jiganti

So my team and I have been bootstrapping the development of our site http://kothpoker.com and we decided that Kickstarter would be the best way to raise a small amount of funding. Any advice/comments/concerns are greatly appreciated!

Here's the link- http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kothpoker/king-of-the-hill-poker-kothpoker

Hey guys, my team and I are planning to launch a kickstarter project for an iPhone app next week. We've been reading everything we can get our hands on for the past six weeks and are almost done with our video.

At this point I'd like to talk to some people who have actually had experience getting funding through kickstarter, and would be more than happy to meet for coffee somewhere in the city. If you're not SF-based, Skype would be awesome too, shoot me an email!

So I launched my startup (moodstir.com) after working on it since November or so and have made a few attempts over the past couple of weeks to try and get a following. It's actually one of the main reasons I decided to take a leave of absence from the University of San Francisco.

I understand that virality is not going to happen overnight, but I approached the project under the assumption that it's either going to be adopted and spread throughout some niche quickly, or never catch on.

So I'm asking for advice from some of the more experienced founders on HN- am I being impatient? Should I pivot the concept in some way? Perhaps allowing other login options aside from Facebook is the first step to reduce barrier to entry.

If you have any suggestions about either where I should go from here, or specifically regarding the concept, I would be happy to hear them.

I've seen a few posts from developers offering to build someone's prototype for a flat rate in the past month or two. Specifically I remember an apparently reputable hacker offer to do so for $5000 with the intention of helping someone with no technical skills create a functional product that can be shown to investors/etc and improved on from there. Are there more of you out there? Right now I have a geolocation iPhone app idea that I'd like to pay to have built. I live in San Francisco and am willing to work with someone from the area. Please reply here or email me if you're interested- Thanks!

Hey guys, I posted on HN back in August last year asking about meeting potential technical cofounders. After recently moving to San Francisco, I wanted to make a few of the ideas I was thinking about happen. I got a number of emails, including help from HN'er 'mahmud' and eventually partnered with someone. We created a first site www.crushtease.com, which I paid a reasonable sum for 50% equity.

Our product didn't initially go viral, and I mentioned another idea to my cofounder, who thought it was interesting as well. We ended up working on this second project (wikizu.com), while shelving the first project for the time being, identifying a few errors to the concept and presentation. I paid for that, plus some sort of marketing campaign that I knew far too little about.

This was back in November, right before Thanksgiving. From then until now, I have been asking him about the status of Wikizu and he has given me a variety of excuses. I believed them until a few friends started questioning the situation. Today I confronted him about it and he dodged every question I posed.

I suggested he send back the advertising money (which I sent back in November, thinking we were launching very shortly) to prove my friends wrong. He concluded I was being "annoying", said he had work to do, and mentioned contacting a lawyer a few times. I can upload the chat conversation somewhere if anyone wants to read it, but this is pretty much what happened.

I understand that I was horribly naive, and blindly trusted what I was told without really understanding what was going on. I sent money to someone I didn't know simply because we had long IM conversations and he seemed to know what he was talking about. He even made the sites functional with facebook, which I thought meant for sure there was no reason to question him.

I don't know what to do at this point. I'm out a good chunk of change, but I'm also frustrated that I've spent six months waiting around instead of implementing some of my ideas. I even posted on here earlier today asking about doing another project with someone, since I was tired of waiting around.

The alleged scammer posts on HN, and to my knowledge has a minimum of two accounts, one that he has posted as recently as this week on. A google search including his name and "scammer" brings up results, as does one with a pseudonym he uses for various sites. I'm not sure if I should out this information at this time. Any help would be appreciated.