HN Member on Frontpage of Today's NY Times | Hacker News Reader

HN Member on Frontpage of Today's NY Times

nytimes.com

77 pointsbreck23 comments

Congratulations, aandon!

I'm curious though, and I'd love it if you'd share - did you get this awesome press through PR, contacts or serendipity?

Another roommate of ours met the reporter at laidoffcamp in San Francisco last week and mentioned Alex and his Jellyfish business. The reporter called and came by the house to do the story.

Link to the actual article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/14/technology/start-ups/14sta...

Looks awesome!

Maybe try and mention your name on the front page of your website?

The NYT article only mentions your name and jellyfish. Searching for "Alex Andon jellyfish" does not show your webpage in the first result - I think that the NYT article can be a pretty good advertisement.

Do jelleyfish have much awareness of their environment? Would they care much about the size of the tank? If so, how can you tell if they think the tank is too small?

Yeah, that picture showcases a really small tank for a creature that size...

Jellyfish are extremely primitive creatures. Words like "awareness", "care" and "think" are probably about as relevant for a plant.

Not that long ago we (wrongly) thought the very same about other critters.

Well... Without a meaningful nervous system, I bet the odds are pretty low.

You're assuming awareness requires a nervous system. If a plant dies because of lack of sun or water, you can be sure it's aware of its environment. Conversely, even if a mammal is aware of something doesn't mean it has any meaningful effect on it.

Living things tend to be complicated systems, and assuming the nervous system the only part capable of interactions is just a bias. Lots of subsystems are a lot more complex then a primitive cortex (the immune system comes immediately in mind)

It looks to me like he carefully phrased it not to assume anything.

It's like a race. How many other HN people can get on the front page of the Sultzberger NYT? Only, oh, perhaps 200 or so front pages to come.

He's the one in the picture with the jellyfish.

User andon11, who posted his startup story here a few weeks ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=466497

Yeah, I remember that. The most striking thing about this to me is that he appears to be building these and experimenting with the jellyfish food right in the middle of a normal-looking apartment that other roommates ostensibly share.

I got a new website up since the last post. Hm readers gave me great feedback, would love to get some more: http://www.jellyfishart.com

I'm building some simple software to go into the site soon to automate a lot of the marketing

The picture on the index page tells an interesting story: the lady is trying to hide her horror as she slowly conceals her escape from the sinister-yet-well-dressed man and his killer jellyfish.

It's an excellent play for the Bond villain market; I hear those guys are loaded!

You weren't involved with the movie "Seven Pounds", were you? The jellyfish plays a major role in the movie and the tank looks familiar. I made a picture from the trailer, since Google doesn't find any:

http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/280/bild1w.png

This is a huge improvement! And congratulations on landing the NY Times.

As someone else said before, now you have to get http://jellyfishart.com/ to be a top hit on Google for your name, and/or the concept of jellyfish tanks. Unfortunately the NYTimes didn't mention the domain name or the company name. (I wonder, can such things be negotiated?)

Link to the NYTimes story on the front page of your site. Maybe start a "Links" section; this is also useful for trading links with other entrepreneurs to build page rank.

Just curious, why no phone number? If I were you I'd put that in the footer of every page.

Funny, but I see very few pages at all on Google for your company. Maybe you should try Google's webmaster tools.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dashboard

Since you probably can't afford the services of an SEO consultant (and most of them do shady things anyway) perhaps the best thing is to find a lot of business directories and make an entry for your company, with links back to your website. Also your YouTube channel or any other avenues you can think of. Ideally this should have been in place before the article came out but you still have time if you work on sites that Google crawls quickly.

There are a few mistakes on the page which a browser will render ok but may cause Google to give up. Use http://validator.w3.org/ and you'll see what I mean.

I'm guessing that you're using some kind of tool to create HTML - these tend to suck for getting Google rank, since the structure is visually pretty but hard for Google to understand. For instance, search engines can't determine what's a heading and what's not unless you use the standard <h1>...<h6> tags. Also, adding an alt="something" attribute to your images tells Google what is in the picture (and that's required for XHTML anyway, which you seem to be trying to support)

working now on getting to be a top hit on google. I put up google ads right before the article came out since I am nonexistent on organic results, but a bunch of my competitors probably got a lot of clicks too I'm working on SEO now, got a programmer helping me. Also, the site was made with dreamweaver, so my room mate (current YC term) just cleaned up the html to make it easier for google to read

The text is too light, at least on my screen.

I don't like that the contact form is a Wufoo branded form instead of a Jellyfish Art branded form.

In chrome, scrollbars show up at the wrong times, breaking the page (kinda kinda). This was the case for the "about" and "team" pages.

you're absolutely right, just fixed that

Related HN thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=515526

Reply on news.ycombinator.com