NEPatriot

Interesting experiment.

How much for a lifetime of free?

Additional factors you could play with: 1. Let people name their own price and % discount (0-100) and reject or accept their offer. 2. Let those who invested in you contribute to what you build next. Perhaps assign voting share based on $ invested.

I would try to market this at the "idea" guys in order for them to make their product more than a crazy idea.

The angle I see is: make it something they can put in front of developers who they want to recruit as founders or design firms for estimate purposes. Plus you can save money because the designer doesn't have to wireframe your stuff from scratch.

Perhaps ask VH to create an 'email requirements' section? In which you could state "Meeting in person probably won't happen, let's start by you sending me screen shots"

Can you guys put together a few basic questions (to filter) you would want answered? Or link to a best practice guide somewhere on the web and make it required reading prior to email pitching? Or a slide deck template? Something like Guy Kawasaki's 10 slide presentation?

Perhaps get VH to tell e mailers to use this?

They have enough cash to beat out an animal hospital in a fight of attrition...

Worst case they blame the one sales rep (this is not yelp company policy blah blah), pay up, and promise to play nice in the future.

Boston VCs should give young hungry startups a chance.

A team of 2-3 brilliant early 20's building the next google is the dream of the valley.

Hopefully some of the successful Boston founders cultivate the talent here and come up with a nice (PR) Boston story.

I'll tell you what is and is not special about Boston (I live in Boston). This is the city with the VC community that told Facebook - no thanks, take your app somewhere else. If Facebook had been founded in Boston the entire landscape here would have been different. Instead, we see most of our brightest students go to the valley by default. So the "old" money in Boston is not special and neither is the "old boy's club" often associated with older cities.

What is special about it? Top educational institutions, history of success, and the will (tbd) to compete with the valley.

Learning should focus on understanding how you learn and retain information verses memorizing facts.

I spent my entire time in K-12 thinking I was average/below average because as a very process oriented learner I needed to make connections with concepts and thoughts in my brain and have those concepts validated. This validation usually comes from the teacher either affirming or denying my assertions but to do this properly would have involved asking 20-30 questions per class (which I certainly wasn't going to do).

Fast forward to college where freedom is aplenty and I started "experimenting" with among other things my learning style. It wasn't easy for me but I finally discovered the method in which my brain best retains information and received high marks.

I'd like to see more of an effort made to help students discover how to learn before actually engaging in the process of learning. It was a life changing experience for me.

consumers will see the google ads for google products and buy them

so are there any analytical type modules to track this?

consumers

As long as I'm not being sold on "how to get ripped in 1 week" or have ads shoved down my throat I think it's fine. The interview starts off with 10-20 seconds of ads and there it is.

Did you guys notice Andrew monetized the site now? With a "how much would you pay model" where the users can choose what to pay per month.

(pay to access older interviews)

Next they buy walmart, and after that... the US govt. Such that google will control our power, data infrastructure, commercial goods, and govt!

Maybe this happens for most but for those companies who can take this concept, iterate on it and make it work it's a good move.

I also think the opportunity is ripe to create a web app that allows companies that sponsor online events say... podcasts/vlgos to measure effectiveness via tweet mentions as a direct result of that show.

So I'm company x sponsoring show y. Show y says "listeners please tweet out thanking our sponsor company x on twitter" (jason calacanis does this on twist) the web app would sum up the number of people who tweeted and then count the number of followers they have to give you a general idea of the reach and allow for measurement on a per campaign basis.

Of course this could lead to the downfall of twitter which is why it has to be targeted and tasteful.

Please tell me if this sounds crazy or already out there.

I would post this video right smack on the home page. To the right of the signup/tour buttons and try to make it btwn 30-90 seconds. Maybe with a heading like... See it in Action. And to stay consistent with the high end feel of your site I would try to make the video high quality.

Yes. Email away - I love providing feedback. While I do think a yammer style service would be useful I would try to focus on one thing and really knock it out of the park. If you are making the choice to pivot your product towards a yammer/bookmarking combo product that is new tech this is a new hypothesis and should be part of your overall strategy. As opposed to adding bells and whistles.

In my office, we all have common links... email, time tracking, bug tracking, PM web app, etc. And having a centralized bookmarking network would be useful. Especially if I could publish a bookmark to say all the sales people and say - read this o sales people it's useful. But you would have to ask people in management (which I am not) for a more important opinion since they are ultimately the ones making this decision. Or aim this new product at the front line employees and move it up the chain verses down.

brilliant marketing one to copy cat in some form for sure

In your responses here you state you are aiming this product at the masses. So I'm going to attempt to review your site from this angle.

Before putting on my typical user hat let me say that I like the concept quite a bit and the site design is very nice.

I am putting my 'mass market consumer' hat which means I'm pressing the back button in 10 seconds unless something good happens.

I see discover. bookmark. share. But these are kind of vague... (I would A/B test this heading) But intriguing enough for me to checkout the tour.

Next I see what looks like a movie/slides. I press play and see the instructions are "click on play icon to view". I press play and get to the "what is favilous?" slide but then nothing happens. I don't really see another play button anywhere. This happens when I remove my mouse from the play task bar and unless I go back over it don't see it again. The play button to the lower right of the mouse if quite small and hard to see. Maybe think about either explicitly stating to keep pressing play or clicking the screen to keep the slideshow going or turning this into something more like a movie.

The slideshow itself is of very high quality but the initial slides highlight features. The entire time I was asking myself... I want to see this thing in action. Take me through a typical user experience with the app. What can this app do for me? This doesn't happen until much later on. I would make the slides more into a story about what a first time user would do and how this would be useful to me - a casual user.

Feel free to email me if you have additional questions.

I've always been paranoid that the people I work for would turn on the video camera on my laptop and just observe me work...

Agreed, hard to read text like that. Looks like it should belong on a kindle.

I think for a business guy to NOT know design is un-excusable. Meaning how the user interacts with the app. He/she doesn't need to be able to code but to be able to mock up the UI for sure.

The best teams have well rounded/varying skills. Look at Ideo.com (company that invents stuff) - they look for well rounded individuals with passion. So while a team with more techies will produce better tech - not necessarily something that will be successful, a team that's more rounded has a higher chance to produce something that will succeed with inferior technology. That being said, web companies do not fail these days due to a lack of tech. So I implore those who know tech to look for people with differing skill sets and vice versa.

Right. But at least with one general knowledge techie and one general knowledge biz guy you can get a good read on tech issues/requirements and market opportunity. Thus once you get to this point you know what you need more of and more importantly you know what you don't know.

Would it be appropriate to create an open source community project which would keep the current simple interface of google docs but support more users and perhaps store info such as blog links/HN links to posts along with a standardized location?

Agreed. It's usually best to find somebody with an offsetting skill set. While getting another tech founder will certainly increase your ability to produce quality technology it does not always lead to being able to properly identify a great idea with great potential.

Hard to read the text in the footer. It also seems there is an extra box below your footer.

Well it's nice to see they score 2/5 on: http://www.thefunded.com/funds/show/North+Bridge+Venture+Par...

Isn't that what www.thefunded.com is supposed to do?

They have more lawyers... with bigger stacks of papers. Unless it's in writing in these things assume the worst is coming.

The skill comes with being able to digest and boil down what the users are saying. This is going back to the old Ford lesson, that if he'd listened he would have built a faster horse.

There is just going to be a lot of noise and out of that one must pick out recurring themes and look for patterns that tell you whether or not something needs to change.