Dog fight video 11/09/2008
 

Robby and I went down to Fullerton to learn formation flying, low and hi yoyos, lead and lag pursuits, displacement rolls and all other sorts of dogfighting maneuvers.

The pilots with us take off and land. Once we're in the air, the plane is under our control. Don't ask me how or why this is safe -- I still don't know, but it actually seemed relatively safe at the time.

Check out the video I put together to see us dogfighting, go inverted and into huge loops, and pull some other crazy moves.

The program is called Air Combat USA and flies out of over 15 locations across the US.

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In a couple week's time, the teams YC has invited will be flying out to Palo Alto for a quick, shotgun style interview that they'll base their funding decisions on.

If you've been lucky enough to get invited, here's a bit of advice on what to expect and how to get through it successfully.

What to expect

You only have 10 minutes, which is a surprisingly short amount of time to discuss your business. You won't have any powerpoints or presentations, but you should have a demo. You'll start off, talk for about 15 seconds, and instantly get bombarded by questions for the next 9 minutes and 45 seconds. It's easy to get off-track, so you'll need to answer the questions quickly while trying to steer the discussion on-topic. Don't be surprised if multiple simultaneous conversations end up breaking out (at one point during our interview, I think I was having 2 simultaneous conversations -- one with PG and one with Trevor, while Chris and Dan were having a separate discussion with Jessica).

What you want to accomplish

You have ten minutes to convince the group that:

(a) Your idea is pretty good (it doesn't have to be take-over-the-world good, but it can't be bad -- that reflects negatively on your judgement).
(b) You're smart, and are otherwise equipped to accomplish your goal.
(c) You can get shit done.

Preparing for the interview

Experiences vary, but our demo was a crucial part of our interview. It's very helpful keeping the discussion on topic, lets the team visualize your product, and, most importantly, proves that you can actually build what you say you can.

Having an idea is pretty easy, but actually being able to put it together with the right parts -- easy to use, decent design, smart UI choices, functioning feature set -- in a short amount of time is what will be the difference between your product launching or not. Not all launched products are successful, but all unlaunched products fail, so proving that you can get your product finished and out the door is important.

Code frantically to get some kind of working demo done before the interview. Two weeks should be more than enough to get something basic done. If you can't, or your demo is going to look like hell, I wouldn't bother showing it.

If you couldn't already tell, memorizing some kind of presentation isn't going to work too well. Sticking stubbornly to your guns is also not advisable. As others have mentioned, you want to strike a balance between being open to suggestion, and defending your opinions -- just be sure to defend the right ones.

Having said that, be sure you know your market in and out. You better know who your competitors are ("We don't have any" is not an acceptable answer), the history of the market (What previous companies were similar? Were they successful? If so, how did the exit? If not, how are you going to do better?), how you are realistically going to make money (for a 3 person company, at least $30,000/month), and a very good technical understanding of how you are going to get all this done. The YC application is a great place to start to look for questions to prepare for the interview.

Before the interview

Relax. Put on some music to get yourself pumped up on the drive over. Try not to be nervous (even though everybody is, to some extent). Investors make a lot of decisions based on their excitement, so get excited about your idea! It'll rub off on them. Get there a few minutes early to hang out with some of the YC Alumni. You can also practice your pitch, and get some quick last minute feedback.

After the interview

You'll get a call that Sunday with the news. Don't freak out if it's late (ours was almost 2 hours later than they said it would be, and I was nursing some serious stomach ulcers at that point).

If things are still the way they were, you'll only have one variable: what your valuation is going to be. Decide ahead of time what is the lowest valuation you'd accept (if there even is one you wouldn't), so that you are prepared to give an instant answer to PG when he calls.

After the call, take a few shots, call everybody you know and enjoy yourself! Then get ready to work your ass off and eat ramen for 3 months.

Note: If there are any Penn State groups interviewing this session, be sure to shoot me an email! I'd love to get together over a few drinks and hear about your idea.

