Whilst looking around to see what sorts of graphical editors there are out there for teaching introductory python programming, I ran a search for blockly python. If you haven’t come across Blockly before, it’s a library for building browser based graphical programming interfaces, based on interlocking blocks, with a style aesthetic:. I already knew that Blockly could be customised to but the environment from Virginia Tech’s Software Innovations Lab is even richer: For a start, the environment is set up for working with small data sets, and can display small tabular datasets as well as plot them. (You may remember we also used data to motivate programming for the FutureLearn course.) The language is a subset of Python 2.7 (the environment uses the client side Python interpreter; I’m not sure if the turtle demo works!). The environment also supports blocks-to-code as well as code-to-blocks translations, so you can paste a chunk of code into the text view, and then display the blocks equivalent.

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(I think this is done by parsing the Python into AST and then using that as the bridge to the blocks view?) Alternatively, it you’re happier with the blocks, you can write a programme graphically and then grab the code version. Or you can flip between the two As well as the blocks/code view, there is a pseudo-code view that maps the code into more explanatory language. This feature is under active development, I think To aid debugging – and learning – the environment allows you to step through the code a line at a time, previewing the current state in the panels on the right hand side. If you get an error, an error prompt appears.

I was using the JavaScript version of this on my web site. I tried to embed it but the dynamic aspects failed to perform as expected. This is because I am using a wordpress site at present and embedding code doesn’t seem to be a trivial exercise. Instead I added another page and linked to it. I thought it was a great idea, I’m not a fan of Scratch and I like the ‘best of both worlds’ format of blockly. If I ever get any time I intend to take down the wordpress site and integrate it properly with my site.

That’s really handy info thank you:) I have hosting provided by my ex-boss for free, lucky me. I set up the wordpress site when I was teaching because one of my classes didn’t have moodle access so it was a quick way to give them access to materials from home. I said I would leave it there for them for as long as possible so it’s still there for now. So the page I am linking to is on my site which is fine. It just looks a bit random hanging on the end.

When I reclaim the site I’ll try to get it a little more cohesive. Further to intro-to-coding: I found the materials for the hour of code and beyond were fantastic for teaching basic coding as well, my daughter loved it. Great write-up! Here’s some developer responses: The Turtle demo partially works – I’ve been meaning to set it up to work, and had some code that could actually make turtles appear and such. Needs a bit more before it’s ready for release. The “Mutual Language Translation” does indeed work by parsing the AST and generating relevant XML. Blockly makes the blocks-code transition simple.

The pseudo-code feature is indeed under development, and we’re testing it out in the classroom starting today. It remains to be seen if it’s useful, but it certainly seemed interesting! We have some write-ups for many kinds of errors, although some we can give better advice for than others. Complete list is here:. I think this is influenced by the Runestone project, which had some influence on this project. Logging in doesn’t have much use, yet, unless you’re in the LTI side of things. There, it’s absolutely crucial and happens behind-the-scenes.

I have big plans for the regular logging in, but haven’t had time to focus my attention there. I also want to see what sort of features instructors expect (managing assignments, managing classes, etc.). The features to embed BlockPy canvases, share user submissions, and custom assignments are actually fairly close to completion, but have a few key features left.

I really want to setup a “shareable URL” system, but just need the development time to make it happen. One of the best features of BlockPy not immediately visible from the currently exposed view is that it can give you feedback to students. Essentially, you define a function that is run when students’ run their code, and evaluates it (currently, able to look at the source code, properties they created, and whatever they printed, but I have big plans). You can use this to either mark “Success” or return a string of feedback. You can start seeing what’s exposed when you have the LTI stuff hooked in via this: think.cs.vt.edu/blockpy/blockpy/?mode=instructor Here’s a short paper we wrote about BlockPy.

We submitted a paper to COMPSAC that’s longer, and we’re hopefully writing a journal paper for a new open-access venue on Block-based languages. This will have some actual evaluation data too! Please feel free to raise issues on the BlockPy site, or engage on the google group. I’d love to see people interested in BlockPy, and this is a good time to make suggestions. Hi Cory – Thanks for the comprehensive comment – it’ll be interesting to hear how the pseudo-code interpretation goes with learners The turtle thing’s not really one of my favourites, but I know it’s a staple and it seems that in terms of screen layout it’d naturally sit where the current chart canvas area is. Re: the development time required to finish off the shareable URL – understood:-) I was thinking in the short term that it would provided a compact way of saving programmes without the need to have any heavy machinery.

