crxnamja

interesting read.

good list.

this is cool. nice work.

intellichat is the best thing ever. you've got to be kidding me. you can't talk to everyone one of your customers and this may help answer some questions they have about why they aren't buying your product at that point. if only i could be next to every one of my customers while they are thinking of paying!

it seems crappy but it totally works. also, you have to consider who is really purchasing your products. if it's educated buyers who take longer to purchase than that will seem childish vs other things.

glad you like it. i can add more meat in a future post. it was just a sampler:)

Austin is the place! glad you like the advice. just some tips i picked up along the way. let me know how they work for you.

good shit ted!

enterprise is where the $ is but not as sexy.

ha. its just funny you can do something so under the radar and make a crap ton of money.

damn. this is ridiculous and i knew him when he just started the site.

thanks tim! 37 signals is good but some of their stuff is not that great. look at basecamp. if you want to move a todo to another list. you have to delete it and re-enter. im not discounting what they do and their stuff is simple but not the end all. nice on the links.

tim, totally good call. its insane to watch people. i remember at facebook people would click a certain link to do something and i yelled at them. why are you not doing this? i dont understand!!!

1. know what you mean about sample set. its hard to get exactly the right person but close enough is good for me. 2. for the public places, i have seen a few people on sports sites and go up to them. (we built a new sports site)

i've seen ethnio.com, good call. in terms of being an evangelist, im not at all. the real issue is that most startups NEVER do this, i wanted to document what i've done and if people want to use/benefit then good. if not, sucks for them.

its nice.

Every person who uses your service is important, if you can call them personally, great. if you have to email so you can have some hours to sleep then do that. i didn't call but suggested that would be a fun idea to try.

after launch vip emails were sent and then emails were sent to different buckets of people.

and on news.yc;) thanks J!

in case anyone was curious i started doing this and more 9 months before the techcrunch40 competition. i would say 4 months is a good headway to get this going. i think

a) some sites dont need outreach or trust to be built since their initial users could theoretically spread the product

b)you want to build the relationships and things earlier than you need them.

thanks alaska. hugs! i have part 2 about other things that worked well!

guy is all ambition. good lucks.

news [at] okdork.com is the best way to reach me.

i honestly don't think i cheated the system. i didn't realize it was illegal to ask people who read yc to upvote my articles. i should read the small print next time:) plus my article was on the homepage for about 5 seconds which isn't useful to the readers or myself.

i guess next time i will just have a few votes to get on the homepage and if it sucks then it won't go anywhere.

rms. I IMed about ~10 of them thinking that 50% would actually upvote. I do agree that getting it on the homepage and letting the community decide is good. I will try to not have my "ring" be so helpful. rms, vote for me:P

I agree I don't want this turning into Reddit (not that it's bad but it's now all politics & images focused) but I have a lot of friends in YC, my start-up is with a YC person (chris smoak) and non-YC start-up friends as well vote for my articles.

I think bottom line is that if the YC community doesn't like the articles<br /> a) they won't click or read it <br /> b) they won't vote additionally after I have asked my start-up related friends to vote (not spam in the least bit)<br />

so is the solution that i only ask my yc friends to vote for my articles?

I love this site but the solution you are suggesting are:

a) have people constantly moderate the new threads to see vote upcoming articles b) be a yc company so the voting-ring is then approved by you c) have you be the sole decider of what's valuable content for the readers? d) just eat it?

thoughts?

@pg are we not allowed to ask friends who enjoy this article to vote it up?

a good place to start in college still is with clubs.

cialias advertising.

if you can't find your girlriend, see alice.

great post.

booyah. lets do this.

facebook is the new facebook:)

amazing graph. well done:)