Dragon's Den

[DiscoStu]

I expect to see some dodgy russian guy on this next year trying to get funding for his search engine.

Can you imagine

AtW lecturing the dragons about how he is right and why everything they say is wrong

[MrMark]

Can you imagine

AtW lecturing the dragons about how he is right and why everything they say is wrong

Someone went on there the other year to turn the Dragons down! I'm hesitant about mentioning her name, as she'll only pop up a few minutes later. Ok, then - LingCars.

[DiscoStu]

Someone went on there the other year to turn the Dragons down! I'm hesitant about mentioning her name, as she'll only pop up a few minutes later. Ok, then - LingCars.

She sometimes posts on Pistonheads too. Mad as a box of frogs but incredibly successful!

[d000hg]

22k a month burn rate is crazy, they must be hosting it on the international space station.

Using Ruby on Rails a single developer could get a working prototype within a day, and polished product in about 3 months (with some help from graphical artist).

I think the site will probably do OK, I would guess their real plan is to get a few million visitors a month and sell it on for a couple of million.

I think it would be more work than that, things always are Especially if you have to design the infrastructure to cope with very high user-load. However, even if we said £100K where's the rest gone?

And, I don't know how to spend £20k/month on the site. Is that hosting alone or paying for recipes and ongoing development work?

Why doesn't someone here contact her and say "several experienced software engineers were discussing your site after seeing it on Dragon's Den". We took a look at your site and found it seems to have several errors; in our professional opinion such a site should not have cost more than £X and monthly running consts of £Y. etc etc do you want to hire us?"

[tim123]

I think people use the ODBC MySQL driver to get around the GPL issue, as you dont put any of the MySQL driver into your code. But more to the point who uses classic asp anymore! What are they using visual interdev to develop it

also isnt that a public facing ip for the db server, anyone wanna see if they are using anon access or default passwords...

finally how is she going to make money from this?

By getting referral fees from things that people buy. The theory is that people can be persuaded to buy the stuff for the recipes through the web site.

Can't see it myself really, punters are going to have to do a "normal" shop as well, so why wont they just add the required ingredients to their list.

Or perhaps they think that people will add their normal shop to today's recipe ingredients, but that's only going to work if you are offering the punters their favourite choice of supermarket.

I can see Tristain and Tamsinn ordering a recipe this way. I can't see Wayne and Tracy doing so.

tim

[tim123]

22k a month burn rate is crazy, they must be hosting it on the international space station.

Using Ruby on Rails a single developer could get a working prototype within a day, and polished product in about 3 months (with some help from graphical artist).

I think the site will probably do OK, I would guess their real plan is to get a few million visitors a month and sell it on for a couple of million.

How easy is this Ruby on Rails to learn?

I need to find something to do with my free time (aka - all week) and making website seems as good as any, but I CBA cutting HTML.

tim

[tim123]

[QUOTE=d000hg;918034]I think it would be more work than that, things always are Especially if you have to design the infrastructure to cope with very high user-load. However, even if we said £100K where's the rest gone?

And, I don't know how to spend £20k/month on the site. Is that hosting alone or paying for recipes and ongoing development work?

[QUOTE]

The recipies are free, punters upload them for you.

I got the impression it was 1 AND 3, but that wasn't entirely clear.

tim

[minestrone]

As said there could be a great linkup with a supermarket, customer sits down on a sunday and choose the meals they want to cook during the week and for how many, everything gets delivered within a few hours.

Going on dragons den probably saved it from going under sooner.

[OwlHoot]

Maybe if her site goes up the search engine rankings, she can rake off part of the pay per click income from sponsored ads on her site.

It would take quite a while to get back £300K from that though. Seems an incredible amount to pay for what looks a fairly run-of-the-mill kind of site, even if it is pretty well designed and laid out.

[d000hg]

How easy is this Ruby on Rails to learn?

I need to find something to do with my free time (aka - all week) and making website seems as good as any, but I CBA cutting HTML.

tim

Don't know how easy it is to learn, what languages are you used to? RoR requires you to learn Ruby (duh) and gives you very easy ways to do common web-server tasks, such as databases and web services.

I don't think it replaces HTML, it's an alternative to PHP/ASP(.net)/JSP so I guess it does dynamic page creation but you'd still have to set up your HTML somewhere (AFAIK).