(I was thinking in terms of the code being encoded within the URL, rather than being saved server side and represented by a shortcode. It’s a bit clunky, but self-contained, and would be okay for short programmes) Re: building test functions into the code – interesting. (Is that how things like CodeRunner (Moodle plugin) work?

Thanks for the paper refs – will check them outand as for raising issues, I may well do!;-). Turtles aren’t really my favorite thing either, and the Blockly Games suite is already so good. Hence why it always seems to slip down my priority list Apparently a feature I had forgotten was that you could pass in a URL as a query string parameter, and the page would attempt to GET whatever it found there as code. E.g., Doesn’t work against CSRF, but works for publicly accessible endpoints. Would be trivial to change this to have it just decode it as code. I should find some time to make that happen. I’m not familiar with CodeRunner, so I can’t say that if it does something like that.

I usually compare the feature to something like WebCAT, although they use unit testing and we don’t demand that.

It's still the best source if you're doing your apartment search remotely. If you're local, another good approach is just to drive down the multi-family zoned areas in the valley (it's pretty obvious where they are if you live here, plus you can see them on satellite view in Google Maps), pop into the office, and ask if they have any vacancies coming up. Most blocks are pretty densely packed, so you can easily hit up half a dozen complexes in an hour and get a sense of what rents are like, how clean the complex is, how friendly the management is, what sort of people live there, etc. In my most recent apartment hunt I took a bike trip with my girlfriend - we just biked down a bunch of the residential neighborhoods in Sunnyvale and stopped at every apartment complex. Another useful strategy is to take a short-term lease when you first move out, then once you're acclimatized, pick out the places you really want to live and ask if there're vacancies. You learn a lot of tacit knowledge about the area that way, eg.

The California/Escuela area of Mountain View has a number of openings on Craigslist, but it also has a reputation of being kinda a bad neighborhood in MTV (nothing that'll put your personal safety at risk, but I know a couple people that were robbed while living there), and you'll only pick that up from living in the area and talking with locals there. There are two major methods. Jamming (active): Broadcast so much noise at the relevant frequencies that it drowns out any other signal the devices might try to interact with. You throw a lot of power into going LALALALALALALALA at the frequency bands you expect the devices you want to jam to be interacting at, then they can't hear each other over you. It's actually not a particularly hard engineering problem until you start worrying about heat and efficiency - you just build a transmitter and broadcast noise at high power. Blocking (passive): Use a Faraday cage or sheer mass to prevent signals from being broadcast into or out of an enclosed area. Mass attenuates signals depending on thickness, density, and frequency.

A Faraday cage uses a powered metal mesh to maintain constant voltage at a surface, which can kill most transmissions without the need to turn your building into a bunker. But assuming this is actually allowed by your local laws, you still shouldn't do it. It's hazardous and unethical since it will also disrupt e.g. Emergency communications.

If you're bothered by impolite cell phone use, you should pursue a social remedy which allows for extreme cases where manners are not the biggest concern, rather than a technical one which is blind to significant edge cases. For military applications: You don't have an enclosed area to work with, so you mostly use jamming devices with as much power as you can manage. But this gets used less than you might think from Hollywood, since a major cost of using them is that you're very loudly shouting your general position to anyone who cares about that and access to some basic electronics. Also the really good ones are set up as buildings or vehicles, it's not going to be small if you want power on the order of 'shout so loud a civilian radio station can't hear itself think.' Passive compliments: Anti-radar stealth technology, which is where you try to make yourself as much of a pain in the ass to make out clearly as you can manage. This is far more difficult since you don't have a controlled environment to play with, but there's still a lot you can do with clever shapes and surface design.

Also the point is less to make yourself invisible, than it is to reduce the amount of advance warning that an opponent would get, or their ability to respond to changes in your vector. Chaff countermeasures are easier, you basically launch a bunch of stuff that's highly reflective at the frequencies people are trying to track you with. I think this is mostly an air-to-air thing. It actually works pretty well, at least in terms of 'make it less likely that you get shot down.'

But if the other guy has reasonably modern targeting systems, you can bet he's got chaff too since it amounts to a thing that shoots out tinfoil confetti. This is not as big a problem as you believe it to be. The independent contractor test is a balancing act. It is not an absolute barrier to you personally working on behalf of a particular client.

Kalzumeus Software maintains a fact sheet, because that sounds better with 'Word document'. It's one page and starts with the words 'Patrick McKenzie is, under relevant IRS regulations, an independent contractor and not an employee of your company.' It then has a bunch of bullet points where I recite the facts which are most supportive of that conclusion.

