Kyle Bragger

• 2011-09-22

  Week One Recap.

  tinyproj:

  Tinyproj launched in the late hours of Sept. 13. A week or so later, here’s where things are after sending two emails (there was a mid-week send on Wednesday due to project demand — not a bad problem to have.)

  • 6,430 have registered for the weekly emails
  • Now that some of the buzz has died down, we’re adding roughly 200 users/day
  • 64 projects have been submitted in total
  • 31 of those have been approved and paid (with a few more in the queue)
  • Just as many have been rejected or asked for clarification for not meeting our guidelines
  • The average user requests an intro to 2 projects
  • Projects receive, on average, 74 intros each
  • The average project has a budget of $1,900 and has a timeline of about 1 week

  I couldn’t be happier with the response thus far, and on both sides of the equation. Folks are loving the projects and seem to be enjoying the curation I’ve been trying to do. Those who have paid to list projects are thrilled with the amount of quality intros they’ve been getting.

  It’s also been exciting to watch the product transforming before my eyes. For instance, based on overwhelming feedback from project owners, earlier today I pushed a brand new dashboard for projects where one can manage and respond to interested talent. This should also cut down on the email overload Tinyproj was causing up to this point. There’s also some stuff in the pipeline that deals with feedback mechanisms for both projects and talent. The future seems bright for this experiment turned revenue-generating product. Also newly launched are the Tinyproj Guidelines, which set forth what we expect of our users and projects.

  You should follow @Tinyproj on Twitter for more quick-fire updates, and by all means, if you’re a developer or designer, or have a small project and need talent, please give Tinyproj a shot.

  -Kyle

  Source: tinyproj

• 2011-09-20

  

  caterpillarcowboy:

  Postling in Businessweek!

  Read the full article here.

  Bloomberg / Businessweek just published an article about mentorship and decided to feature us for the story. 

  For Lifson, the mentoring relationship evolved: Thompson invested $50,000 in Postling in November 2009, the first of several outside backers who have bet about $1 million on the startup. She started using the service for 700 clients of her apartment rental service 4 Walls in Narberth, Pa., immediately after Postling launched in August 2009. 

  [….]

  He says Thompson’s perspective was as important as her business. “She gets to see a side of the market that is a little different from what we see,” he says. “She was good at all the things that we were bad at.”

  This photo!

  Source: caterpillarcowboy

• 2011-09-17

  A recap of Day One.

  tinyproj:

  Today Tinyproj officially turns three … days (old), and what a ride it’s been so far. I thought it would be fun to do a quick breakdown of the first email we sent today (and if you didn’t get it, sign up for next time).

  It’s great to see a chord has been struck with folks — over 4,500 developers and designers, copywriters, and illustrators have signed up in the past few days, and the growth isn’t showing any signs of slowing down. On the project side, there were close to 30 submissions, which was culled down to 16 (based on fairness of budget, quality, etc.). Today’s email featured those 16 projects; they covered a range of disciplines — anything from iOS dev, to HTML/CSS, UX design, copywriting, and more.

  Across those 16 projects (which went out to an average of 3,800 people), the average number of people who asked for an intro to the project owner was 41, with the highest coming in at 99, and the lowest coming in at 8. The average project duration was 7 days, and the average budget was $1937.

  The feedback has been incredible, and I’ve got a solid list of things to improve for next Saturday’s email. I’ll talk more about what went right — and what didn’t — in my next post.

  Until then, if you’re a dev or designer and looking for interesting, paid, respectable work on the side, sign up today. You don’t have to do anything — the projects get sent to your inbox every Saturday morning (probably slightly less exciting than Saturday morning cartoons, but that’s up for debate.)

  If you’re someone with short-term work and don’t want to use crowdsourcing services that have people working on spec, why not give Tinyproj a shot? It’s just 25 bucks.

  Until next time,
  Kyle

  Source: tinyproj

• 2011-09-14

  

  I just launched Tinyproj, the latest in my line of web service experiments. Tinyproj is simple: it helps connect developers, designers, copywriters, and illustrators with respectful, interesting, and paid short-term projects. These projects go out every Saturday to almost 1,000 over 4,000 rad folks. It’s just $25 to get started if you’ve got a project to offer, and free to sign up if you’re looking for work. I think this fills a real need and will hopefully be of great use to people on both sides of the equation, especially given that it’s a more ethical alternative than asking people to work on spec. Nonetheless, check it out, sign up if it sounds interesting to you, and stay tuned — I think great things will come of this.

