Couchsurfing for hackers coming to NYC.

800 subscribers @ $10/mo.

"Here’s another way to come up with startup ideas: walk around your house or apartment, and look for “hot spots.” A hotspot can be an area of high information density, clutter, stress, disorganization, or any place that has a suboptimal solution. Then think about a web or cloud solution to that hot spot. Let’s take a look at a few examples:

Music CDs -> iTunes, Amazon MP3 store, doubleTwist, MP3tunes, etc.
Bookshelf -> Amazon, Kindle, iBooks
Stereo system -> Sonos, Squeezebox, Rhapsody, Pandora, last.fm, Spotify, Grooveshark, MOG, Rdio, etc.
External hard drives -> Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Pogoplug"

"BillFloat pays your bill. You settle up with BillFloat up to 30 days later."

"Anyway, as I poured hour after hour into my business, I started to wish that others had done what I was doing and just let me piggyback on their work. Other people I met had the same problems: they needed a simple template to help them optimize the time they were spending on general, not-specific-to-one's-business tasks."

Here’s the 5 second version:
1. Bring a laptop to a bar
2. Offer to buy someone a beer in exchange for participating in a user study
3. Watch your application crash & burn as people do all sorts of ridiculous ass shit they would never do in a lab but constantly do in real life
4. Go back, apply the lessons you have learnt, repeat until you have an app that is 100% drunk person proof

"You know that old saw about a plane flying from California to Hawaii being off course 99% of the time—but constantly correcting? The same is true of successful startups—except they may start out heading toward Alaska. Many dot-com bubble companies that died could have eventually been successful had they been able to adjust and change their plans instead of running as fast as they could until they burned out, based on their initial assumptions. Pyra was started to build a project-management app, not Blogger. Flickr's company was building a game. Ebay was going to sell auction software. Initial assumptions are almost always wrong."