This has resolved 95% of interactions I've ever had about this question. (The last 5% was at a particular BigCo where they wanted me to fill out a BigCo-approved questionnaire, but they reached the same conclusion.) I second Thomas' comment that this is largely a sales question rather than a legal question. At a lot of places, 'I want an agency in front of you' just means 'I want someone to yell at if you turn out to be a bozo.' An agency is one way to decrease the downside risk of you being a bozo. Or you could just have a bunch of strong signals which say 'Almost certainly not a bozo.' If a potential client said 'Patrick, we want to work with you, but we'd rather do it through an agency.'

I'd say 'Can I ask what is motivating your desire to do it through an agency? I might have a solution for you.' No, that's not true. What is true is that large companies will (a) ask one-person consulting shops to subcontract through existing contracting firms, because they have very complicated MSAs and accounting processes set up with those larger firms, and (b) occasionally try to withhold taxes for one-person contracting firms. These are sales/marketing issues, not legal issues. There's no formalism to consulting 'agencies'. Basically: if you're talking to a BigCo who wants you to work as a sub through one of their vendors, that's a sales objection.

If you're doing commodity consulting work, like the same front-end web software development work that their vendors already sell them, you're going to have a hard time displacing the vendor, because doing that costs them money and incurs risk. Three responses to that trap:.

Specialize further, so that the work you do isn't substitutable by work they can buy from one of their big vendors. Note that you will not have an easy time trying to specialize in technology (being the best Angular.js developer in the world does not make it easier for you to sell web front-end work against a huge vendor that already provides that); you need to find ways to specialize in business model and problem domain. Pick more appropriate clients.

This sounds flippant, but it's not; it's one of the core problems of sales. If you're running into potential clients that all want you to sub, you need to do a better job of qualifying your leads so you don't waste time on prospects who aren't going to sign an MSA for you. BigCos can ask a single-person shop to sub through an existing vendor, but they can't reasonably ask a 10-person shop to do the same thing, because no 10-person shop would ever do that. Scraping HN and building, say, a JSON blob out of a thread page wouldn't be difficult - if I can do it with curl and PHP then anybody can do it. My biggest concern though would be how HN itself would react to that - and of course if you want it to be more than read-only and completely seamless you have to do what essentially amounts to cross-site request forgery to make it appear the login and posting is being done on your site and not the other - and it looks like HN uses a csrf token in the form. So probably the least painful way of doing it (apart from an official JSON API) would be to scrape the site periodically (not so quickly as to be banned, obviously) or use one of the existing services which acts as a proxy api, save locally to your own backend and then do whatever.

Personally though, I think it's slightly unethical, unless you're going to clearly mention that the content is coming from HN and you have their permission. What do they get out of you using their resources to lead readers away from their site, after all? The discussion is here because the community is here. Most websites do not have the ability to produce sufficient content to draw sufficient audience as to have it's own large community and the commenting that goes with it. Some of the current benefits of posting it to HN is that provides traffic.

I find that I occasionally get comments directly on my blog when something posts to HN but the comments there are a bit different from the discussion here. So I think of them as being fundamentally different. Managing a community is a job in itself and is fundamentally different from producing good content.

I don't see this as a bug. It's a feature. Though I have started wondering if I should start putting a link to the HN discussion in the blog post. For now, I did recently add a page listing FPP-Worthy posts that generated real discussion and putting the HN links there. I am still trying to figure out what the hell I am doing and largely figuring it out alone since I have no mentor or similar. Choose your own adventure: 1) You currently have approximately $500 to $2k in revenue.

That's great, because it is $500 to $2k in revenue more than the vast majority of people will ever achieve. You need to work the numbers on whether the founding team can solo-close $100k in revenue in the next twelve months. If that appears achievable, you tighten your belts, perhaps run up larger balances on your credit cards than usual, and start solo-closing every business you can find locally.

You'll spend approximately 95% of your effort in the short term on ad sales and 5% on everything else. After you can consistently keep the lights on, you're going to hire a bunch of folks who will do that job to your script on the telephone all day, every day. They will be the heart of your business. They will always be the heart of your business, for values of 'always' which map to 'as long as you primarily keep the lights on by convincing local businesses to buy advertising.'

There is a reasonably achievable path to you having a business here which closely resembles a well-run local newspaper (except you'll potentially have nationwide reach): millions of revenue, 20% margins, etc. Much like local newspapers, it may be a not-quite-straightforward proposition to confidently say 'The people who pay us get great value for their advertising spend.' If your team cannot reasonably solo-close $100k in revenue by repeating your current model, which I allocate a very non-trivial percentage of the probability space to, you do not actually have a revenue model yet. I'd have a hard look at my bank account and say 'Can we figure out a revenue model before I get thrown out of my apartment for non-payment of rent?' If not, you may consider winding down the business.

