Using sfDoctrine to match allowed email domains

2007-07-09T00:00:00-07:00

[tags]php, propel, doctrine, validators, symfony, optiopt, startup[/tags]

I'm a co-founder at an online finance web site and I'm in charge with building out the site. Our rollout strategy is to let a a handful of companies at a time, so we're limiting registration based on your company's email address.

I decided to follow the bandwagon and use PHP Doctrine. We'll define two objects, Company and CompanyDomain:

Company:
  tableName: company
  columns:
    name: {type: string(100)}
    created_at: timestamp
    updated_at: timestamp

CompanyDomain:
  tableName: company_domain
  columns:
    company_id:
      foreignClass: Company
      cascadeDelete: true
    pattern: {type: string(100)}

Where a CompanyDomain represents a domain name for a company. E.g. Motorola might have both motorola.com and mot.com.

We can validate a signup form and see if we've got an email address from a domain we recognize. I like using the validationXXX methods in an action class for specific validation. I made one called validateSignup:

public function validateSignup()
{
    if ($this->isPost())
    {
        $email = $this->getRequestParameter('company_email');
        if (!$company = CompanyTable::match($email))
        {
            $this->getRequest()->setError('company_email', 'Your work email doesn\'t appear to belong to any of the registered companies.');
            return false;
        }
        return true;
    }
}

In our CompanyTable we create a static function CompanyTable::match:

static public function match($email)
{
    $company = Doctrine_Query::create()->from('Company c, c.CompanyDomains d')->where('? LIKE CONCAT(\'%\', pattern)', $email)->execute()->getFirst();

    return $company;
}

Note that we transparently do a join in the ->from() statement. If there's a match we get a company object (which we can associate with the new user) otherwise we get a null object.

Enjoy.

Finding a co-founder

2007-04-05T00:00:00-07:00

[tags]startups[/tags] A friend of mine directed me to Why to Not Not Start a Startup:

Not having a cofounder is a real problem. A startup is too much for one person to bear. And though we differ from other investors on a lot of questions, we all agree on this. All investors, without exception, are more likely to fund you with a cofounder than without.

This is probably the single largest road-block in the way of starting a start-up. One solution is to move to where there are more interested parties (e.g. Silicon Valley), but that's not always an easy option (although I'm warming up to it, Minneapolis isn't exactly heaven for several months out of the year).

Another option is to find someone online. Mike Subelsky created Founder Finder as an attempt at addressing this very issue.

Unfortunately, deep down inside I think that is a difficult proposition as well. I have a hard time finding good programmers, I've worked as a one-man island most of my life, and haven't maintained good contact with my fellow CS major's from UIUC.

Believe it or not, social networking is helping in some ways, because I'm able to reconnect with people I knew at one time or another who are very much start-up driven and really have the drive.

A better network of developers needs to exist, not just people we scrape out of monster.com and jobster... how's that for a cheap idea?

Dave Dash

Using sfDoctrine to match allowed email domains

Finding a co-founder