I’m going to start showcasing some of the work I’ve done — here’s a site I did for a friend in #LAFI:
Ether Studios needed a site that showcased the HTML5 capabilities of their video/CMS platform, so the homepage features a prominent Flash/HTML5 video player (try it on your iPad, I swear it works). The bokeh effect in the background emphasizes the “Ether” part of the company name (and it’s a cool effect). The site’s built and hosted on their CMS-in-the-cloud solution.
So I’ve been doing design work for a few guys in the Founder Institute sessions — it’s been great fun working on other peoples’ projects and getting paid for it. Awesome!
It’s really different working for other people. That part’s a new experience for me. It forces me to do better work, I think. I’m having to think through the design and how it relates to the client’s needs and objectives more than I used to. Being a freelancer has also helped my time management. This is one of the better things I’ve done.
So here comes the shameless plug part: I’m available for graphic design and front end CSS/HTML work at a rate of $50/hour. I’m in the process of transitioning this blog into a portfolio site; if you’d like to see some of the sites I’ve worked on, give me a holler at mail@strapdev.com and I’ll get back to you soon.
On another note, I just typed out this entire blog entry on an iPad, using WordPress’ app. It’s pretty excruciating working with the on screen keyboard — I’m going to have to buy batteries for my Apple wireless keyboard before the next time I decide to create content on this thing.
we’re done with Founder Institute — we graduated!
the program was really awesome. there are still some kinks to be worked out, but i’d say it was extremely helpful, especially to first-time founders like richard and myself.
we’re planning on attending some of the LA sessions; hopefully we get to meet more interesting people!
just to keep you updated on progress, we changed our name from Receet to MelonStand a few weeks ago, and we’ve been working through a rebranding process. adeo, FI founder + TheFunded guy, told us we were one of the more stubborn groups in the class wrt changing our name, but i’m really glad we did. the branding and marketing possibilities are endless, and people smile when they hear our name. awesome.
anyway, i think i might be attending an ixda meeting tonight. hope that goes well.
until next time!
we’ve made the decision — we’re changing Receet’s name to MelonStand. while it’s quirky, it’s easier to spell and gives people a happy feeling, which is always a good thing. it also gives us great branding opportunities; don’t be surprised if you see us at your favorite TechCrunch event in a future chopping up cantaloupes.
anyway, other than rebranding and redoing all of the graphic styles, this week has been slow. Apple’s iPad announcement last week sent everybody in a tizzy. i’d like to see a higher resolution display though — if it were a 10″ or 12″ device with 1280×800 resolution i would rush out to buy one today. it looks like i’ll end up waiting for version 2, which is a lesson i learned on both my 1st-gen Macbook Pro and iPhone.
we’re thinking of making another trip up to norcal soon. i wonder if there are any good events going on this month…?
awesome. that’s how i’d describe two weeks ago — both the fi session on wednesday and the showcase the night after.
we got back from fi daygo at 3am wednesday morning. i ended up doing laundry until 5am. we left town at 10, ran some errands, then really hit the road around 11:30. it was a long and uneventful drive (thank god i wasn’t driving the Q); we hit san jose at around 4:30. we lazed around for 15 minutes then drove to WSGR’s offices in Palo Alto (nice place, btw). we met some bay area founders, adeo made fun of our name (in front of the whole class, no less), and aaron patzer, phil libin of Evernote, and GD ramkumar (formerly of A9, now at Amazon) all gave awesome talks (i really liked phil). i was sitting in the front row, shaking from all the caffeine i had consumed before showing up. i don’t think i’m ever going to do that again.
we grabbed drinks that night at a place with the word “nuthouse” in its name, which i thought was hilarious. maybe i just have a juvenile mind. there are some interesting cats in the program, all with great ideas.
rich and i attended the founder showcase the next day, held at sun’s campus in santa clara. the venue was cool, as were the pitches, but some of the companies lacked a clear monetization strategy — maybe i’m spoiled by receet having one. hung out with some more people that night after, then hit the hay.
i swung by hacker dojo the next day and did some work. i checked out micromobs and trendero when i was there — both interesting products with cool teams behind them.
we ended up having a bbq on saturday in honor of my friend john’s birthday, then drove home on sunday.
it was an awesome but tiring week. looks like we’ll be doing it again soon…
i have an investor session pitch (thanks @founderinstitute) on tuesday — hopefully i don’t cock it up. i think the pitch format is 1 minute long, without the use of visual aids (powerpoint/keynote), so i’m going to be working on Receet’s 1 minute “elevator” pitch this weekend.
there’s been some consternation in the program about the difficult (both in terms of time and monetary outlay) terms of incorporation being foisted upon founders. hopefully everybody in the program will find a reasonable balance between incorporating and graduating — for everybody stuck in this situation, allow me to wish you the best of luck.
anyway, i’m looking forward to tuesday’s meeting. the drive is another matter…
RockYou Hack: From Bad To Worse – TechCrunch
It’s absolutely mind-boggling to me that in this day and age, companies are still storing passwords in plain text. It’s also mind-boggling to me that RockYou’s database was pwnt by SQL injection — that’s a basic thing every web developer worth their salt should be protecting against. I just can’t believe that a venture funded company (by Sequoia and Lightspeed, no less) fails so hard.
tuesday was session 5 of FI’s san diego session. we had jon carder again, chris capdevila (with oracle, but he used to be a startup founder) and steve iverson, who’s building a green, energy efficient amazon s3-like service (at least, that’s what i got from flipping through his company’s website). we hit epic traffic on the way to the venue (we spent about 40 minutes going from the 805-5 interchange to genessee, which is the first exit and less than 2 miles away) and we swung by laguna beach to pick up a classmate whose car had died (wow, it was really beautiful), so we were all tired and stressed when we walked in (only 20 minutes late, might i add).
the presentation was meh. the investor session wasn’t terribly constructive, i thought. the presentations were ok, but i was so out of it that i wasn’t really listening. the real highlight of the session was the discussion we had at the bar after — that’s almost more interesting and helpful than the actual in-class session.
anyway, i’m looking forward to my group meeting on saturday and then class again on tuesday!
we had a good meeting on Tuesday (i’m sorry i’m late again). trip adler of scribd, jon carder of mojopages, and neil senturia of sdnn + blackbird ventures gave some presentations, mostly about what’s important to a startup, rather than the posted topic of company roadmaps. some interesting things — trip has a very product-centric approach to starting up, while the other two had some other insights. jon told us to be wary of outsourcing. neil made jokes, as usual, but he had some good notes on what he looks for in a startup (there were 10 points, if i’m not mistaken, and his slides said a startup has to bat 1.000 on all of them. sorry if that doesn’t make sense; i’m no good at baseball metaphors).
we got into new groups. hopefully this one is more interactive than the previous one (i had a good time, but i think we could’ve had more debate). anyway, i’m looking forward to the first group meeting tomorrow. yatta!
we also have an investor pitch session coming up on monday. i was thinking we should pitch, but apparently neither rich nor i had our names tossed into the ring, so we’re just going to pitch the investors informally after. we’ve been working diligently on our slide deck and pitch. if you’re interested in seeing it, please drop me a line!
Portfolio: Remembra
http://www.strapdev.com/remembra
This website was a concept that ultimately isn’t going to see the light of day. Remembra, an #SDFI startup, needed a homepage that conveyed a sense of professionalism, while also highlighting the benefits of signing up for and using the app. I took Remembra’s color palette (a nice green, white, and black) and translated it into a homepage for their app.