116 karma · joined January 4, 2008
RateMyStudentRental essentially needs students to rate their rentals. However, just saying "Rate your rental now" on the homepage doesn't offer much immediate benefit to the student, and thus does not convert very well. I've had several iterations of the homepage that I've tried out, and just recently made a change (last night) that focuses solely on "Browse Rentals" for the main call to action.
A lot of my knowledge on the subject matter comes from studies and reports such as this: http://www.marketingexperiments.com/improving-website-conver...
Anyway, your thoughts would be greatly appreciated!
If anyone here is a student, it would be awesome if you could create an account (you may need me to add your school to the site first) and give it a whirl. Otherwise, just play around with it and let me know what you think.
Hopefully the value proposition and purpose of the site are clear on the homepage, so I'll let you have at it!
So, what did I do? I spent every waking second of my senior year in high school applying for scholarships (merit-based, not need-based). So my advice to you would be to do the same. You may be out of high school already, but it's never too late. Spend the next semester applying for scholarships (sign up and create your profile on fastweb.com for starters).
After you've gotten a few, go take out student loans for the rest. Though a co-signer helps, I never had one, so I know it's possible. I got most of mine through Sallie Mae. Of course the downside is you get approved with an 11% interest rate (especially with the economy the way it is now). But if you're truly as skilled and disciplined as you claim, you should be able to make that back up no problem once you graduate.
Of course, playing devil's advocate here, there are many people for whom college is not right. Many people spend their entire lives paying off student loans because they got a degree in some field that doesn't pay well, and for which the difference in average salaries between a college grad and a high school grad is not enough to feasibly cover the cost of the college degree.
However, with programming, and the level of competence you're claiming, a degree would definitely be a wise investment for you. So, get in the game and take care!
The footer overlaps the content a little, making the bottom of the page difficult to read. That's using Firefox2 on XP.
I've been doing it for my personal and 1-man LLC for years. My new business partners actually went to a well-respected accountant, and they told us we should give TurboTax a try first.
But seriously, how has no one mentioned Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy?!
It's a great book with a surprising amount of actual theoretical science (you know, stuff that could technically work). Douglas Adams writes the way I think. I wish I could do that :(
It's relatively accurate except for when the visitor is accessing the site from a corporate or school network, in which case it shows up where their main ISP hub is, which could be across the US. Unfortunately that's a large percentage of our users, so it just ended up confusing most of them. We had to remove that feature :(
I've won several marketing competitions, an elevator pitch contest, and made countless connections with others, using ideas from this book.
I personally juggle school, a full-time co-op, a rock band currently recording an EP, a consulting company, two startups (one is on its way out), and a few hobbies.
How do I do it?
1. I love everything I do.
2. Multi-tasking is good. When we're in the recording studio just mixing, I'm coding or answering customer emails. Same goes for boring classes.
3. I sleep 3-5 hours a night, though I'm no stranger 5 hours in a particular week.
4. I exercise and workout to keep me on my toes.
5. I try to stay single as much as possible ;)
A new site I like is http://www.docstoc.com
Also, check out the Nolo series of books. Those are awesome and usually come with a CD with a bunch of stock templates.
I also have a tablet with XP. My favorite editor for Rails is RoRed, but it only works for Windows :(
Nonetheless, it was very relaxing and I'm glad I did it. At the same time, when you're this close and really into your company, it's hard to NOT work on it.
Between Google Apps for document-versioning and mailing lists and 37Signals' Backpackit app for to-dos and milestones (and time-tracking if you need it), we've been pretty effectively productive.
We still need to get a good CRM tool though. I've heard good things about SugarCRM, I'll have to take a look.
Another observation I'd like to point out is that in 6 years, you could have learned to program and done it yourself. I've learned to program and started 3 companies in the past 4 years.
So, my question for you is, do you really believe in this idea enough to do what it takes to make it happen? If not, then go to IBM and milk what you can of it.
Since 3 of the 5 people here are in Atlanta, I'll just go ahead and ask. Would you guys be interested in meeting for coffee or something the weekend of April 11-15? I'll be in Atlanta for a national marketing competition.
1. Doing tons of research and being well-versed in the legal field. This is good stuff to know anyway, so I put the time in at the beginning learning how to do it myself. And you save a lot of money by drafting the documents yourself (pulling from examples online) and then just paying a lawyer to review them, rather than going to a lawyer and paying them to pull out one of their standard templates.
2. When it does come time to get a lawyer to review your documents, find one you trust through personal referrals and then hope that their website needs some work. Then, in you come to the rescue ;)
Though, I'm starting to wish I had gone with something more traditional for the framework, like Wordpress. It has way more support for plugins than Mephisto.
If you want a really good dictionary that translates words in context (and also includes common phrases and sentences), use http://leo.org.
At the risk of being unpopular (judging by the other comments), I would advise you to go do it now. It's not that difficult, and you will have to learn how to do it eventually. Furthermore, if you are really planning for your startup to go anywhere, things are most certainly not going to slow down. In fact, your time will just become more and more valuable, so right now would be the smartest time to incorporate.
If you are not yet making money, then that means your taxes won't be that difficult to file anyway. If you are making money, you are suppose to be claiming that on your taxes, whether you're incorporated or not. Either way, you can at least legally cover your personal ass(ets).
Keep in mind that my thoughts are based on procedures and tax law in MI, so if there is some mysterious overhead in your state that differs from MI, then you must take that into consideration.
So, I guess my suggestion is: If there is a good chance your startup will flop and fail within the tax year, and not get sued in the process, don't bother. But if you are serious about it and believe it has potential to grow, why not do it now?
Just try not to get into an unspoken cooking competition with your roommate. Two months into the semester that my roommate and I decided to learn how to cook, we were spending $30 a meal at the grocery store, trying to outdo each other with dishes like Fillet Mignon with Caramelized Onions, and Grilled Swordfish. Don't do that. Stick to the basics.
I generally try to stay away from PayPal, because they're not a bank. Their user agreement states that they're not liable or responsible for "lost" funds, and I've heard of people getting burned by that. If you use them, I would advise withdrawing often.