By the way I was wearing my Occipital shirt today so appropriate.
Congrats to all the new Techstars teams and best of luck. Especially happy to hear Mogotest is doing well. The program is an amazing opportunity and hooks you up to a great network of people.
Great post and I completely agree... There is so much value not just in the initial return but the return to the community as a whole.
I probably won't get into details of everything. On the Caliper project we starte signing up private beta users and discussing price with them. We quickly learned that what they were willing to pay for the service couldn't sustain a company on it's own. It could be used to help up sell other products or services (consulting). When looking at what people would pay and the expected number of paying customers over time, it just didn't make sense to continue with the product as the primary goal of a funded company.
Haha thanks for that Micah. I am following with interest your companies moves. I am looking forward to the IPhone app. Thanks for your support and advice.
Thanks everyone for the well wishes and support. We learned a lot from the experience, and hopefully our experience can help others.
Thanks for all the support everyone. Obviously this isn't the outcome we wanted, but it was an amazing experience and we learned a ton from it. Thanks for everything. Not sure what is next yet, probably a tiny bit of a break and then who knows, as this winds down I am sure I will figure it out.
Yeah it is unfortunate how hard it is to find out good information about how to best use selenium with rails. It looks like selenium-client and Webrat/Capybara are the way to go. seleniun-on-rails plugin has some serious limitations and isn't being maintained. I also agree about limiting the number of full stack tests, it is good to know a few mainline cases work, but all edge cases are better tested at the model/controller level.
Great post it is interesting to hear about the struggles others have in the start up world and how they react to them. Often many of the details inside the start up world don't get shared. Or they are only shared as after the fact success stories which doesn't tend to focus on the real struggles of start ups.