Accepted! Finally! Flying in from Juneau, AK

It seems like getting a wide enough adoption to make this useful would be really tough, since as soon as you started to get traction (if at all) you'd get bought by someone who was scared of you or a more established player would break into the space. Further, inventory and sales systems are long established and are big investments for a lot of places, so kind of tough to upend. As many have said, widespread retail adoption would be unlikely.

The meat of the concept is fantastic, but why not come at it from the consumer side of things. Try to figure out a way to take transaction information (like, from a receipt) and upload it at the point of sale. You'd get a live data stream of what was being bought, where, and for how much. You could entice consumers to use the product by providing them with mint-like app for day to day purchases. You wouldn't have inventory for individual stores per se, but you could make a lot of inferences.

We're trying to create a few startups:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3394844

This is a cool project/initiative ... I will be following you guys, maybe even participate :)

Hope something good comes out of this ..

The more the merrier. We now have a website and a Google Group.

website: http://www.startuporshutup.org

Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/startup-or-shut-up

edit: added links.

Follow the discussion at: http://notes.avaaz.org/kRBXB8P1Ci

Well, this whole thing is pretty off-the-cuff, but I'll hang out in the ##startup2012 freenode channel, and maybe we can come up with something a little more formal.

I'm IN, but might want to add a contact.

1. Good Question. I (and a lot of others around here, I think) 'jump' head first into projects on our own all the time, and stay totally committed for like the first week. I've got a long list of projects and concepts and a boat load of code that faded into oblivion. I'm hoping that working as a group might keep the momentum going until something is actually produced. Working with a bunch of folks I just met seems like a lot of fun, and they aren't totally random; we at least have HN in common.

2. True, but I think for the sake of this exercise, something should be achievable.

How did you get your first customer? How much of your time (%) is marketing vs. sys admin vs. coding vs business?

I used to work for another company called Motionbox which offered a similar service in addition to a more youtube style type service. Motionbox was sold to SnapFish/HP. SnapFish, for whatever reason, was only interested in acquiring the youtube style customers. That left all of the commercial, paying, customers available. We made a bid to buy them from Motionbox and the bid was accepted. We then gave the customers the option to migrate all of their videos to SproutVideo and become customers. Around 200 made the transition.

It's somewhat hard to calculate where my time is spent as I don't really keep a good record of it. If I had to guess, I would say the breakdown is something like this:

40% - Coding

30% - Customer Service

10% - Marketing

10% - Sys. Admin

10% - Business

I'm not convinced that multiple submissions is a bad thing. We're all going to continue to get out information from different sources, and the discussion that follow a particular submission may have as much to do with the source as the story. Some people might place more trust in one source over another or one poster/submitter over another, and I think that is why the multiple submissions problem hasn't already worked itself out on its own. Any sort of automated merge/filter would be a form of editorializing that could squelch valuable discourse.