SC Life: Team SocialCaddy meets Team HealthLeap

Today we are very excited: a couple of team members of HealthLeap , our favorite NYC startup and sister company of SocialCaddy, are working with us out from our Athens Office. Debugging had never been so much fun!

Have you heard of HealthLeap? If not, it's the easy way to make an appointment with your physician. That's how we do it! No more phone calls, no more planning 3 weeks in advance, no more tears. Like the opentable for doctors. 

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There are a couple of other sites in the same space. But we really prefer HealthLeap. Why is it so much better? The HealthLeap team has the answer:

"Coming from families of physicians, we know how frustrating the business lives of private practitioners can be.  Physicians didn’t go to medical school to be in business – but with 87% of physicians in practices of 5 physicians or less, they are often times splitting their time with patients to essentially run a business.

Moreover, now that patients are moving en mass online, running a practice means creating a website, leveraging social media, and even offering the convenience online scheduling. We thought - why not make this all easier for physicians and other health practitioners?

As patients ourselves, we have to admit, we also got very excited about the idea of being able to find health practitioners and book our appointments online, even on the weekends or after a late night at work. We couldn’t wait to get started on HealthLeap!"

The hidden influence of social networks

We're all embedded in vast social networks of friends, family, co-workers and more. We hate to admit but we are all clustered in herds and groups and tribes. We "like" and "dislike", are passionate or dull, and maintain the illusion that we solely decide how we feel and what we do. 

Nicholas Christakis tracks how a wide variety of traits -- from happiness to obesity -- can spread from person to person, showing how your location in the network might impact your life in ways you don't even know. His work has inspired us here at SocialCaddy and we wanted to share this talk with you. 

Clash of the Titans: Erlang Clusters and Google AppEngine

Erlang Factory here we come! 

SocialCaddy (and many many other applications) exist only because amazing platforms like AppEngine and languages like Erlang make it possible business wise. 

That's why we are SO excited to give a speech about our favorite two things in the programming world.

Here is a small preview of our talk:

We are going to talk about how SocialCaddy, the first CRM for friends,  uses the best of two worlds: Google AppEngine as a front-end system, ready to handle a lot of traffic without needing any administration from your part (set and forget); and an Erlang cluster, running on dedicated servers doing background tasks and sending data with lightning speed to AppEngine.

AppEngine is the best thing since sliced bread. But it's not particularly good for crunching data. Meet Erlust. Erlust (the cluster behind www.SocialCaddy.com) communicates with AppEngine via JSON requests. AppEngine sends Erlust the source code to be executed and the number of nodes to be used, and Erlust is responsible to "map and reduce" the data across nodes.

Due to the fact that many libraries (especially for social networks) have better support for a specific language, Erlust is language agnostic, meaning that it can run in parallel source code from many languages. Finally, Erlust exposes the data back to AppEngine by opening many concurrent connections.  

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Sending HTML emails with web2py on GAE

We want SocialCaddy to send HTML emails with daily digests to our users. Well there is nothing fancy about it but we spent one day trying to do that on Google App Engine.

We use the Python framework web2py. After digging with the web2py source code we found a tiny bug that prevented us from sending HTML emails from App Engine. If you face a similar problem then just go to gluon/tools.py and replace line 437 with the following code:

result = mail.send_mail(sender=self.settings.sender, to=to, subject=subject, body=text, html=html)

We hope that no one else will spend 5 hours on such a tiny bug :)

"I think I am in love" or "How to build the best product"

The first thing people ask me when I tell them I am in start-up is "how it feels to be in a start-up?". I usually tell them that it feels exactly like being in love. And it's true. And that's the bad part.

So, you found a person you love (and hope she/he loves you back) and it's the best thing that ever happened to you (at least this week). You feel invincible and that you can do anything! Well, this is "Phase 1" in the start-up world!

Phase 1: Exaggeration or "I am building the new Facebook/Google!"

Every single entrepreneur thinks that his idea is the best idea in the world. And that's good. If you don't believe it yourself, why someone else will? The world falls apart when your idea gets shot down. But you don't care. Because you are in love. In love with your idea. And that feels like nitro in your blood stream. 

In order to succeed in the Start-up world, you reaaaally need to love your product. You need to crave for perfection, skip meals, sleep, baths, sex and everything else that might please you. And you don't care. Because you are with your dream girl. And that's what only matters.

Yeap, Start-ups are like oxygen :)

Coming up next:

Phase 2: Fear

Phase 3: Euphoria

Phase X: Mood Swings

Things that Silicon Valley Doesn't Have: Your mom supporting your startup

At SocialCaddy we genuinely admire Silicon Valley. As a matter of fact we would kill to have an office there and get exposed to some of the most brilliant minds and ideas in the world. But we don't.  C'est la vie! 
And sometimes we get really tired with our fellow New Yorker (and to some extend Athenian) bloggers and founders drooling in sleep about Silicon Valley, constantly bitching about the Big Apple and the rest of the world. (Come on guys, you live in the most amazing city - embrace it!)
 
So we decided to start this humorous (and so true) series of things you wont find  in your cubicle at Menlo Park. 
Take that Silicon Valley! (kidding!) 
 
Part 1: Your mom doing the groceries
 
If you are a Startup and you are not based in Silicon Valley, then most probably you are still at home. Chances are your folks are around too. 
Parents (especially moms) are a weird animal. They spend most of their time worrying about you, trying to discourage you from leaving your steady job at McKinsey or BCG (yawn). But when you finally take the leap and start your own company something clicks. A magical things happens and they treat your startup as if it's you. For bootstrapped ultralight startups, like us, this can make such a difference. (it's an unofficial Y-combinator :)
 

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This is from our office in Athens. Hungry geeks = bad code. Thanks mom for keeping us happy!

 

UPDATE: That's an event worth checking out if you are considering making the transition: Working at a startup . 

(summary: If you're like a lot of programmers you may have considered one day joining a startup. But the prospect probably seems a bit mystifying. Most people know what the deal is with working for a big company. What's the deal with working for a startup?

Work at a Startup is a special evening event designed to explain that. How can you tell whether a startup would be good to work for? How much salary and equity should you expect from startups at different stages? What's the work like at different types of startups? Are there any danger signs you should watch for? We'll answer all those questions.)