What keeps the fire burning and motivates you to keep working on your startup

If you’ve been following the Simplebucket blog, you would have read that we released Simplebucket Release2 last week on March 20th. Release2 has the goodness that I’ve been working on for the past month. I won’t go much into how awesome is Release2.

But I want to specifically talked about how great it is to see what you have been working on is getting appreciated and getting all the great feedback from different sources definitely keeps the fire going.

1) The YCombinator Hacker News Community is great!

There is a little well-known hacker community known as YCombinator Hacker News. Hacker News is the community for hackers (not the type of hackers that goes around breaking into peoples website/servers) but the type that lives and breathes the excitement of turning their ideas into reality through nights of coding and maybe coolaid.

So being a reader of Hacker News for a while, I thought I tried my luck and posted an AskYC. AskYC are specific questions directed at the community, and the intend is for the poster to some answers/feedback from the community for their questions. After 24 hrs, I was getting comments from people that I did not know and they replied with really, really good feedback. They were not only feedback but also they took the time to try out Simplebucket and reported what’s wrong, what could be better. I was especially appreciative of one commenter, hoyhoy, who posted a comment with 18 different things/issues that he sees as things that can be improved.

There was a total of 6 comments and those comments definitely gave me a lot of ideas what direction to take marching towards Release3 and thanks to hoyhoy, everyone will be getting a custom profile page soon.

So my advise to other hackers out there, don’t be afraid to ask. Ask the YC Hacker News community on what you have been working on and be wonderfully surprised.

2) Emails from users.

The other great motivational factor for me was receiving emails from Simplebucket users. They start off expressing how great Simplebucket was and go on to saying what they thought like to see in future. I can only say “Thank you!” to all who’ve emailed and said “Hi, I love Simplebucket” and everyone email is well-appreciated and I keep all your suggestions in mind.