There is no shame in this and, while you may think your current level of success is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, if you hypothetically believe that I would take the other side of that bet. 2) You have a very compelling pitch for getting into YC, 500 Startups, or another incubator. You have actually shipped a software product. You won't believe me when I tell you, but many, many people who you might think are better fits for incubators cannot actually ship a software product.

You have also successfully demonstrated hustle, by being able to walk into a furniture store and ask them for money, which is something which is lamentably rare among people who are capable of actually shipping software products. The combination of shipping and hustle is pretty much exactly what incubators look for. This is a straightforward pathway into Door #3, in case executing on Door #3 doesn't sound straightforward to you. 3) You have all the elements necessary for raising a small seed round.

You make an AngelList profile and curate it diligently. You approach a few investors privately, show them your stats and paint a rosy picture of the future ('We've potentially got Groupon's growth trajectory ahead of us! +'), and secure, say, three to four commitments of $25k each.

You start to trend on AngelList and fill out the rest of the round, probably for $250 to $500k. (I'm unaware of what the Going Rate is for valuations at the moment - probably mid single digit millions but ask someone who does this professionally to fill you in there.) You bump yourself up to greater-than-subsistence salaries, hire three or four people who are young and hungry, and aim to sustain those growth rates for the next 8 to 12 months. If you do, you will sail easily to Series A, on your way to creating an rather large business which may or may not resemble the one you are presently running.

If you don't, your company implodes. + 'Patrick, is that a good thing?' None of the seed stage investors in Groupon are cursing their name right now. To put it mildly.

First, decide if you really need to raise money. Can you bootstrap (ie, self fund) your business? Too many people immediately go for capital when they don't need it.

It's extremely distracting and not all that necessary. You should only look into raising capital if you have a capital constrained opportunity or problem.

So many problems initially look like money problems, but they're really disguised as something else (culture, product/market fit, market timing, etc). Usually, it's best to really get to know your market really well first, before reaching for funding. Second, make sure your legal documents are in order. Incorporate, if you haven't already, and open up a business bank account. Make sure to use your business bank account for all business related expenses. This will make accounting much easier down the line. Third, hire a great bookkeeper.

Trust and loyalty is really important here, so best if you hire someone who is somehow connected to you. Fourth, hire a great accountant.

Some accounts will also do bookkeeping for you. I don't think this is a good idea, as you typically want someone 'on your side' watching out for your day to day finances.

Intelligence and industry expertise is really important for an accountant. Fifth, if you're making real money, it's important to put some words on paper about how the company ownership is divided, and other 'what if' scenarios.

You typically also want some sort of Operating Agreement between the founders. Usually this document covers:1) ownership division2) provisions for terminating members3) provisions in case of long term disability or death of a member (for example, do you all of a sudden want your cofounder's spouse or parents as your cofounder in case of death? Look into 'key man' insurance.)4) provisions for adding new members Some people say get a lawyer for these documents, which isn't a bad idea, but most of these types of documents at this stage is pretty boilerplate. If you have some unique circumstance, like an international cofounder or something like that, then perhaps consulting a lawyer is best.

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Are you paying yourselves salaries? Do you have an actual office? I would suggest that you not get ahead of yourself with 'making it big' and instead focus on making it a solid business. Get to the point where you're paying yourselves and everyone who works for you a market rate salary and benefits, and you have office space, and you're cash balance is growing. Basically this is the classic definition of being 'profitable' (you have net income). Then hire a CFO.

The CFO will help you organize your thoughts around how much money you make and need to make in order to maintain a level of profitability. Then take your net revenue and feed it back into the business, pick up your next campus. Work on the process for organizing a campus, what you need to know who you need to contact. You will be able to start hiring sales people.

These people should be paid based on advertising sales delivered, not 'leads generated'. Once you've got your next campus, quickly post mortem what went well and what didn't. Then move on to the next one.

As you add campuses your revenue stream will increase and you will be able to add additional engineers to help integrating the data. Every million dollars a year in revenue shines more light on what works and what doesn't in your business. Have fun, enjoy the experience of all the things you are learning, (even the bad things teach something). You have an absolutely gorgeous product. I say that as someone who contributed on a contract basis to a similar system for a couple of guys in Arizona trying to do the same thing. I think that your local advertising model is going to be extremely difficult to execute and is going to scale poorly, so I would recommend moving that to a secondary revenue model. There are lots of ways to make money in this market that does not involve inefficiently calling up shops and asking them to part with advertising dollars.