  PS. Discussion on HN

• 2011-09-13

  Do you strive to understand your tools, or simply “make it work”?

  I’ve been pondering this question for a while, and I thought it could spark some interesting discussion. 10 pin bowling is a huge part of my life: I’ve been a ball driller, coach, and at my peak was throwing 50-100 games a week, and was gearing up to start bowling professionally (those were the days!) What’s interesting about bowling is that a lot of folks I drilled equipment for didn’t really care about the physics behind it — the how and why; indeed, there are a ton of aspects to a proper drilling, but most of my clients just didn’t care about that — they wanted to see the ball hook, and they wanted to score well. Beyond that, it was of little concern what layout I used or why, so long as the ball was getting the desired reaction. Bowling is a combination of mental and physical routines greatly impacted by a number of variables that one can tune — it’s like a giant equation. As a ball driller, there are numerous tweaks I can make to how I drill a ball that will subtlety (or grossly) affect how the ball works on the lane (there are also a number of physical things you can do, like tweaking ball speed, hand position, etc.) In striving to improve my own game, I learned everything I could about the variables involved, and how I could tune them to maximize my scoring potential.

  Now, if you’re actually still reading this, you’re probably asking yourself how this could possibly relate to development or design. Well, my friends, it does more than you think: When was the last time you stopped to truly understand what was going on behind the scenes in your code, gems, plugins, libraries, your CSS frameworks, and your design tools? Have you ever spent a significant amount of time pulling apart your tools in an effort to understand not just what the do on the surface, but how and why they do it? This is something that I’ve been making a concerted effort to do the past few years, and it’s helped me grow immensely in my craft, not to mention it’s so much easier to understand what’s going wrong if you understand what’s going on in the first place.

  So, my question to you is this: do you strive to deeply understand your tools, or is getting it working good enough?

  (Cross posted from Forrst.)

• 2011-09-08

  

  psql:

  mindsnacks:

  We’re adding a shipload of new fun things to MindSnacks, so we need the help of some fresh, creative brains. We’ve got some early openings in our Art-Design department. 

  Check out our careers page for more information, and spread the word! It’s a truly exciting opportunity.

  It’s actually blood!

  But anyway — check out our openings. It’s going to be exciting to work with some additional whacky brains.

  Any questions can also be telegrammed to pasquale(at)mindsnacks.com.

  Source: mindsnacks

• 2011-08-30

  Pud's Blog: Why Must You Laugh At My Back End

  pudjam666:

  Disclaimer:

  I’m not a trained engineer or sys admin. Never even finished a book on it. But I’ve launched (and sold) a few things that have become popular, so sometimes people ask me about my back end. Which ends up in blank stares, or worse.

  OS:

  Windows Server 2008. As for why not linux, I…

  Nailed it. Using the right tool(s) for the job will usually win over using what’s hot this very second.

  Fun fact: I used to write ColdFusion, too.

  Source: pudjam666

• 2011-07-15

  Stats!

  forrst:

  Everybody likes stats, so here are some neat/awesome/boring stats about Forrst.

  Since launching about 14 months ago:

  • 31,000 registered users, 40% of whom are active each month (and that’s more than just logging in)
  • nearly 90,000 posts across four types (code, screenshots, links, and questions)
  • 350,000 comments
  • 17,000 folks waiting for an account (something we’re working on reducing, e.g. with GitHub-powered signup)
  • almost 1 million pieces of content liked
  • between 50 and 100 people request an invite every day
  • 640 paid accounts
  • we grew by 1,200 users in January 2011; we grew by 2,700 users in June 2011

  It’s been awesome to see Forrst grow from literally nothing into the awesome community it is today, and we’re all seriously excited about what’s next for us.

  And we didn’t need to raise enormous amounts of money to do it, either.

  Source: forrst

• →

  Ted Roden: Meet the new boss

  tedroden:

  About five months ago I left my job at The New York Times. When I left, the plan was simple, I was going to work part time at betaworks/bit.ly to help get news.me out the door and part time on Fancy Hands. News.me is out the door and Fancy Hands is still “up and to the right” as Tony Haile…

  Congrats, Ted!

  Source: tedroden

• 2011-06-30

  Andrew Pile: Oops

  From: XXXXX
  Date: Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 2:07 PM
  Subject: Hello From YouTube Engineering: checking in
  To: XXXXX@gmail.com
  
  Hi XXXX,
  
  It’s a new year — already halfway over! and I thought I’d check in to see if you may be interested in exploring engineering opportunities with YouTube? I hope…

  Gotta love recruiters.

  Source: pile