bestattack

OK, I think the number one thing to ensure about this business, if you want to revolutionize hiring, is to show that it works. If I can apply this idea to my potential hires, I'm going to give you all the dollars because the alternative is spending my team's precious cycles on interviewing.

I think there are a lot of paths that lead to your business making money but ultimately going down a path towards "yet another technical certification" - technical certifications are a negative hiring signal for a good reason. Avoiding this pitfall, I think, is the hardest part but perhaps the key to success.

OK, I get what you're trying to achieve. But I went through your prototype and felt that I was being talked down to. Not sure if I'm just not your target market or whether this is a real problem.

You need to go find people in your target market who will give you a few minutes and sit behind them while they go through your prototype. Ideally you could monitor their outcomes and see if the education actually helped them, but simply seeing if they "get it" might be enough to get you started.

Distribution is going to be a challenge too. How do people find out about codecademy and Khan Academy? Will that same strategy work for you?

I'd note that Khan also has some finance related videos which are quite good.

OK, let me try to paraphrase your idea:

The traditional internet advertising model sucks. But if I'm reading an article by somebody who recommends a product, I am much more likely to want to click on a link based on their recommendation. I can get the product and the writer can get paid for that link. Your site will be the broker for these ads, with a focus on simplicity.

I get this, I think it's reasonable that people would want to sell those ads and I can imagine clicking on those links sometimes.

To get started you should just go talk to some bloggers who already promote products, and offer them to swap the link and get paid for it. A lot of them are probably already using Amazon affiliate links, so you may want to offer more money, or find people who aren't using Amazon.

Hm, interesting idea. I get what you're going for - inbox as to-do list, sorted appropriately.

However, there are a lot of things that make inbox inadequate as a to-do list. The thing that scares me about your idea is the special syntax; people sending me email are very unlikely to want to learn a special syntax.

Mailboxapp had a "reorder inbox manually" feature at one point, which seemed like a simpler way to achieve something similar. Have you considered whether that's suitable?

To comment on the overall vision: Recently I've been having to-do problems, and looking for a new answer, but I'm very confident that email integration is NOT the solution - for me, anyway. Most emails shouldn't be treated as todo items, they should be treated as distractions to ignore. So I would not be inclined to use a product which increased the primacy of email generated todos. Because of my experience I fear that the world is moving away from the direction of your vision.

A lot of things I don't understand about what you are trying to achieve. I have never used AR (which I assume stands for Augmented Reality) and don't know why I as a consumer would use it.

Your pitch is full of marketing speak. Talk to me like you would talk to a friend.

Cool! I think this is a simple, good application of self driving tech. The self driving thing is neat but people (both restaurants and consumers) won't bother to use your tech for coolness factor more than a few times -- ultimately, everyone's going to adopt this only if it becomes cheap enough. So that needs to be your focus.

OK, so just to be clear: you're targeting well-off parents, who want to give their kids a leg up in the world from a business perspective - right?

The fear I always have around companies like this is that you're playing a two-sided game, where you make money by convincing parents that it will help their kids in life but your actual work is trying to actually help the kids, and these two vectors point in different directions. It's easy to optimize for making money without actually helping the kids - the impact piece doesn't have a good feedback loop. If you want to help the kids then you'll have to rigorously measure whatever you can get your hands on, in order to improve the program.

To evaluate this idea further, I'd want to know how fast (how much faster) the loan will be paid off given various salary percentages. Is this a good way to pay off a loan? (Do I even want to pay off the loan faster?)

As an employer, you have to convince me to offer it as a benefit, which means convincing me that my employees will love it, that it will help to attract and retain great people. This makes me worried because it is one of those "vitamin, not painkiller" problems - and it's a niche one at that - I am worried that people don't want it and it will be hard to get into people's hands.

I am pretty into this! I've never been a homeowner or landlord, and a big reason why not is that I don't want to have to keep a rolodex of people to call when things break. I'd love it if you guys would fully automate this for me, and am willing to pay a lot (because my alternative is the rolodex thing, or a property manager).

Idea one: I'm a renter, I want my landlord to fix something for me. Can you enable me to video it with your app and get the landlord to either signup, or at least fix it with his normal contractor?

Idea two: Say I'm a landlord, my renter complains about something being broken. Instead of hiring a property manager, I want to make my renters download the app, submit a fix request and then I'll approve the proposal thru you guys. I'm not a landlord but I could imagine wanting to become one if I didn't have to deal with handling these requests.

I think this is one of those ideas that's hard to distribute, because you aren't needed often enough for people to even remember your app's name when they have to get something fixed. So you'll need a really compelling distribution strategy; maybe landlords can talk to each other or you can go through landlord associations or something.

OK, I like this idea - as a business owner I can definitely see the use case. Your home page presents the idea very simply.

One thing I instantly want when reading your site is a gift :) -- you say "try it out" but I think it would be pretty magical if you'd just send me one if I type my address, or something like that. Obviously you'd want some way to prevent abuse.

Second thing I want when reading the site is to see the pricing on the homepage. I'm not in the business and have no idea how much these gifts are going to cost, so an approximate range (or, even better, github style "plans" showing various gifts and how much they would cost) would go a long way towards getting my email address.

Lastly, you could probably get away with an insanely simple "api" for your mvp that just let the person upload a CSV of addresses, and then dumped them onto a stripe checkout. You could build that in a day and (I'd guess) go pretty far.

First thought: your site gives a first impression of a shopping site with the scrolling devices across the top. But I don't think that is your intention.

Second thought: The site has three "primary" things: manage, share, discover. But none of these things appeal to me as stated. I think arriving at the site via a link should present the one primary use case that's most likely to hook me (probably "discover"? but then you're like a shopping site, so maybe "manage").

I'm concerned about "share"; people seem to be getting allergic to the word.

Beneath the fold, the first use case for "manage" is knowing when my warranties expire. I don't find this particularly compelling; I don't think I've ever (or maybe only once?) wondered whether a device I had was under warranty. Curious why you present that as the primary thing you can manage.