ryankuder’s posterous

Hat tip to @nrek for the find.

This pattern — “success” based on forecasted future success instead of current success — shows up all over in the tech-business press. Instead of dead simple metrics like “they make more money than they spend” we see stuff like “user count growth” and “followers” and “impressions” and “friends” and “visits” qualify success. Whenever you see someone piling big numbers into made up metrics, it’s a diversion. They want you to think that this time it’s different. But like Judge Judy says, “If it doesn’t make sense it isn’t true.”

Jason does a great job dissecting a recent NYT piece called "Using Free to Turn a Profit." Figuring out how to take an product and make money from it should be simple. Find something that people want to pay money for, build it, collect the money. He's blown away that his partner David's classic Startup School talk got the reception it did. The basic message of the talk is as old as business itself, "Come up with a product, charge money for it, make more money than it costs to run it, and you turn a profit!" Sounds simple, doesn't it? But I'm amazed at how revolutionary it sounds when you try to apply it to what you're doing every day.

I'm pretty sure I have the best commute in Silicon Valley. While the rest of the Valley sits in gridlock on the 101, I make two rights, a left, and a right.

The music is Sweat, by Oingo Boingo and it happens to be exactly as long as my commute. This was the first film I took with the Flip Mino HD I got back in March.

We won! Last weekend, the Koombea team participated in the 2009 Rails Rumble, a competition to see who could build the best Rails App in 48 hours. Out of 137 completed apps, our app, Hi, I'm, was selected by the expert judges as one of the 22 finalists to go to public voting. When public voting ended on Sunday night, Hi, I'm topped the leader board!

Hi, I'm is a social profile aggregator. Ben Parr of Mashable described it as a "profile centric FriendFeed." When you register for Hi, I'm you get a page at http://hi.im/yourname (here's mine:  http://hi.im/ryankuder). Your page is like an Alltop or PopURLs with all of the content you create across the web. We see Hi, I'm as a way for you to introduce yourself to the Internet.

Having only 48 hours to build Hi, I'm, there was a lot we wanted to do that didn't get done. We're already working on getting a bug fix release out as soon as we can and starting to work on some of the ideas we got from the feedback provided by the expert judges and the public.

We were incredibly impressed at the quality of the apps that were built in just 48 hours. Congratulations to all of the teams who got such great apps up and running in such a short amount of time.  And a HUGE thanks to everyone who supported us for the past week. It's been a great adventure.

In the meantime, if you're looking for Rails developers, it might be a good idea to check out the guys who won the Rails Rumble. I hear they're pretty good at what they do.

"In a bold move aimed at catching the Africans who have owned this event, Ms. Goucher has taken all the tactics generated by U.S. running experts in the last 20 years—the charts, the mileage recommendations and high-tech motion-sensing computer readouts—and stuffed them in a dumpster."

Go, Kara!