You know, I'm sure this is great and there's a market for it but unless I can see it, I don't know what "it" is. Open login demo? Screenshots? Examples? Tour? Video? Something?
192 karma · joined July 28, 2009
http://sabrinadent.com @SabrinaDent
We're older than the average YC applicants by a couple of decades and we have partners, kids, dogs and mortgages that complicate things slightly. My co-founder has primary custody of her school-aged son and absolutely cannot relocate to SF for three months. I can go though, and would be delighted to; my husband would be equally delighted to hold down the fort here. Unfortunately, I have an immoveable commitment in February, so the winter schedule just wasn't going to fly. We're going to apply for the spring instead, and we're looking forward to the process.
Well that's not very social.
That demonstrates a very shallow and cursory understanding of Twitter. It's also problematic for people in the hacking space; if you eschew channels like Twitter until you need to market your product, you will have no native intelligence in the ecosystem, you will gain no benefit or far less benefit than you might have, and you will not do as well by your product as you might have.
You say that really well. Your site doesn't. Is there some reason you can't just say exactly that on your website?
That's rubbish. I write copy for clients all day; very few companies I work with launch without copy for websites and marketing materials written by me. I bill this at my standard daily billing rate. I am without doubt a good copywriter although it's not what goes on my business card; it's just part of what I do for clients so that they launch as well as possible. The pro copywriters I know may be charging 10x what I'm charging but it's still nothing like what you're talking about.
I think I'm in love.
This is a great product. I'm delighted for you that you've launched it as a shipable unit after what I'm sure was epic work. But you just cannot sell to consumers on a website that look like that. Your homepage consists of a graph, for crying out loud.
On the other hand, Jason has 125K and I don't so WTF do I know.
But I will say that I don't buy into the idea of really good domain names these days being rare as gold dust; I brand a lot of client companies, and just picked up the perfect 5-letter.com on the aftermarket for $79 on behalf of a client. Granted, that was a steal but I've never, ever paid more than $300 to brand a company with a great .com.
YMMV
Show it to the people you want to sell it to as you build it, and start building a mailing list before launch.
Let's say Popular Website A can give you 100,000 views and charges I dunno $35 CPM. Less Popular Sites B, C and D may only be charging $10 CPM, and you can get the same number of ad views in aggregate by placing ads across all of them. You'll have to work harder to find them, but I generally assume people who have no money have a lot of time when it comes to marketing.
As an example, I know of a site for wedding photographers with good numbers that will give you an entire year of sidebar ad placement for $275. (Drop me a mail on my contact form, I'll send you a link.)
To answer your other questions, don't worry about the dogfood at all. And no, affiliate prgrams are really hard to sell to individual site owners; they're generally not setup for it, don't understand it, and don't think it will work. The sales cycle on your part is way too long.
Interesting how the slides from the 2006/2007 deck are so much less polished and high-value, design-wise, than the 2008 deck they're presented in.
EDIT: Also I just submitted an answer but I have no way of knowing if the submission was successful - the confirmation messaging is obscure.
And finally... please see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1771607 because your Facebook/Twitter social sharing buttons are using non-async scripts.
I agree that for very niche products, $25 is too probably too low. Do you have a solid analysis of the value delivery?
That means you must collect and pay sales tax from any taxable sales made to customers within the state of Texas.
So if your servers are in Texas, and you make an online sale to a customer in Texas, you (apparently) need to charge that customer sales tax.
While I don't think there's a huge amount of mileage in personalising it into a sleep log system, I do think there's some value in reversing it:
It is now 23:27. If you assume it takes me 14 minutes to fall asleep, what are the optimal time choices I should set my alarm for?
Seriously? They're trying to spin this as saving the world with cheap VPS? That's pretty gross. They'd be much, much better off just transparently saying "We're doing this as a loss-leading marketing initiative to spread the word about our services."
THAT I would buy. This VPS, not so much.
For most services, there will not be - if the servers stay up, the users will never know or care that Oz is temporarily not behind the curtain.
But sometimes it does matter. My husband runs a service where he needs manually process data and commit it every day that $foo is in session. If there's an emergency and he has to go offline, I can keep the servers online; if there's an emergency and we're both called away, there is a trusted 3rd party who does that job. But currently there is no other party who can process data. In that instance, we post a notice on the site saying that Friday commits will not be posted until Monday and apologise for the service interruption.
I would, by the way, never make a public announcement that you are leaving the ship unmanned. That seems like a really poor security decision to me. YMMV.
That's fine for a one-off, rare and unplanned instance. But you better believe that we have a much more robust plan for what to do if he gets hit by a bus. In that instance, there's a named and designated person in place to step up, an insurance policy to pay them (obviously with some delay), a secure and immediate process for transfer of passwords, and a 48 hour plan to execute.
So really what I'm saying is that if you start with the worst case scenario and step back through that, I'm still not convinced that there are sudden departure scenarios you can't successfully address with forward planning.
Basically I'm saying if you're asking the question, there's a scenario in play there, and the scenario can likely be planned for. Yes, Apple stock will take a diver when Steve Jobs dies or retires, but if there's a strategic plan in place for that exit, the chances of it bouncing back are vastly higher than if there is no plan.
Or put another way: The New York Times has his obituary written. Do you really think the Apple board is less prepared?
For example: you say your website is a mess. If he can make it ugly, then he has too much control. Move to a CMS with a tight templating system and eliminate this pain point. If he's making repeat (and poor) feature requests, move to a formal feature request system with upvoting and make it public. Then you can point out that a particular feature has no user support. If you're answering the same questions over and over, institute an internal helpdesk system and just refer him to the answered, closed tickets and the search when he re-asks.
Basically, look at it as a management issue. The human factor is always going to be an issue no matter what startup you pursue; if you lack the soft skills to deal with it well, a systems approach might take you 80% of where you need to go until you've expanded enough to bring in another person who's designated job it is to take responsibility for these decisions.
The simplest formula is: 1. Solve a specific problem; 2. Tell the people who have the problem that you've solved it; 3. Convert them; 4. Profit. If the number of people you need to reach with #2 is vast, it's less likely you will reach #4 with the kind of budget you're talking about.