burgalon

Hi,

As part of dog fooding my own platform, Strmr.com - I decided to try to do remote online consulting for 5$ per session (mostly one hour slots).

I'm hoping this can be an interesting experiment as I'm hoping to get a wider view of what kind of problems the industry is dealing with, as well as expand my network, possibly with like minded founders.

Strmr.com is a platform for online professional services. It allows creating groups of providers to organize together. If you think this is of interest for you - please reach out through the contact form - I'm looking for more founders to join me on this.

https://www.strmr.com/j/1RlIlW

Me and my colleague have been working on a small POC for Background removal. We used semantic segmentation trained on selfies, and documented the process of training and deploying a Keras model with Docker, Heroku and a Gitlab CI in 3 posts:

https://greenscreen-ai.boorgle.com Server side implementation https://greenscreen-ai-client.boorgle.com Client side implementation using KerasJS

Training post https://medium.com/@gidishperber/background-removal-with-dee...

Deploying Keras model to Heroku with Gitlab CI https://medium.com/@burgalon/deploying-your-keras-model-3564...

KerasJS client side post https://medium.com/@burgalon/deploying-your-keras-model-usin...

Server side source code https://gitlab.com/fast-science/background-removal-server

Client side post https://gitlab.com/fast-science/background-removal-vue

My domain, Giraffelist.com was registered at Nameterrific.com a reseller of ENOM.

Nameterrific has "sunset" however it did not transfer its domains, and keeps running its half baked dashboard. No renewal emails were sent. Renewal is currently not functioning (They charged my paypal account for two more years, but the domain still shows as expired even though the invoice shows as paid).

No response on their support line or email. I tried to contact the founder through Facebook, Google Plus, Email - but no response there either. I contacted Enom but they say they can't do anything since the reseller is listed as active.

What can I do?

This is the second month that I've quit my job as an engineer in NYC and am now busy bootstrapping a new startup. A few days ago, I met for coffee with another entrepreneur who is also bootstrapping his own service in the same domain. At this point I had a full beta product working, and working full steam to iterate on it, while he had 2 more technical guys aside him but no product or anything to see. Few days after, I met with the CTO friend of that startup, and he tried recruiting me. I was amused and answered politely that I am 100% dedicated working on my own service. Today this has happened again with a different guy.

This got me thinking: Maybe I'm not creating enough "buzz" around myself? (if I'd knew what this means exactly, I might be doing this) Not making myself look enough busy?

I am an engineer who has built a full working beta of a new startup in the e-commerce domain. The service still hasn't launched and has almost zero traffic.

In the past I've made few projects that have failed with traction. This time I'm hoping to improve: I received very positive feedbacks and from the few beta testers that used the service there's even tiny revenue which is very encouraging. However the fact that this is still almost with zero traffic make it hard to attract people to join me, and also means that probably most of the work will be grunt work, with no compensation.

I'm hoping to find a person who would become a co-founder and invested as myself in the project and would help grow the traction and be invested in the idea as myself.

The question: For engineers, it seems easier to find people who are interested in the same domain as you are thanks to services like GitHub or StackOverflow, however I am not sure where I could find someone who would be interested in the same domain and would like to partner.

Are there any quality social networks (Angel List?!) where I could look for people?

Am I doing a mistake for looking for a user acquisition person as this stage? Should I do the work myself and get help with a paid intern?