Houston StartUp Weekend is this Weekend. Go get a ticket.
If you are pitching Friday night,having your pitch ready is probably priority number one. If you don’t have a team, you need to attract a team and for that you need a good pitch. Once you have a team, what next? Javid Jamae has a great post over here on what your weekend should probably look like. Following this plan should get you to a place where you have a pretty good idea with some data backing up why it is a good idea. At some point though, you have to build.
In prepping for the build out of @SnapHang Art I’ve compiled the following list of services that I may need to employ. I’ve created accounts on all the services so that I can hand off the username and passwords to my team and they can get right to work. You could easily waste a couple of hours signing up and vetting these services. Hopefully the list will keep you from doing this.
Database – MongoDb at https://mongolab.com
MongoDB is a nice simple Document based database. Mongolab exists in Amazons ec2 cloud so you’re gong to have nice response times if your application and web servers also sit in ec2.
Cost: Your first developer instance is free.
Web Servers – node.js – http://www.heroku.com/
Heroku will let you provision a Rails and/or node.js 0.4.7 application instance. I had considered building SnapHang on node.js but since I’ve never used a hosted node.js environment I’ve decided to ‘dance with the one who brung ya’ and stick with ASP.net unless I meet a bad ass node.js developer on Friday night who wants to contribute(hint hint to all you awesome node.js guys. Contact me before Friday and lets talk).
Cost: Fist Dev server is Free.
Web Server - ASP.net – http://www.appharbor.com
I can’t promote appharbor enough. They are what Windows Azure should be. The service is really easy to use. You can have an ASP.net MVC 3 web app up in less than 15 minutes. Better yet it free for both a 10GB SQL Server and a web instance running on ec2(so your mongodb calls are quick if you go that way.) You’ll have some VCs tell you that building on the Microsoft stack is a red flag. They are probably right, but if you keep your application layer a thin simple data service with a Mongo backend it will be easy to rip it out in the future and replace with something less reliable but cooler sounding.
Cost: First Dev Server and DB are free per application
Image Storage – Amazon S3 -http://aws.amazon.com/s3/
Put images in the cloud. Pull them from the cloud. Pretty simple. Amazon has a ton of other services that you should explore as well.
Cost: Credit Card on File required. $.09-$.14/GB for storage, $.01 per request, 1 GB out free
Push Notifications – iOS and Android – http://www.urbanairship.com
They make sending notifications to iPhone and Android Apps a breeze. I’ve heard of read rates north of 95%. This is an amazing way to stay connected to your customers.
Cost: 1st 1,000,000 / month free
User Account Creation and Validation – Parse – https://www.parse.com/apps/quickstart
Create your users in the cloud. Don’t worry about storing passwords. They also do push notifications. I’ve always rolled my own, but this looks too easy to ignore. It will save SnapHang 2-3 hours of messing with user registration code and password retrieval, etc. etc.
Cost: Free Starter Plan
Billing – PayPal – http://www.paypal.com
This is a tough one. It is hard to justify setting up a merchant account for a startup weekend project. PayPal has some hoops to jump though and getting your money can be a bit of a pain, but the nice thing is that it is free to set up and you don’t have to pay them unless you use them.
Cost: Conditional Transaction Charges
App Test Distribution – iOS – TestFlight – http://www.testflightapp.com
This service is a God Send for iOS developers trying to test their apps. As you push out beta releases, users get notification emails on their phone and they can reinstall without having to sync with iTunes. They also have some very nice real time logging and monitoring tools.
Cost: Free
GeoLocation – Google, SimpleGeo, Factual
I don’t know which to pick. Googles looks nice and they run my world so I’ll probably go with that. UrbanAirship just purchased SimpleGeo and I think that is the direction you should go if you need to be building your own Database of locations.
Google: http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/places/index.html
SimpleGeo:https://simplegeo.com/
Factual:http://www.factual.com/
Cost: SimpleGeo starts at $9/month with 2 months free. Google requires a CC fro over 1000 requests/day, Factual has free program for small request sizes.
Good luck! If you have any questions about why I picked these or you know of something better, let me know @rvvrapps.
If you’d like to help SnapHang by helping with customer validation fill this out and we’ll contact you when we need feedback!