196 karma · joined March 17, 2010
The game mechanics are a good start, but you need to find the sweet spot between where you are and sites like updown.com.
I agree with an earlier commenter that putting things in terms of beating the S&P 500 is a good reference. Your current focus on up/down this week is a little short sited for most investors. I know you need to recurring traffic, but I think you may have abstracted too much from how investing decision are actually made.
If you had tokens that could be placed on stocks and won by beating the S&P; a weekly leader board of who made the most tokens, and positions in the company where awarded to who made the most/least tokens from that company.
Is Techcrunch that important to get traction? They sent a ~2 day traffic spike your way, but after that not much. Is it the sacred cow of launching?
I agree with your fix quickly mentality, but coming away with the conclusion that you should listen to the critic without context is a bit rash.
You changed your site for 1 blog post. I do agree with their advice, but what if you where told that the logo was terrible, or your navigation scheme was wrong? How much would you be willing to change for the coverage, and at that point who's site is it?
Wow this kinda turned into a rant. I don't want the groupthink to lend itself toward; bending to the will of a tech blog, because it's the only way to launch.
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/2009/1/apple-stores-now-just-...
Is $5 really a micro-transaction?
Programming is hard because you may understand the solution, but you don't know your equipment well enough yet to get you there.
If you know what kind of industry you want to work in (Games, Web, Enterprise) focus on the tools that are used in that industry (C++, Django, .Net). Once you zero in on these specifics it will be much easier to find a mentor/community, because a flight instructor is pretty useless if he doesn't know where the landing gear is.
Pretty much guarantees I'll never use this site.