My feeling is that you are technically savvy enough to create a more complete property management solution that landlords would pay for. One other revenue stream that I thought was interesting for the guys I worked with was pre-approving tenants with a background check, credit report, etc.

That way, the tenant would pay an application fee once to you, and then that application could be used at different properties during the tenant's search process (think of it as The Common Application for housing). Additionally, your advertising prices are obscenely low. Your largest package tips the scales at $1,200/year. To be perfectly honest, selling five of those packages is not especially impressive. Assuming that you sell your largest package to every advertiser, you will need 83 advertisers to clear $100k revenue, assuming no turnover and nobody ever calls you to complain or whatever (and believe me, they will).

Furthermore, your UI can probably only support fifteen or so advertisements per university without becoming utterly saturated, so you are constrained there as well. Suppose that you sold fifteen placements per college and had no turnover, your max revenue is $2,700,000 and now you have 2,250 advertising customers to coddle and keep happy.

Granted, that is a huge pile of money and anyone would be absolutely thrilled to make it, but now you have to back out your expenses. Assume that each of the three of you are going to draw $100k salary, now you are talking $2.4M, and now you need to pay account managers, sales people, customer representatives, not to mention all of your technical staff and infrastructure. You have a phenomenal product, but find out how to sell it for money to people that use it instead of advertisers. Advertisers should be the gravy!

Feel free to email me if you want to discuss further. Email is my username at the gmail. First ask yourself if you really are making money. Does the amount of money you will bring in equate to market rate salaries for you and your co-founders 12 months from now? With some money left over for growth? If the answer is yes then it sounds like you have a business on your hands.

Create a cash flow plan. It should show how much you'll be bringing in and how much you'll be spending on a month by month basis. Do it 18 months out. Make it as close to reality as possible. Then try really really hard to make it work without raising money.

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If that means you grow a little slower, that's OK. If it means you have to be a bit more frugal, that's OK because that's the cost of your own company's stock. (The alternative being, you sell that stock and get money to grow the business, so you lose that chunk of ownership). Assign someone as your CFO. They're the cash-flow tzar. Anytime someone wants to spend, they have to go through that guy.

The tzar should also have a talent of finding new pockets of money even when it seems that you're about to run out. Just because you're going to get a TON of offers from investors doesn't mean you should raise money.

I'm sure you get a lot of offers from credit card companies too. Once you raise, your definition of success is no longer 1 million bucks a year in revenue and $300,000 a year salaries for you and your two buddies (which would be awesome right????!). Instead you're going to have limits on how much you can pay yourself, who gets to be boss and how much of a boss you get to be, and your definition of success becomes $10 million a year in revenue instead or you raise again and again and then you have to IPO. You should sit down with the team and work out the unit economics per city. This will give you a tangible and precise target for what it takes to make the next city profitable.

'70 apartments available, 4 ad sponsoring business for break even.' ) Once you have that you can do like all franchise models do, reinvest your profits organically for company-owned cities and let franchisees come in to fuel growth beyond that, with the process manual based on the cities you did yourself. You got to where you are by focusing on just the client. Think hard before spending time trying to play the venture capital game.

First, congrats. Having real revenue probably puts you in the top 5% of startups already. Incorporate. You want the legal protection of (at least) an LLC.

Really think about if you need to raise money. If you do, it should be easy to raise $100k-$200k with real revenue and traction. But it sounds like you're in a position where you could actually bootstrap this. Equity is expensive. Think twice before raising money. Think in terms of milestones. What can you do to get to $XX,XXX in revenue per week,month,year.

Then, what can you do to launch at an additional school while still staying cash-flow positive? This sort of thinking breaks the process into bit-sized chunks. Much easier to digest. Your biggest problem will likely be scaling the ad sales efforts.

Walking into local businesses works great for 1, 2, 3 schools. But it will be hard to scale that to 100 universities. I'd love to help out in any way I can. I started a company in grad school that I sold last year. I've been through many of these issues before.

Mkijewski at g mail. I'm probably going to be a minority voice here but I think there are a couple opportunities/risks. Since you're curating properties around each campus AND selling ads to local businesses, I think there's a pretty good opportunity to franchise the 'feet-on-the-ground'. You might be able to charge for the franchises, but even if you can't, you can still pay straight commissions as a percentage of the income from each campus area. If the franchisee gets 50% of the ad revenue and is in charge of driving traffic to your site, the 50% you keep would need to cover your server costs and the founders living expenses.

