Could you please tell more about the development process? What was used: icons, jquery and so on. Great product!

I rolled my own MVC implementations for the client and server. The backend is in php. The client MVC implementation uses Backbone events and the backbone router, but everything else is custom. jQuery of course, Twitter bootstrap, IconJar, some free icons I found on 365psd, glyphicons.

You built the PHP router too?

Sometime if you're not a hacker or you're one but want to focus on your startup, then taking a less "serious" job can do the trick also. I've met we've guys that even worked night shifts in security and coded all day long. Others did even customer support from home. Got the bills paid while they build their project. Getting a $4K a month client is something that's can take considerable amount of time to achieve.

Yeah -- to be honest we were very lucky to have the kind of client we had. One word of caution I would give is splitting your time like that can has its drawbacks. Having three weeks to focus 100% on product was an enormous help in allowing us to ship a working product as fast as we did.

I understand sometimes this just isn't possible though.

To me that seems a very good idea. Doing security at a place where you don't have to be on guard at all times (something like a receptionist job) means you can work on your product and get paid to do it with some distractions.

That's exactly what he has done. The thing is that he was a team leader in a large tech company, and could earn something like 6x in compared to the money he earned in security, if he got a full time job. But he told me that with a full time job he can't possibly develop anything for himself.

But that's not always an easy thing to do when you are 35 as he was.

The smartest person I know taught himself German and ancient Greek while working the night shift at a gas station. If you're young, that's another job with lots of down time to work on your own thing.

In some cities, working the night shift at a gas station non-trivially increases your risk of dying on the job (by getting shot by a robber).

The one thing I've learned from top entrepreneur is that there is no blueprint for success. What worked for Ryan in one company between 2003-2008 doesn't have to work in different time place. The only thing is to run it and improve it all along.

Could you please elaborate on what technologies you've used to create the app?

Very nice movie! Is this professionally made or just home made?

Why programming isn't a commodity skill? Or will become such commodity soon? Programming is like a house builder. Yes there are better and more experienced builders, but most of them can build a house top to bottom with no problem.

Programming is not like building houses. The computers on which the software runs are the "house builders"-- the parts of the system doing the repetitive work. Programmers are the architects and civil engineers who are tasked with inventing new types of houses every time.

Not that I disagree with you, but have you looked at a typical architect's salary and job prospects?

It seems there's a lot more demand for different types of software than there is for different types of houses.

Especially since most of the house design is now done by software.

To add on to your point - you can program anything with little to no startup costs anymore, whereas you can't build anything architecture wise without large amounts of money.

> ...with no problem.

For certain values of "problem" as defined by the builder? Sure.

For what a buyer defines as a "problem"? Highly debatable.

Even in house construction, an activity that has been performed for literally THOUSANDS OF YEARS, there is no commoditization. If nothing else accounts for this, the bewildering array of local building codes assures that commodity construction as presented by a builder (like a national prefab builder) is really a business-level API that presents a uniform interface to buyers that hides a team that handles all the local idiosyncrasies underneath.

And if you expand it beyond just house construction to all construction, which is probably a better comparison, it's even less of a commodity. Cost and time overruns are common in multi-million dollar building projects, just like they are in multi-million dollar software projects.

> Programming is like a house builder.

Sorry, but that analogy is completely wrong. I would recommend reading Fred Brook's "The Mythical Man-Month" (among many other books on software estimation) to understand why.

He argues that unlike activities involving physical mediums like house building, computer programming creates with an intractable medium. You would be surprised, in the field of programming, that many so-called "programmers" cannot even build a simple house that is stable on its own foundations.

Unless you're building a 20x20 cm shack, which is about what most intro into programming courses aim at, and the level where some people simply stay. Or in the words of hacker school "completely useless and destined for dev/null".

If houses were vaguely specified, constantly changing, enormously complex designs for invisible things that had to interface with an entire ecosystem full of other "houses" then yes, programming is like house building.

...also sometimes people start using the building while you are still making it. Also each builder has his own style. And there is no final blueprint.

Programmers are, in essence, creative problem-solvers. That skill set is difficult, if not impossible, to commoditize. Building a house well may require some creative problem-solving, but it is not as frequent or as important when compared to programming.

So in short, that's not a valid comparison.

I would say programmers are like skilled laborers in this simile. Some are plumbers, some are electricians, some are woodworkers, some are handymen. I wouldn't hire a plumber to wire a house, nor an electrician to plumb it. Either might be able to do the job, or might not. A handyman probably can, but most likely not with the same quality, or knowledge about how to fix more specific or harder problems.

I don't expect a programmer that's been steeped in the world of UNIX daemons to write a good customer facing website on their first attempt, and I wouldn't expect a front-end Javascript programmer to know how to deal with multiprocess programming in C/C++. Asking them to do so may not result in something "with no problem". At least not in an acceptable time frame.

If only. Aside from very, very standard patterns, software development is like building a totally different house each time, and builders tend to have a bear of a time when things deviate from accepted patterns. There is an immense range of productivity and quality among developers, and you can't make up for having less skilled developers by hiring more of them.

Well, see, that's the difference between a house builder and a programmer. Not just anyone can write a program with "no problem". Sure, sure, anyone can learn to write one off hacks (much like building couch forts), but building something that doesn't fall down when the first woodpecker comes along takes a lot more experience, training, thought, effort and time.

Programming is far closer to architecture than house building

"The firm's stock price has risen nearly 16-fold during this long tenure..."

I think that sums it up pretty nicely.

Could you please give 2-3 examples of marketing moves that helped you directly in getting more?

Sounds interesting (pun intended..)

+1 for awful pun

If nothing helps another option is to register the domain in somewhere like GoDaddy, not because of their "great" service but just because they offer a service to grab the domain as soon as it expires. Then you can wait for it to expire. After the domain will be at GoDaddy you can easily transfer it to another registrar. Risky but might be the only choice.