Breck’s Homepage

Very easy to use and adds immediate value to this blog(not that there’s much of that here). What’s smart is they use the plugin to get links back to Disqus and the related SEO. Very cool.

HisCatalog.com. HisCatalog will eliminate the hassle of shopping for men’s clothing.

I just want to share the most valuable piece of Internet startup advice I possess.

Every other mistake was irrelevant because the only thing that matters is the numbers.

From month one, you have to be tracking the numbers.  Do not pour effort into anything unless the numbers have shown it to be worthwhile. If you’re not tracking the numbers yet, then you’re not really trying. If you are tracking the numbers and they don’t look good, don’t put a whole lot of effort into it until you get permission from the market–improved numbers.

That’s my advice for the day. 

I just uploaded all of my music to a new site called BlueTunes. Now I can listen to my songs anywhere I get internet access. Works out great for me because I’m constantly using different computers and don’t want to lug my portable hard drive around.I had a little trouble getting all my songs up there initally, but once I did that BlueTunes has been great. The player is really fast and works just like iTunes.Check out the coverage in TechCrunch. 

Crazy day for JustHackIt. First a quick numbers update. Over 14,000 visitors, over 400 new users, and over 30,000 page views. Not bad for less than 48 hours.

The big issue now is how to keep the community growing and increase the number of connections formed through the site. This is going to be slightly more work than I anticipated.

Couldn’t come at a more hectic time. In addition to finishing up a freelance project, helping one sister move to Lebanon and getting ready to head to Florida to help the other sister, dealt with a ton of emails from users, potential acquirers and potential co-founders.

I think trying to sell the site is not the way to go after exploring that option a bit. The money wouldn’t be much at all(got a number of bids but all sub $1000), the real reason to do it would be to put the site into someone’s hands who would hopefully keep the momentum going. But then I thought, even if the next couple of days I’m not available to work on it much, in the long run having control of it will insure that it succeeds in its goal of connecting many new co-founders.

So now it looks like we’re putting together a solid team of hackers to grow and improve the site. Already met some smart people and couldn’t be more excited about it.

JustHackIt.com continues to grow. In less than 24 hours the site has gotten nearly 10,000 unique visitors, and hundreds of users. Next steps:

• Improve the CSS
• Create a common template for posting ideas or bios
• Add tagging/categorization
• Start the first JustHackIt Hackathon contest
• Start an IRC channel

This may require moving the site off SlinkSet(in order to add tagging and some other features). We’ll see. Currently I’m talking to a few people who may be able to take this site farther than I could alone.

JustHackIt blew away all my expectations. Since 11pm last night, the site has gotten over 5,600 unique visitors and 150 new members. A lot of this is due to the TechCrunch article, but visitors are also streaming in from HackerNews, Reddit, and a bunch of other sources.

Already there appears to be a number of people who have connected via this service.

Now the trick will be to make some slight improvements to hopefully encourage more cooperative projects.

Thanks to everyone who has provided feedback and signed up! I’ll keep the updates going with more stats and improvement notices.

This evening JustHackIt.com launched. Before you co-found a company, you need to find good co-founders. The best way to do that is to just work on projects with people. The idea for JustHackIt is to connect hackers in one place and encourage them to just start projects together, without even knowing the person. Hopefully you’ll find some people who are smart, talented, and will make a great co-founder in the future.

The idea stemmed from the YC meetup last week. PG said that the YC interviews aren’t like interviews at all, they just “Do YC”. If the team and YC seem to click, then they get accepted. I think the same thing applies for finding good cofounders–you just start something and see if the chemistry among the team clicks. I’ve started projects with friends and complete strangers before, and whether or not I knew them before the project isn’t correlated with how well we worked together. There are a few people I met the day of starting a joint project who I’d love to start another company with.

That’s what I hope this site could do: not just bring hackers together to discuss startups, but bring them together to launch things and find new cofounders.

Already, the site’s getting pretty good traffic–400 visitors in the last hour. I don’t know if it will go anywhere, but it took only a few minutes to put together(thanks to slinkset) and hopefully will connect at least 1 co-founder team.

BTW, the signup rate is pretty good–users are already in the double digits!

According to this brief study done in 2006, not very:

Based on the evidence we’ve gathered here, it’s safe to say that no external metric, traffic prediction service or ranking system available on the web today provides any accuracy when compared with real numbers.

I wonder if things have changed two years later?

Decided to try out one of these book social networks to see if I can find some important books I should be reading. The idea is you enter the books you’ve read and rate them, as well as the books you want to read. Then the site will show you people who like similar books and you can hopefully stumble upon some books that they’ve read that you will like.

The three main sites I found were Shelfari, GoodReads, and LibraryThing. The idea is pretty cool, because a good book recommendation, unlike a movie recommendation, can possibly change your life. So the chance of getting a huge payoff from these services is relatively very high. Not bad for spending no money and just a couple minutes or even an hour or two entering your book list and exploring the shelves of others.

My primary goal is to find business and technical books. Finding good fiction or literature to read is not a problem for me–there’s plenty of it out there. Really what I’m looking for is books that have been read by people I respect in a business/technical role. That’s why I think a service like this could be more valuable than Amazon’s recommendation engine. I’m looking for quality books read by quality people. Amazon generally recommends popular books. The books I want to read don’t necessarily have to be popular among the masses, just popular among the people who I want to learn from. 

I started with Shelfari, then checked out Goodreads, and then on to LibraryThing.

They are all pretty good. I will update this post later with more detailed reviews, but I have to say if you sign up for one you might as well sign up for them all. You will increase your chances of finding “diamond in the rough” books that way. Of course, it takes time to input your books into all 3 of them, but there could be a quicker way to do that(I’m gonna look into existing sites, otherwise might roll one myself).

The traffic stats:

Compete.com shows goodreads pulling away from the comptetion.

shelfari(red), goodreads(blue), librarything(orange)

Google Trends for Websites also shows goodreads in the lead and growing fastest.