Amaze (& Keep) your Clients

There's nothing better than the right client. What are you doing to keep your best ones? SitePoint recently published some great tips for retaining your clients. Here's how Outspokes can further help with client work and generate repeat business. The following points elaborate on the SitePoint post, so I'm reusing their headlines: 1. Go Above and Beyond…Every Time How do you stand out after landing a contract building a big site for a great client? They probably expect lots of long emai...

Interviewing with Y Combinator or How to Not Finish Your Sentences

Arthur and I arrived in Mountain View bright and early to interview with Y Combinator.  We grabbed a filling American breakfast in a diner nearby and were pumped to interview at 10am.  Twelve hours later we would get an email from Paul Graham explaining that YC would not accept us for the Winter 2010 round. We felt deflated to hear the news, but the feedback was helpful, and our inner optimists continue to drive us towards helping our fellow web consultants.  On top of the aggregated YC i...

East Bay Ruby Meetup Developer Spotlight

We'll be doing the inaugural developer spotlight at the next East Bay Ruby Meetup.  Come hear us talk about what worked and what didn't while we built the Rails backend and the Javascript frontend.  Learn from our suffering and share your experiences as well. The EB Ruby Meetup is a really chill crowd and a great local resource for asking beginning and advanced Rails questions.  We've been going regularly since 2007.  Check it out here.

Outspokes Tweet-a-palooza: Free Premium Accounts!

Get our $10/mo premium Outspokes account for free through January 2010! Outspokes is a great new collaboration tool for anyone involved in creating or managing a web site. Whether you're a freelancer with an outspoken client, a consulting firm dealing with design by committee, or just a remote team all producing the next great web application, Outspokes can help you communicate faster and more clearly. Just follow @Outspokes and tweet the following: Excited to get my free premium @Outsp...

Summary of YC Interview Advice

Last week we found out we'll be interviewing with Y Combinator for their Winter 2010 cycle. Jerry posted on Hacker News asking for advice and we started reading, reaching out left and right, and trying to soak it all in. Check out del.ici.ous for my collection of relevant blog posts. Below are my favorite bits... ------------------------------------------------------------ http://blog.directededge.com/2009/11/05/the-interview-with-y-combinator-thats-not/ Talk to as many peop...

Outspokes: Startup Chapter One of Many

Let me tell you a story about a startup. How this story ends is up to you. It begins at UC Berkeley in January 2009. A group of 7 Computer Science students, most in their last semester at Cal, get together to cook up a great class project for CS 169, Software Engineering. They're graded on how far they get based on where they start and boy do they want to impress their professor (Eric Brewer of Inktomi fame). Brainstorming sessions happen often. Designs come forth, get tossed out, adapt, ...