Tawheed

I started about two weeks ago getting intros to angels from within my network. I connected with a couple of angels over the past week and perfected my pitch. Over this weekend, I submitted to AngelList and wrote the blog entry. So, to answer your question, it is a variety of things, and I've found it is a lot about relationships and connecting through people you know to the people you want to know but do not know.

Build a team beyond yourself and forge ahead.

Tout (http://toutapp.com) uses SendGrid for emails. I'm happy to see some competition in the space, I can now have backup or multiple e-mail delivery providers, which is inherently better for my customers.

Right. I try to define and track atleast one metric that gauges how sticky and useful my products are. For Braintrust, I track # of edits, for Tout, I track # of emails sent.

Tout has about 700 users, and about ~15 paid users @ $30, with a good number of people "waiting" for a lower priced solo plan. Braintrust has a higher number of users, but most of them are no longer active -- so I've stopped looking too hard until the re-launch.

I know this article is quite lengthy. Any feedback you have on my thinking process would be awesome and much appreciated.

I launched it as a hail-mary after hacking it over a weekend back in April of this year. To day, there's been about 700 users, nearly 7,000 e-mail pitches sent, and about 10 Premium Subscribers.

I've done little to no marketing for it, most of my customers have come from the press I got for the Highrise integration and the rest came from blog entries here and there.

I did get a ton of customer feedback (some through Survey.io, others from direct customer development) which has lead me to release this updated version.

I'm going to be focusing more on marketing Tout over the next few months.

Amazon.com lets you self publish. You should look into getting it into the Kindle store. I'd love to get it streamed into my iPad and read it on the Kindle application.

The conversations taking place there just screams BROKEN. "What's your Twitter username?" - "What's your LinkedIN username?"

It seems that there is a clear problem here (HNers want to network with eachother) -- but the solution of a FB group ain't it.

Thanks for checking it out. I'm probably a little ignorant toward color, I'll have to look into changing the background.

Clickable link: http://mainstreet.io

Link: http://mainstreet.io

I think the crux of all of this boils down to marketing. You can market your widget as a consumable or entertainment and people will not pay. On the other hand, you can market your product as an INVESTMENT to achieving their goals -- and people will quickly take out their wallets.

It connects to what Kathy Sierra has always talked about. Design your product to make your users fell AWESOME and you will succeed. If you do that, people will co-relate paying for the product as making themselves more awesome.

So what if the functionality is the same? It's the community and the khutzba that differentiates.

Want to know the only difference between complicated and simple? Between a startup and Big Co? EDGE CASES -- Your startup (country) will be fine and perfect as long as you support the basic cases. It's when you start addressing the nuances, you'll get right back on the path of the parent country.

It sounds like you need to go back to basics. Throw out your current goals and assumptions. Think through and write down the things you value the most. Based on your values, think through what you want out of your life. Then, compare/contrast with where you are today. Once you have a good picture of this, you need to take a 10-year view of how you are going to get from where you are now to where you want to be. Don't do anything less than 10 years since you'll just want to hurry things up and inherently fail.

Chances are, you already know what you don't like about your current circumstances, but you just don't have the courage (yet) to face it. The exercise above will help you -- it helped me. I'm quitting my day job this Friday to focus on what I love doing.

You can have anything you want, just not everything.

Why not just build something of your own and put it out there as a product?

See http://www.tawheedkader.com/2010/04/how-i-used-heroku-chargi... for inspiration.

There are a number of disadvantages to being a solo-founder; however, as long as you are cognizant about it, you can take steps to compensate.

The real question you want to ask yourself is why you're going the solo-route. As a solo founder myself, I'm fine with the tradeoffs because it affords me certain other liberties. Do some soul searching and get in synch with yourself.

One of the compensating measures I have is a Braintrust with other solo founders. It's a pretty good place to bounce ideas off of other people in similar situations. Let me know if you are interested in joining.

Even TC sometimes has a slow news day.

