Launched my side project: Grade Spotter
Published in 2012, this chronicle by @kennedysgarage details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Charging customers from day one acts as the ultimate filter for building software that solves genuine, high-urgency problems.
Keeping fixed overhead low and leveraging lean infrastructure allows founders to stay alive until market tailwinds kick in.
Small, repetitive improvements in customer retention and conversion rates yield massive returns over multi-year horizons.
Community Debate Themes:
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
CATEGORY Bootstrapping & MRR →
HISTORICAL ERA Web 2.0 Genesis (2007–2013)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 7 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 14 comments
Totally awesome. Quite frankly, I'm mad I didn't get to it first as I'm also obsessed with these grades.
I would suggest maybe changing the tag-line on your front page to "there are no more excuses for the unknown reasons behind your favorite restaurant's grade, but that's just me.
Also, on Firefox 11 for Windows XP I'm having a hard time even reading that text. You might want to consider adding a little weight to it as it's quite badly aliased.
the text "The powerful and easy NYC restaurant grade reference app for the iPhone is now available. There are no more excuses to the unknown reasons behind your favorite restaurant's grade." looks really weird on chrome 18 ... not sure what it is supposed to look like, other than that the site looks good
Almost skipped the link, I thought it was some app for high school teachers or something since I mostly associate that with grades. Maybe some reference to the fact that its about restaurants may be a good idea.
Awesome project. I love the clean interface. Having no information about these grading systems, are they available outside of NY? If so, any plans to expand this nation-wide?
Initial thought was that the introduction/explanation paragraph was difficult to read due to the font. The rest of the page is far easier to understand