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Looks like if I would have read the Apple discussion post a bit longer before hastily writing my last post, I would have found the solution. For anybody that is consistently getting a 4010 error, this seems to work:

(1) Open [username]/Music/iTunes/ in the Finder.
(2) Make a copy of "iTunes Music Library.xml"
(3) Validate the XML file. The easiest way to do this, if you have Firefox 3, is to open the "iTunes Music Library.xml" file in Firefox. Depending on how large the file is, this might take some time. Presumably, at this point, you'll get an error message saying that there was an XML Parsing Error.
(4) Find the song that is causing the problem. If you can't tell which song it is, you may have to open up the file in a text editor, and navigate to the line number specified.
(5) Go into iTunes, find the song, right click it, and click "Get Info".
(6) You should see some funky characters somewhere. At this point, you can either (a) delete the song, or (b) click on Info, and make sure to completely delete and re-write all the information.
(7) Once you've done that, re-load the file into Firefox and correct all the songs until there are no more errors.
(8) When Firefox parses the file correctly, quit iTunes.
(9) Open the [username]/Music/iTunes/ folder in Finder again and remove the "iTunes Library Extras.itdb" and "iTunes Library Genius.itdb" files by dragging them to the Trash and emptying it.
(10) Restart iTunes, enable Genius, and voila!

It's quite unfortunate that iTunes doesn't seem to be able to repair corrupted XML, or at least tell you that that's the problem.

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I've been trying to set up Genius on iTunes 8 for the last few days, with no luck. I'm getting the "Genius results can't be updated right now. An unknown error occurred (4010)." message during Step 2, "Waiting for Apple to process information".

Looks like lots of other people are having this problem. What's so strange about it, is that it seems to come and go -- sometimes it works for people, sometimes it doesn't. Most people seem to think it's a server load issue.

None of us know if it's a server issue or not. But after the MobileMe fiasco, I'm starting to think that Apple is seriously unprepared in their "capacity planning" department.

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From the team that brought you Rock Band and Guitar Hero, a new startup that's a bit hard to describe. It's a little bit game, a little bit social, a little bit music discovery, and a lot of fun.

These guys are doing so much right, I don't even know where to begin. I was attracted to their game by a Facebook ad that said "Like Ladytron? We don't have it yet, but we do have a ton of indie electronic music." My kind of website, I thought to myself.

The idea is like Guitar Hero with the arrows on your keyboard. Naturally, a lot of fun right off the bat.

Add to that a very social experience. You choose to "dance" for people (either flirty, flashy, or funny), and leave a comment for them, sort of like an IM conversation. Comments are auto-generated, so even if you don't really want to say anything in particular, it's still quite funny to have this pseudo-chat.

Since they are advertising on Facebook and to a presumably younger crowd, they're attracting a real mix of male and female audience. I saw a mostly college-aged crowd while I was there.

The beauty of it, is that in order to talk to someone, you need to "dance" with/for them. All in all, it feels very flirty, and is much more like doing an activity with someone, as opposed to creepily talking to a random person.

Looks like their product is living up to their stated vision: "Are emoticons and pixellated panties the stuff that true friendships are made of? The activities and experiences that we share are what bind us together. When spending time together online is as fun as a night of clubbing or as intense as a great jam session, then social networks will truly be social."

I was a couple days late to the scoop: Venturebeat covered it on the 8th (Damn! If only I'd clicked on that Facebook ad sooner. Congrats guy, though, on some seriously cool sleuthing). Since Venturebeat's already let the cat out of the bag, I don't feel too bad pointing to the alpha url: http://alpha.loudcrowd.com/

Here's a video intro from Vimeo:

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We'll be posting on this in a few days on the Weebly blog once we make sure all of the kinks have been ironed out. In the meantime, check out the new image gallery feature:

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Here are a few more songs I've been getting into lately.

Chromeo

Think 80s spirit with modern electronic production. A fun album to get in to.