As an aside, I'm near Penn State and I'm not sure whether this would work here. Most of the properties that will rent to students at all are managed by property management companies and the students tend to find those companies first (there's a lot of local advertising). First year students are required to live on campus, but they tend to start visiting the 'apartment stores' during their second semester. Do the three campuses you're currently servicing operate in a similar way?

Maybe the current crop of tech-savvy students look to the Internet first since they've had it from birth? In any case, great to hear you're making money and good luck! I'm not sure your upside is very big.

You might what to think about where you go from there. 150 universities. Real busy once a year when everyone is looking for housing but not much most of the year. How big were you advertising deals? Have you had anyone re order adverting? Any business owner is willing to give a couple kids just to starting out $200.

Most investor would want this to be at least $10M business. 60k per year per university. 5k mo per univeristy. Not trying to be negative but, I would hate for you to chase a bad path when you can focus on what could work. If someone has better incite let me know?

Also, maybe you want to talk to the group doing rent a sales force. Saw it a couple of days ago on here. While everyone has suggested bootstrapping, friends and fam, local angel groups and Angel List, have you tried your university? Many large public institutions have launchpads and accelerators (they just don't always market it well). This could be a natural fit for them. I think like most people are echoing, continue to fund it out of pocket (maybe with the help of family) to get it to be the best product possible.

From there, slowly build out into other geographies. You can learn lessons from your early expansions so as to not repeat it.

Given the product is still young, there is likely a good amount you can build on prior to scaling out. Good luck and will def be monitoring University Niche. I have a very similar problem. We have built a system for building niche websites for collectibles and plan on scaling horizontally - adding new collectibles in a similar way to the way you add universities and re-using the same code to power each niche. We're making some money on the trial niche ($5000/ MRR and growing) and have our first 100K monthly users close to product/market fit (78% would be 'very unhappy' to lose us).

Just like you guys, we don't really know where to go next. Right now, we plan on bootstrapping (we both work full time for well-known firms so all the revenue goes to contractors) but raising a 'real' seed round could change everything. Just like you, we have no idea if we should raise a seed, crowdfund (people LOVE their collections and we made 10K in 3 days in a small crowdfund) or continue to bootstrap. Not sure it matters, but coming from someone in a very similar place - we are rooting for you!

Have you gone back to the businesses you've sold to to see how much traffic or actual $ sales have been brought in by your service? If there is a measurable and verifiable ROI for them, you have a powerful lever moving into new markets. Those testimonials would be priceless.

What I would think about is recruiting commission-only sales persons in new markets rather than trying to go manage them yourselves. Likely, you'd use other college students. Start with another local school so you can jump in if necessary. Write up a 'how-to' guide with marketing materials for the prospects, and then look for self-starters who will go do the selling on commission only. Do some training.

If they are empowered with testimonials from businesses who have seen a real return, they will find it as easy to sell as you did. So the question is: can a single sales rep, likely a college student themselves, make enough money selling ads for you that it would be worth their while? The goal is to get cash coming in without having to spend any to get it started. Have you raised a family and friends round?

What amount of capital are you looking for? If you just launched 3 months ago, I'd say seed level, but I don't have enough specifics on what you need / burn rate to judge. Depending on where you're based, I would look at getting in touch with some of the angel investing syndicates. Also, be realistic about the runway you're giving yourselves.

My personal philosophy is to meet with investors in my network right at launch (not for money, but to alert them that I might be coming to them at some point). These relationships take time, and even an angel investment can take a month or more for due diligence.

Expect Series A to take months longer. Given that you're not currently in touch with angels, I would start identifying 1-2 groups in wherever you're based (I hope the answer is a larger metro area). Find out if you have a mutual contact. If not, and I hesitate to say this, but make a cold call to the angel / angel group. You don't have anything to lose. I believe you should concern on the quality of the business first before you raise any capital.

$695-$1200 can be alot of money for some local businesses since landlords are killing them with high rent. The key here is to train your sales team to show your potential advertisers the Math. Compile data and show them if they spend $695 they can get 3-6x that in return otherwise chances they will call you can cancel 6 months later. Numbers never lie so try to focus on tracking how many students click or view a particular ad and maybe come up with a conversion funnel analytic data for the local business owners. This can be a powerful selling tool.

If you can bootstrap it with profits then stick to it. Growing something too fast can lose the quality of the product. Once you have happy paying customers, growing it exponentially won't be so hard. I love your idea, love your design, keep it up.

The site looks great. I've actually been thinking about a similar product in a totally different space. If you could spare a couple minutes to answer, I have a couple questions that are probably really basic but I've been struggling with: 1. I see that you have a 'LIST YOUR PROPERTY' feature, but how did you seed your DB? Just search CL, call the owner and ask if they're open to renting to college students? How did you settle on making your own advertising platform your main revenue stream?

