danoc

How have you been promoting the site? Looks great!

The thing is that I was actually in the same position as you. I've been keeping a list of ideas (most crap, but some good ones IMO) for the past 5+ years. The only thing holding me back was technical skill as well. Now I finally have the skill to build it. I've been thinking about this site for at least three years.

Thanks and good luck with your launch!

What if the features are the almost the same but the design/experience is vastly superior?

Imagine that FMYLife was created two years ago but never really went anywhere because it was poorly marketed and just looked like crap. You KNOW there's huge potential and it would do much better with an improved design/experience. That's sort of where I'm at right now. The problem is that the only new feature I can think of is to use Facebook connect to grab a user's like and suggest personalized content.

It's funny you say that. I made a website last summer targeted to freshmen entering college. There was absolutely no market, so it did really well and got 150,000 visits in one summer. I got an offer to buy the site (for a couple thousand) and said no. The guy ended up creating his own site and out did mine in every way. That's partly why I decided to work on a new project mid-way through the summer.

My project is just a fun website and is kind of like DearBlankPleaseBlank, FMYLife, and TextsFromLastNight.

It would be like me creating a website called ScrewMyLife and finding out that FMYLife already exists. The only difference is that FMYLife is wildly popular and all clones automatically fail. My competitor has probably received a couple hundred thousand visits (the content is very viral), but not enough that a well designed website could easily crush it.

Only Newsletter I actually enjoy receiving!

I also wondered the same thing. I think that could be made a bit more clear.

Why have I never thought of this?!

If anything, charging by the hour not only kills the incentive for productivity gains, but also lowers a designer's productivity.

Nice to see that people are still visting it! Is most of the traffic direct or from search engines?

Does anyone know why there is no official HN feed?

They seem to have deleted the post. Nice journalism...

I don't know about India, but Brazilians have a large online presence and love things that are popular in the US. Just take a look at the trending topics on Twitter and you'll almost always find something in Portuguese. I think that Facebook's worldwide dominance is what caused many to switch.

I think to should explain it better on the site. I only knew what you were talking about after reading the "What are Fake Buttons?" blurb at the bottom right.

It's not unusual to see emails go ignored. According to MailChimp, the industry average open rate is 19.1% while the industry average action (click) rate is 4.0% I'm not quite sure where they get these numbers from, but it appears that your figures are normal.

Thanks! That's exactly what I was referring to.

Other than having Bing as the default search provider, I would love to know why people choose it over Google.

One of the main advantages is that you have three months off for Summer vacation. Even if you're working, that's a lot of free time!

It's definitely important. I remember reading an article about a startup that was struggling to get their first users. After following someone's advice and spending a couple of bucks on a ThemeForest design, their sales increased dramatically.

Users are more likely to trust a well designed site.