Chromeo - Mamma's Boy

Chromeo - Tenderoni

Chromeo - Bonafied Lovin' (Yuksek Remix)

More Justice

I'm still finding obscure Justice remixes and new music on the hype machine that kick ass. Two of the latest:

MGMT - Electric Feel (Justice Remix)

Keedz / Justice - Stand on the World

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Just logged in to Google Analytics today to find that Weebly is used in exactly 200 countries! Pretty exciting. Our top countries are:

1. United States (55.65%)
2. United Kingdom (8.06%)
3. Canada (4.55%)
4. India (3.22%)
5. Australia (2.44%)
6. Brazil (1.81%)
7. Philippines (1.74%)
8. France (1.21%)
9. Netherlands (1.12%)
10. Sweden (0.99%)

One interesting observation: English speaking countries make up 70.7% of Weebly's user base. (Time to internationalize?)

Also interesting to compare against Alexa's estimates of our traffic origin:

United States (40.6%)
India (8.7%)
United Kingdom (5.9%)
Canada (4.7%)
Australia (2.4%)
Germany (2.3%)
Singapore (2.0%)
Italy (1.7%)
Brazil (1.6%)
Indonesia (1.4%)

Looking at the errors in these estimates, it looks like Alexa is heavily biased to non-US visitors, and biased towards Indian visitors.

What does your global usage look like?

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If you're running an internet service, you'll probably need to send emails to your users at some point. Getting those emails through to their inbox can be quite a challenge.

You can pay someone to do it (ConstantContact, Boomerang, etc), but their rates are through the roof -- this can be as high as a couple cents per email. The lowest quote we were able to get was about $0.003 per email, with huge volume. Sending out one email to our user base would have cost nearly $2,000.

At that point, you've just got to do it yourself. One of the main things we didn't want to handle was tracking bounce messages. All major services require that you do this: if you send a message to an invalid address twice, you will be heavily penalized.

I hacked up a quick script to login to an IMAP server, check for bounce messages, fetch the dead email, and move the messages out of the inbox. Since I figured it could be useful to more than just me, I've open sourced it.

You can grab a copy of the source here: monitorBounces.php

If anybody else has written any other software to help them get past the near defacto spam classification, please let me know : )

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Being fun 05/04/2008
 

There's one thing you'll almost certainly need when starting a company: other people's help. The right introduction at the right time can make a world of difference.

How do you get people to help you? If people's interests are aligned to yours, they'll help you out. Those people are called investors. There's another way to get people to help you: make them like you and want to help you.

This ties in with a more general problem that a lot of very technical people face: How can I be a fun person, someone that people want to hang out with?

I was born in France, lived there for seven years, then moved to Casablanca (Morocco) and lived there until I came back to the US for college. Having never spent significant time in the US, I wasn't entirely used to the socializing process when I got here, but I picked up a few simple tips by observing how some of my more popular friends acted. Since I actively did that, I made a mental note of each one. These could generally be summed up as:

"How do I make a good first impression and get people to like me?"

1- Always introduce yourself (with a smile). For some reason, this is really important and labels you as assertive, friendly and outgoing. Make sure you introduce yourself to every member of the group and look them in the eye when shaking their hand. Don't be impolite by interrupting someone, but having said that, there's something very weird about someone who stands around and doesn't introduce themselves.

2- Ask a question. There are a ton of really easy questions you can ask, depending on your social situation. These include general questions, like "Where are you from?" and "What do you do?" as well as more situation-specific ones, like "What company are you with?".

3- Listen to the answer. Keep an open mind and don't assume anything negative. That seems simple, but too many people end up hogging the conversation off the bat by talking about themselves, or judging the other person. However, everybody likes a pleasant person who asks about them, listens, and responds intelligently. They'll usually return the favor by asking about you.

4- Figure out another question to ask based on the previous response. If you can find a way to add some kind of rapport, this is best, like "Oh, you're an engineering major? So am I!" or "You work at Trulia? I have a good friend that works there!". At worst, you should be able to ask for more information: "You go to UCSB? What major are you?"

5- Ask another question. Rinse and repeat.

That's really all there is to it. Besides being generally beneficial to your social life, being a genuinely fun and interesting person has one important benefit to your startup: It makes people want to help you, even if they won't personally benefit from doing so.

In other words, if you get feedback that you're not very "sociable", it is a huge benefit for you to learn to be so. It's not something that everybody is born with, but it is most definitely learnable.

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