When you have a niche market like this, is Adwords (or similar) not a viable alternative? Have you thought about charging the listing agent directly? You are creating something similar to the change of address packet and welcome kit by the USPS. When you move to a new area, you get an envelope with a ton of local offers for new movers.

This is what I am talking about: You will find its companion Mover's Guide at your local post office. Simply ask for it from any USPS clerk. Studying it may prove to be very interesting as it will help you identify which companies already advertise to movers. I like that you offer to connect prospects with landlords by prompting the site user for her phone number. Someone needs to figure out how to get them to pay you.

You may want to offer landlords pre-filled rental applications instead of just phone calls. 'Apply Online' becomes a premium feature for which some landlords may be willing to pay (this needs to be tested). We should talk as I may have a way for you to make more money involving my product.

I also have contact information for every moving company. I am wiseleo on skype, gtalk, gmail.

Jeez, everyone is talking incubators, YC, angels, etc. People don't realise that this type of money is the most expensive you will EVER get.

And trying to get this funding will consume your business for the better part of a year, at least, with everything else on-hold to the point where you have neglected the actual business long enough that you will need the funding, and die without it. Bootstrap for as long as you can. Be imaginative. Seek out partnerships with customers as they can be a great source of money/advise/contacts if they feel it can benefit them. Sounds like customers love the concept, so get them to pony-up some money or contacts. Then, the cheapest money is the money you don't need. Equity should be treated as gold.

And a lot of founders who create successful businesses kick themselves for the mindless throwing-around of equity in the early stages. I would suggest setting-up an advisory board. I'm sure you and your co-founders will know several smart people, or ask customers who they recommend. If you want to pay yourselves even $50k/year you're going to need a few hundred grand. You could start with friends and family. But it does sound like some sort of accelerator might be a decent idea. Are there any in your vicinity (or in vicinities you would consider moving)?

The accelerator would ideally help you with funding and pretty much every question you're asking. If you do go the outside investor route, be careful with your pitch. Most startup investors are wary of near term cash flow & profits. That indicates a small return for them. First of all. It's always exciting to see something you've created grow and start to gain traction.

Second of all, please take all of the advice that you see here with a grain of salt. I think most of the ideas that people have shared are really good things to keep in mind for consumer-oriented SaaS platforms in general, however, IMHO the university / college student listings market is a completely different beast. Speaking as someone who co-founded the largest student classifieds system (at our peak 4-5 years ago we had over a million students using our system at over 400 universities nationwide), I can tell you that a lot of the business modeling that people do for consumer software service businesses are not necessarily compatible with the market that you are in. I couldn't help but notice from your site that you're in San Diego - I'm actually in SD as well, and if you're up to chatting more, I'd be more than happy to meet up. From my HN profile you can link to my website - the very bottom of the 'With Whom' section talks about the startup I helped to co-found, and the 'Where' section provides contact information if you want to get in touch with me further. Best of luck!

Curious if you thought about franchising your site. It might work in terms of cost because you would only have to profit from your first location and keep growing it. Offer an instance of universityniche.com but purchase a domain, host the site, setup the login and credentials, configure, maintain, and support the site.

Control all the features. Let the person decide what domain they want. In my instance you could offer torontouniversityhousing.com and I would only have to manage the sales/listings. Charge say 80% of profit or fee based or something a lawyer/accountant recommend. Used to own a business that sold advertising in the same college market.

Be very careful when extending credit to advertisers. The sale is only one part.

The other part is collecting the money. Would suggest you try and not extend credit and get paid if at all possible by credit card. The back office and aggravation can be quite aggravating. People will take advantage of you. They will tell you to show up to get a check (after you pester them) and then they won't have the check and tell you to return. Edit: I made this comment because the op had mentioned closing sales in person (or perhaps over the phone).

This is not the same as a website with a 'pay here' link. When you close in person there will always be customers who attempt to get credit terms. Think in particular what a chain restaurant would do or a company where the management is located elsewhere.

They will say 'send us a bill and yeah sure we will pay' or 'can I give you a PO'. So the question is how lucky do you feel. Of course if the COGS is very low it pays to take a risk. But just get ready to have to follow up multiple times over many months to collect that money.

And don't act like it's in the bank because it's not in the bank. 1) Check online for investors. Angellist would be a great place to find Local Investors interested in your space. 2) Search online for angel groups in the area and go talk to them.

