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by zheshishei 4312 days ago
I did a bit of amateur sleuthing(googling) out of curiosity. First, let's lay out the hard facts:

1. The work-for-hire occurred at least two years ago. This would peg the time frame at roughly early-mid 2012.

2. Pigeonly started out as Fotopigeon, the photo sending portion of the company. Telepigeon was added at a much later date.

3. Pigeonly applied to the YCombinator Summer 2012 batch, but was rejected [1].

4. Pigeonly entered the NewMe Accelerator as part of their Spring 2013 batch[2]. The equity stake that NewMe took was 4%[3]. Crunchbase lists the intial investment date at October 2012[7]

5. Pigeonly also received a $20000 investment in December 2012 from FIU AVCC as well as $10000 in services from New Frontier Nomads to build out a MVP[4].

6. Frederick Hutson is placed in a work-release program in September 2011 and is released in March 2012[5].

7. Hutson's budget prior to December 2012 was a minimum of $2500[5].

8. From the article: "From the halfway house, he did not have any money, so he persuaded the photo company to do some coding for free." [5]

9. The developer claims Pigeonly fell behind on payments[6].

Now for the assumptions/conclusions:

A. From #2 and #5 we can conclude that that the codebase in question is not in use today.

B. Prior to October 2012, based upon #3, #4, #6 and #7, we can assume that the total amount of funding Pigeonly had was not substantially more than $X000.

C. From #8, interpreting the identity of "the photo company" is impossible, but if we assume that it is the developer, then D follows.

D. From #8, initial coding occurs while Hutson is in the work-release program ("halfway house"), pegging the date at some time between September 2011 and March 2012 (from #6)

E. From B and D, it seems that #9 is plausible, if not probable.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=jparkside [2] http://www.newmeaccelerator.com/2013/02/04/spring-2013-start... [3] http://www.f6s.com/profile/38508 [4] http://avcc2012.fiu.edu/ (second image on the carousel) [5] http://www.tampabay.com/news/humaninterest/idea-mans-latest-... [6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8227225 [7] http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/pigeonly