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Justin and Jason talk with Stavros Korokithakis, founder of bookmarking service Historious, about how he bootstrapped a simple side project into a money generating startup while running a freelance consultancy.
Wait, you guys do interview?!? 😉
Great episode. Good mix of technical discussion, discussion of tech and life in Greece and pointers to interesting web sites that I’d not heard of before.
Talking about theme websites, woothemes is another one I’ve heard a lot of good things about.
Regarding the effect of these type sites on designers, I think that web designers must see reduced demand on account of these type sites. However the demand for websites continues to increase so maybe this is a compensating factor.
For my part, I would typically contact a web designer to provide updates to my site but now, from what I’ve seen of the designs on woothemes, I’d rather spend my time browsing the designs, pick a workable design and rip out the elements I need.
Great show, I enjoyed listening to a fellow European talking about his product as well as the business/startup scene in Grece. There was some good positive energy in the interview. Made me realize how I missed the interview shows too. 🙂
Jason/Justin – it sounded like you two were regretting your design first approach for AnyFu after talking to Stavros, who had some strong opinions about using templates.
I was in the camp that thought it was a bad idea when you proposed it originally, but I have since changed my thoughts. Like Stavros said, it really depends on your product. You guys have repeatedly said that you want v1 of AnyFu to be professional and look legitimate to attract the experts and instill confidence in buyers. Maybe the site design could have been from a template, but the logo and branding stuff you guys have isn’t something you can just buy off iStockPhoto.
I also think that doing some of the design stuff upfront will allow you guys to work smarter once you launch. Since you are both juggling other projects (consulting, Pluggio/AppIgnite), once you launch AnyFu you will be stretching your time pretty thin. Imagine that you launch and you are ready to add the first set of new features – now you already have the design work out of the way and can focus on the stuff you two like doing (coding, marketing).
Another point – does anyone know of any theme sites that have the files in a Rails friendly-format? Most of the ones I’ve seen from the popular sites are just html/css and maybe the PSDs. I’d be interested if there was a site that had pre-sliced ERB/HAML templates that you could drop in.
Great episode guys!
Stavros sounds like a really cool guy, and his story is one of those that leans to the positive side of startup world.
Thanks for that, and a reminder: give us more interviews! 😉
And since I just came back from holidays in Turkey, and am living just a few hundred miles from Greece, I know what he means by “Summer is over, and I miss it now…”
You should really get down to Mediterranean and taste what it has to offer…
Not so sure about working on a beach – my two week vacation produced only two lines of code 😉
One of the better interviews to date I think. Everything worked quite well (bar the one skype fast forward thing in the middle) and good information. It actually has some action items for me to look into such as celery.
Its interesting, historious was something I considered building a while ago as a way of showing off an on demand hosted search indexer which I shall launch sometime. Similar idea, you add links and it runs off crawls and indexes them. Missed opportunity I guess as I could have gained some traction on the back of the delicious ‘closure’.
Great interview guys. I really like it when you interview guys/gals who are still in the 5-20k per annum range for their startup. I love the idea of having 3-4 simple webapps generating 10-20k each. Go stavros!
@jason – I can’t help but wonder if you first came across historious when I spammed episode #124’s post in response to your comments about having to trouble tracking down your bookmarks?
@stavros (If you’re reading), I couldn’t help but think that yourpane sounds like a complementary feature for historious and you should just roll the from yourpane into historious.
@matt s. Heheh. Was that a tongue in cheek dig at the fact the lads haven’t done an interview in a while? Burn!
@justin / jason – How could you guys not know about buying themes? I thought you’d be all over that? Anyhow, prehaps this means that you don’t need to raise as much money for the site redesign as you once thought?
Hey guys, thank you all for your positive comments, I’m happy you liked the interview (I had lots of fun as well).
@james mcgrath, you’re quite right, in fact, I would like to historify most of the things I send through YourPane. I’ll work on integration right now, as it’s simple to just paste your historious API key in the YourPane settings and have it historify automatically.