rfzabick

I'm considering exploring a startup idea from a friend. He works in a grammar school. There is a federal regulation for which he needs to track a bunch of info for each student. Right now, he tracks it through a google docs spreadsheet that he built. It's a lot better than not having it, but he sees that it's not optimal, and he asked me to see about building something.

I'm excited about the possibilities because this would be directly helping to solve a real problem.

But I'm worried because I think this would be very difficult to sell. According to 1 study I found, most purchasing decisions for this particular regulation are made at the district level, not the school level. The further the separation between the people doing the work and the people making the purchasing decisions, the more a sales team seem necessary, and the less effective standard micro isv/startup approach of careful google ads, a/b tests, etc. seems. And a full-time sales team is not something we can afford, nor can we drop our day jobs to drive around and talk to execs.

Does anyone here have experience selling SaaS to grammar schools? Advice greatly appreciated.

For all this talk about cutting-edge webbery, why does HN have such funny URLs for paging? This makes it so that whenever I come back to an open HN tab I get this error message.

I'm building a service that runs on os x. I'm really enjoying heroku and amazon ec2 for other projects. Ideally, I'd spin up os x instances on their ec2, but they don't have os x as an option. And from what I can tell, VMWare is technically capable of running a virtualized os x, but have been prohibited from doing so by Apple, so I can't even start up a linux instance on ec2 and virtualize an os x server. So I'll need to look elsewhere.

But maybe I missed something. Is there a way to run os x on ec2?

Failing that, does anyone have a recommendation for an os x hosting service?