You should figure out websites that have affiliate programs, force the requester to choose a website, and when you end the text message, include the website to add some validity. Including the well-known brand will seem like it comes from a more legitimate website than you (no offense).

For example:

"Hey Andy!Someone shopping on Zappos.com for you and wants to know your shoe size. Reply with your size (ex '9', '10.5')

Also, when you send back the sizes to the requester, you could include an affiliate link for the site they requested to help monetize.

What if I let online retailers provision their own unique number and embed the service in their website?

It's great that Eric Ries used his own lean startup methodology to figure out what influenced people to buy the book.

Eric built a website to take pre-orders so he could A/B test the book's cover, title, and marketing to figure out how to get as many preorders as possible, Since preorders count as orders when your book launches, he managed to become a best seller.

Yup. Also, he had Lean Startup groups throughout the country that helped promote and sell the book (and Lean Startup vision).

Also, he gave up his speaking fees and asked event organizers to sell books instead.

Also, he found a way to bundle book sales with ticket sales.

Also, he had a proven idea.

Yes, very meta.

The bias in the user population for a site that teaches web development is going to be huge. The link you provide states:

"W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user. The average user tends to the browser that comes preinstalled with their computer, and do not seek out other browser alternatives."

If you were applying to work at my start-up, chances are I would try to find you on the Internets anyway, and I would greatly appreciate you saving me time by just providing me your information up front.

If you provide me links, it also ensures I find the right accounts for you, and not someone with the same name. Finding the wrong accounts and thinking it's you could mean the difference of me actually calling you or not.

StackExchange accounts relevant to the position you're applying for are also good to include (if you use the service).

Thanks for the advice! I definitely want to work with startups and small teams, so this seems quite applicable.

I am pretty active on Stack Overflow and Github, so I think I'll put those on my resume as well.

Wordpress is a good reminder that every great product starts from humble beginnings.

There's another start-up that does something similar to this called Brass Monkey. Their angle is turning the iPhone into a Wiimote-type controller.

http://brassmonkeysdk.com/

Both interesting concepts that could be even more disruptive to the gaming industry.

Thanks for the comment and you make a good point. I guess what my main point was that you should pick one thing to focus on once you know what the optimal thing to focus on is.

Imagine the Odeo team split their efforts between Twitter and their first idea? I doubt Twitter would have became the site it is today if that happened.

Well, by your own logic, they would have become perhaps an even better site, right? That they were less "distracted" by the sub-optimal Odeo?

No one could ever disagree with the assertion that you shouldn't devote time to sub-optimal outcomes - it's strictly irrational. "Distractions" arise not from founders making irrational decisions, they come from misjudgements about the expected future value of these "distractions." I'm not sure the solution is to ignore altogether things which have uncertain future value (which I believe is what you're proposing?) because our judgement about these issues is often so wrong.

"Hell yeah or no" and the like make for great rhetoric and catchy blog posts, but they assume our off-the-cuff intuition on such matters is correct. In my experience, it usually isn't.

Single quotes as much as possible, unless it's a MySQL call or HTML.

I hack in PHP mostly.

It's supposed to be an online version of Grimlock from Transformers. He's part of a clan or robots that all talk in third person and have broken English.

That being said, I thought it was a thoughtful read with good points, and absolutely hilarious. I've spread it to 5 of my start-up friends who would get the Transformers reference already.

People love personality in products, like the MailChimp helping you along when creating your email newsletter, or w00ts hilarious product descriptions. Wufoo even does this by having a t-rex be the log in button and a title tag that says "RARRR!"

Apparently people really enjoy T-Rex's

I think you should trial run every employee before hiring them full time if possible. Sales people can lie about their qualifications just as much as any hacker. In fact, it might be easier because the hacker's work is most likely to be publicly online.