Just goes to show how there will almost always be different communities online with differing levels of focus.

StackOverflow's community clearly values the intricacies of tech.

If this conversation was happening in a LinkedIn group, I can imagine many more discussions on distribution models, market size, or even strategic partnerships.

HN has the unique blend of tech+business providing unique insights and answers that takes a lot of these different factors into consideration.

I really think the answer has to do with Github's take on what a "public" view looks like. They focus on the actual files (which is the primary use case of a repo host) and then they focus on the README file (the WHAT), and finally focuses on the contributors (the WHO). It's not as pretty as Gitorious, but it is functional and clear and it gives me a clear indication of what I'm getting out of the site and why I should care.

The ability to link to the Github 'public page' also helps make it go viral -- I never actually ended up in Github's homepage until today, I always ended up there because of a link I followed for an open source project, and then was upsold to sign up and set up a private repository.

On the other hand, Gitorious doesn't make it obviously easy to find the public repositories, makes their front page look like yet another project management site and even when you click on one of the obscure links for a public repo, you're shown a bunch of Activity feeds which doesn't mean anything to the typical visitor.

I think the hardest thing to do with WebApps is to show the user what a "humming" version of the app looks like, how a productive user of the site can use the WebApp. Github does this excellently while Gitorious does not.

I learned Transcendental Meditation about a year ago, and it has had a seriously profound effect on my life.

Just to be clear, I think the campaign is really smart as well. But, my article has nothing to do with that -- my article talks about what the bigger vision around Posterous is (i.e whether they should strive to be yet another blogging platform or try to take a different approach to revolutionize personal publishing)

// I made this clearer in the post.

I can think of better strategies for attacking the blogging market. Instead of creating a generic blogging system that just copies Wordpress' features, create the "starter" blog for a set of verticals.

Create a 'starter' blog that has the right bells and whistles for each of these individual targets:

1. A startup looking to promote their story (have it pre-set with a "About Us" page, a sidebar section to explain their product(s) and what they do, and Twitter/Like buttons to promote the posts

2. An author looking to promote his/her (e)book. Have an "About the Author" section, have excerpts/reviews on the sidebar, and a way to profile sample chapters as blog entries along with a super easy big call to action for buying the book from amazon.

3. A small business trying to attract locals. Have a clear display on the sidebar for location, maps, hours, and phone number. Have a section showing off pictures of the business. Have custom post types for Sales, Events, and special SEO sauce optimized for the given zip code.

(you get the idea...)

With an offering like this, not only will you solve a real problem (people like these having to create and customize these sites from scratch AND having to figure out what the right things to show are -- even though its well known), you 'll be solving a problem that people are willing to pay for.

I'm really confused about their product positioning. Ning was a white-labelled social network, what good will a "simple blog" do to its users?

Similarly, Tumblr is a micro-blogging platform -- people are on it because they precisely DO NOT want a full blog. I remember Posterous founders specifically saying they don't want to be compared because Posterous is not that (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=680087), why go after these people now?

Wordpress? So far, all they've been doing are incorporating features that Wordpress already has and not really changing the experience all that much either... which then begs the question, what's the big goal and how is it different?

It seems to me that their moves align with getting on AS MANY USERS AS POSSIBLE -- and if that means attacking all peripherally similar services, then so be it. It seems that their only goal is a large exit due to a large user base, not really product vision.

I see a couple of takeaways here for fellow hackers and Posterous:

- Really think about what your product is and what your big vision is. Are you really just creating yet another Wordpress.com?

- Is it the post by email that is the uniquely awesome thing about Posterous? Someone should put together a universal "Post by Email" service and test this theory. Have it connect to Wordpress.com and Tumblr and see if people buy.

I think this is pretty cool. Are there any frameworks/tutorials out there to create interfaces like this?

I think you are fooling yourself by thinking that you do not give up any freedom/control by taking someone else's money.

I wouldn't be leaving my six-figure day job if I didn't believe in Braintrust and Tout. They're not getting killed ;)