Also be sure to find out who will actually own your project once it's done! It'd be a shame to build something you'd like to continue working on after graduation only to have it be owned by your school instead of you.
I also got my MBA after getting my BS in Computer Science and while I think I could have learned most everything we talked about by reading books, I did learn:
- public speaking because we had to do a presentation just about every other week
- how business people with little or no technology experience think and their perceptions about technology
- how to talk to the people in the above bullet about technology
- firing people because one of my groups had a member that was not pulling her own weight, and we were told to fire her from the group
I also agree that the branding aspect is also (somehow) helpful. I recently moved from Florida to SF and when I was looking for jobs you wouldn't believe how many people were really excited/impressed/whatever that I had an MBA in addition to being able to answer the tough software questions.
If I had a choice to go back and either spend $50k on an MBA or spend it traveling the world, I would definitely choose the latter, though.
I almost got an MBA in my twenties but decided to start a company instead. My reasoning was that it would cost me $40-50k to acquire, at which point I would need to take a job for 3-4 years to pay it off. I always knew I wanted to start a company so I figured I'd use those 5-6 years educating myself.
I don't regret the choice, but I think an MBA from a top school can expose you to more complex and big $$$ business environments than you're likely to discover on your own as an outsider without much experience.
I always liked the air cooled 911s myself because I remember playing with a MicroMachines 911[1] and they had all of the cool vents (which I guess are silly reasons), but man the new water cooled ones are fast. I think the eggplant headlight change from (I think) 97-01 was a bad move though. I'm glad they're back to the more traditional oval headlamps...
I can't believe that there is so little going on here considering all of the nearby schools (FIT, BCC, Kaiser, UCF Cocoa Beach Campus, etc.) and all of the industry (Harris, Northrop, Lockheed, GE, NASA, etc.).
I guess these two factors don't necessarily contribute to the startup pool, but it DOES mean there are a lot of technically minded people around. Thanks for taking the initiative and starting this. If there's anything I can do to help, just let me know!
I agree with all of your points, but I'm wondering about the case where it's a solo technical founder that has to do EVERYTHING - marketing, development, customer relations, billing, etc. In that case do you think it makes sense to outsource non-core functionality just so he/she can accelerate development in order to get a more complete product out there (beyond MVP)?
Building an MVP and iterating requires building to a (changing) vision. Contractors have an incentive to stick rigidly to a narrow, fixed specification. If you can build that spec and task it out then you may get good results, but just telling a contract developer your vision and sending them off to build it has a strong chance of ending in (expensive) tears.
I am a contract developer. I work with clients to elicit their requirements and have seen this first-hand - the projects that turn out best are the ones where I'm working with someone in-house who has development knowledge, even if it's just to manage and review.
There's different stages of a company. In the beginning, when flexibility is more important, contractors might make sense. Even then, I think you're better off finding flexible developers to work with long-term, but if a contractor is the best you can do at that stage, it's probably not a deal breaker.
MVP+ stage requires a lot of iterative development. Ideally, you'd want to keep the people who are helping with that, because they'd know WHY things are done the way they are. They'll be aware of the failed experiments and previous iterations. You don't want future employees making the same mistakes. The goal of the MVP+ stage is to learn as much as possible about your market and product. Letting that product learning walk out because they were contractors is probably a mistake.
For a project I'm working on right now, we're using HighCharts[0] which makes use of SVG. There's a ton of examples of how it works, so I won't delve into that, but I'm thinking you could probably do this by making use of HighCharts like you normally would, but using output buffering [1] and headers [2]
- I'd change the 1st 2 paragraphs in the about section to "Jobs Tractor looks for people trying to hire developers on Twitter, but filters out tweets that are from recruitment agencies or jobs boards."
- Love the map view
- Does the search field allow you to filter by location, keyword, or both?
- Group by location maybe?
- I'd take the word "jobs" out of the logo - to me it looks cluttered
- Do you save the posts or is it just what the Twitter search API pulls up? Jobs might not get tweeted about more than once, so a posting could still be legitimate after a week or so
I was actually in a meeting today where someone was showing us mockups using Balsamiq. First time I've ever seen it - looked pretty cool. He was able to make interactive PDFs so when you click on an element of the mockup (say a button) it showed the action (like popping up a dialog). He seemed to like it well enough too, but like you said it's not free and requires Adobe Air...
I've been using Balsamiq for a while now and I love it. Sure it runs on Air and isn't free, but it's one of the best purchases we've made as a bootstrapped startup. Also, the group that runs Balsamiq is awesome and the CEO -Peldi?- writes a great blog.
