My favorite quote:

"The amount of support caused by failing pieces of code far exceeded the time it would have taken to test the code properly, period. The agility we gained from our test coverage really helped us refactor big chunks of code quickly."

People ask whether it makes sense to spend time on TDD or automated tests in a startup situation. This right here is why.

I don't agree and I don't understand their dichotomy. That whole paragraph is very confusing and lacks context.

Did they have good test coverage from the get go or not? If they did, why was so much support caused by failing code? If not, it's easy in hindsight to say this but there's no guarantee your tests would have caught all such support issues.

Good for you guys! This is another example of a product that I would never have thought of producing.

How spread out is your business? It seems to me that a lot of larger conferences in the US are held in the LA or Vegas areas. Might you try to locate a US partner near those centers? Or is your business more spread out than that?

Right now our clients range from small church meetup to big tech conferences and they are spread all across the US.

My first instinct would be to find a partner near a FedEx airport hub.

In that case, it should be Memphis TN. Large FedEx hub, and maybe you could partner with the Memphis College of Arts. I know around where I live certain trade type schools (Is an Arts school a trade school?) are all over having partnerships with companies so that their students can get real world experience.

I'm not sure if what we are looking for is creative enough to get art students interested. It's boring printing, cutting, stuffing and shipping stuff.

Good job, but you have almost 300.000 lines of code according to your GitHub commit stats, why is that damn large? It is almost equivalent to Linux 1.2 kernel code in 1995.

The numbers GitHub gives are a bit weird… here’s our output of `rake stats`: https://gist.github.com/rafBM/6837cc72f7958e2853ea

OP here. Shameless use of the exposure... we are looking for a printing partner in the US. If you are in the US and know a high-quality and trustworthy print shop let us know!

Have you checke out Lob.com?

We did try to contact them with no success.

The conference badge team is great and I can appreciate the transparency in this post. Keep up the good work and best of luck finding a US partner.

Why did this post disappear so quickly from the front page?

It's very on-topic, and used to be HN's sweet spot.

We were also surprised...

Nice work guys. Clean site. I have never held an event but I can imagine this would be useful.

Good job! Keep it up.

What are your margins like on this?

The PDF product margin is 100%. For the print product, it really depends on the order size and destination... but around 30% to 70%.

Minus fixed cost and labour(our time is seen as an investment).

Really interesting. Keep us updated!