Bootstrapacitor provides a place to show off your work to a bunch of other startup founders without necessarily launching for the whole world to see. When you register your startup, you're randomly assigned to a "demo group" of up to 8 other startups. (The assignment algorithm tries to put startups in the same geographic area together, to facilitate RL meetups.) You can then post feature announcements of everything you implement, and get instant feedback from the members of your group. Until you list your startup as "launched", these announcements are visible only to your group members, so you can put your startup up well before it might be considered ready for the public. You and your group get "karma" based on how many features you push out and how many people look at them or comment on them, so it's to your advantage to release early and release often.
Our intent is to create the sort of friendly competitive atmosphere of a math competition or hacker lab. To me, this is the biggest advantage of YCombinator and clones: they create a peer group of motivated, passionate people that show off their work to each other. IMHO, that's far more valuable than money or even the advice and connections: most startups fail because the founders give up, not because they make a single mistake or can't get VC.
'... Our intent is to create the sort of friendly competitive atmosphere of a math competition or hacker lab. To me, this is the biggest advantage of YCombinator and clones: they create a peer group of motivated, passionate people that show off their work to each other. ...'
Nice work. I'll check it out when the login lets me in. Is there an RSS post per user?
That's probably indicative of a bigger problem then: the story isn't simple enough for people to grasp immediately.
I know GMail, Livejournal, and most YCombinator startups have a little explanatory text on the front page, but I've been a GMail user for nearly 3 years and a LJ user for 5 and have yet to read the introduction. I signed up for GMail because all my friends were saying "Have you seen Google's new webmail program? They give you a gig of space. Want an invite code?" I signed up for LJ because all my friends were saying "Do you have a LiveJournal? It's like an online diary thing." You could probably sum up GMail with 4 words ("Google. Webmail. One gig.") and LJ with two ("Online diary."). And all the really successful consumer web startups have one or two word summaries: Google ("Search"), Amazon ("Every book"), Ebay ("Auction junk"), Craigslist ("Find apartment"), Flickr ("Share photos"), Meebo ("Web IM"), Reddit ("Share links"), Wikipedia ("Community encyclopedia"), and YouTube ("Share videos"). The only exception I can think of is Yahoo, which may be why Yahoo's recent earnings were in the toilet.
I can't really think of any way to sum up Bootstrapacitor in 2-4 words, which is a real problem. The initial version of the logo had "Hold your charge" on it, but that sounded kinda hokey and doesn't really explain what the site's about. I suspect that putting a 2-paragraph description of the site on the front page won't help, because people won't read it anyway, and even if they did it's not convenient for them to share it. So perhaps the idea itself is flawed until it can be boiled down into a simpler concept.
Bootstrapacitor provides a place to show off your work to a bunch of other startup founders without necessarily launching for the whole world to see. When you register your startup, you're randomly assigned to a "demo group" of up to 8 other startups. (The assignment algorithm tries to put startups in the same geographic area together, to facilitate RL meetups.) You can then post feature announcements of everything you implement, and get instant feedback from the members of your group. Until you list your startup as "launched", these announcements are visible only to your group members, so you can put your startup up well before it might be considered ready for the public. You and your group get "karma" based on how many features you push out and how many people look at them or comment on them, so it's to your advantage to release early and release often.
Our intent is to create the sort of friendly competitive atmosphere of a math competition or hacker lab. To me, this is the biggest advantage of YCombinator and clones: they create a peer group of motivated, passionate people that show off their work to each other. IMHO, that's far more valuable than money or even the advice and connections: most startups fail because the founders give up, not because they make a single mistake or can't get VC.