Not quite blue screen of death but damn tablet failed during demo...
31 karma · joined June 6, 2012
<username> <a> beifong <dotcom>
^Username being my current HN username.
That said, its too early to tell.
1. Press helps but they are usually "nice to have" but whatever if you don't have them. Unless you're a well funded company doing something with a lot of famous names behind your product, generally speaking, getting techcrunched, etc... brings a singular traffic spike to your site and many may not even convert. Although this is not true in all cases, long story short, don't place bets on press. They're nice if you got them but place your bets in better medians.
2. Be creative in how you aim to market your startup. For us, we didn't even get techcrunched until the day we were acquired and we never got coverage on any of the other press sites you listed. That didn't change anything. I believe Alexis Ohanian (founder of Reddit, Breadpig, and Hipmunk) said something similar. Their entire marketing budget they ever spent was a whooping $500 on stickers of the Reddit alien that they use to spread all over town.
In our case, we were in a very niche market so we spent $400 asking for a legitimate paid review (with full disclosure and allowing the reviewer to bash us for any and all negative points if there were some) from a top blogger in our niche to reach relevant audience (was well spent) and aside from that, paying for tables and booths twice a year at a targeted conference to exhibit for our product (also well spent). Some of these things are not as expensive as they seem. That said, MAJORITY of our users and marketing channels were 100% free, especially in the early stages. We focused heavily on getting the community to help spread the world. Word of mouth is often beaten to a pulp and taken out of context. The best thing you could do is get connected to all your users and do a great job for them and let those with social influence do their thing. Find out who the top influencers are in your industry and reach out, you'll be surprise how many of them are willing to give feedback and even spread the word to their friends. Its the best way to get going in the early days.
3. The earlier you are in your startup, the less you should try to blow up in explosive growth. Getting attention can also have major negative consquences too. See Color. Being a startup means you have the opportunity to roll out your product slowly and test and improve constantly before it reaches the masses. Sometimes its worth getting that explosive growth a year later, etc... Just something to think about. Right now, if I were you, I would focus 100% on the community, forget the fancy marketing tactics or press. They're not what makes your business.
1. The domains I absolutely know I want to keep, I do max 10 year registrations on them, there are about a dozen or so of these. They're usually premium domains or things like my name, etc.
2. The ones that are currently active with launched stuff on them, a few dozen, I renew these anywhere between 2-5 years in advanced depending on whether or not I think the site will continue to be active in that time frame and reassess when expiration is near.
3. Then I got a ton of inactive domains and these are the ones that are the hardest to gauge. So I tend to do 1 year renewals on these and visit back every year to determine whether or not I genuinely will use them down the road, are there resell value if not, etc... I'd either sell or let expire the ones I don't care about and access when I pick up new domains again.
The yearly rate I pay varies because some of these are already paid in advanced for a few years so its just the numbers of single year renewals that I have to assess.
It was posted on eBay and eventually pulled because of Apple. You can google for more info. As to why it never became a thing? I suspect (read: guessing) that it has to do with a few things:
1. Network speeds have trouble supporting tablets and smartphones as it is
2. Not everyone wants this
3. City wide initiatives to bring wifi have been ongoing
None of those are really valid enough to excuse why no one else have done it. But then again, its not like no one has. Some netbooks and some models of laptops out there do have built in network cards (I know some sony models do). Just not sure there is a huge market demand to cost ratio for this.
I for one wish there was such an option as well, one that can also translate to a hotspot but I'd imagine we're going to wait a bit longer before that happens.
2. Try to get an email (maybe off WHOIS) and email the guy to see if he is even interested in selling.
3. Go from there.
This isn't even in defense of Apple or anything remotely even close to that, it just irks me that people would try to pull lame stunts like this.
That said, not sure what you mean by unexpected outcome. Perhaps if you provide some examples of what you're thinking of. Learning a lot but can't say I see anything unexpected coming out of it but perhaps we have different understanding or viewpoints of what the word unexpected means in this context.
It started on Lisp but moved away.
1. Talk to the agents/landlords/whoever and show proof of stable income. Some are willing to talk.
2. Alternatively, seek out roommates who have spare rooms to rent just to get your foot in the door. Craigslist comes to mind.
That said, the thing that really nails it for me, and I suspect many others (putting aside development reasons), is the integrated experience. I love the fact that my iPad, iPhone, and Mac work with each other, etc... And once you're in that type of environment, and you have money invested in Apps, etc.. its incredibly difficult to want to move away especially when the experience is great (we can argue the semantics of what constitute as great but lets keep it simple and say good enough for most people).
The move from Windows to Mac was not a difficult one (at least for me). There was no integrated environment and as far as software, new software releases come out all the time so an upgrade or new purchase was going to happen sooner or later. I suspect that a lot of adopters that will be adopting Windows 8 will most likely be existing Window users. They will still dominate the shares in volume but I suspect new Apps on Windows at this point will be a challenge getting Mac users to switch off.