See if anyone in that group is a connection somehow to do a warm call instead of a cold call. 3) Tell your friends and family what you are up to and ask them if they know anyone that is an angel. If you find an angel that isn't interested in your industry, they probably know other angels, so you can ask them to reach out. 4) Ask the university for help finding people that are investors. They would probably love to help and have a success story come from their college.

I really like the interface. I think if you have enough properties listed you can't fail. If it was me doing this the next step would be employing local people responsible for taking care of schools in their region. The only expense here could be legal fees for drafting a contract template making sure those people are self employed 'suppliers' paid a percentage of profit their activity generates. This way you wouldn't need to worry about all other costs associated with employing people.

Also, why not talk to few large property listing websites like (UK examples)rightmove.co.uk or zoopla.co.uk to partner with them? Those guys get fees when properties they list are filled.

It is in their interest for them to be advertised as widely as possible. Or alternatively create another type of a user. An estate agency. You could have hundreds of estate agents sign up and list properties on your website paying extra to make them come up first etc. One way is to pay users to generate content. Back in 1999/2000, I was CTO of a startup building a website aimed at independent travellers (which we defined as anyone who wasn't on a package holiday - i.e. People who were booking their own flights and hotels, and picking their own activities).

Our plan was to become something like what Wikitravel is today - a kind of crowdsourced travel guide, with recommendations from other travellers for places to eat/drink/stay, things to do, sights to see, etc. The idea was that a traveller would come to our site, search for, say, places to stay in Dublin, and the list they would get back would consist of recommendations/reviews submitted by other travellers. We faced the exact same chicken-and-egg problem the OP describes - we had a website based on user-generated content, with no content. People who were travelling/backpacking around the world during their gap year were a clear part of our target market and, at the time, there was no mobile internet, so gap year travellers would use internet cafs to access their email. The biggest and most popular internet cafs in London were run by easyEverything, where, on any given day, you could find dozens of travellers and tourists. So, we did a deal with easyEverything to buy terminal usage in bulk, and we then gave away 1 worth. of usage to anyone who wanted it, in return for them writing a piece of content for the website.

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We literally had people, wearing branded t-shirts, at these cafs, grabbing people as they came in and asking them if they wanted some free Internet time. From our perspective, it was a very successful approach - we were getting UGC for less than 1 per piece of content and, at the same time, publicising our site and getting a bit of brand awareness. Unfortunately, the company didn't survive the Dot-com Crash but that's another story. I say '1 worth' because easyEverything used demand pricing - if the caf was empty, that 1 might buy you 90 minutes, if it was busy, it might only buy you 20 minutes. A lot of people call this a chicken-egg problem.

For some reason, that's supposed to make it seem hard to solve, when in real life, anybody could start a chicken farm very easily. You simply buy chickens. If your question is how do I start a chicken farm without buying chickens, then you have made the problem unnecessarily complex. The thing is, though, when you buy a chicken, you can be relatively sure that you will get eggs. And you can be sure that if you have eggs, it's not too hard to get chicks. Your real problem isn't how to get content (that's simple, you buy it), but how to then get users that want that content.

And then, how to get some of those users to make content. (to answer your direct question: StackExchange was seeded by JoelOnSoftware and CodingHorror readers - it was a closed beta until they got enough content. In other words, Joel and Jeff already had chicken farms, and they donated a bunch of them to StackExchange). One story I've heard is from Alexis Ohanian one of the founderes of reddit.com.

He said that in the beginning they created multiple accounts and posted lots of content themselves. So basically, they faked it for a while.:) I believe the story with Yelp is that they paid people to write reviews in the beginning.

I definitely feel you, I have had similar struggles. I made a site that had some limited traction, mostly my friends used it. I think if your close friends are actually in the demographic you are looking for, then that is a great place to start. Something else I try to consider is to make a site that strives to serve millions of users but can be useful to far less. I've been working on a locally focused, social network and I am creating it in a way that even if 10 people are using it, as long as they goto the same places, it should be useful. 10 people in the same area would be worth 1000 people strewn across the globe in my case. But I do believe that it is a problem that has a solution which differs greatly from case to case.

It's certainly a chance to show your creativity and hustle, I suppose.:). The cynical way to say it is to 'Fake it til you make it.' The nicer way would be to say 'Be the change you want to see in the world.' When we launched MuckRock, a user-generated FOIA request site, we had about 50 early registered users who were dying to use the site. Then we set them loose, and after 2 months, absolutely no one had filed. So I started filing a ton of requests on my own, got back really good information, and all the sudden users started filing.

When I went back and asked why they hadn't filed before, they said they simply didn't know what filing should lo.