jakecarpenter

Over the last several months your interviews have worked their way into my routine and I often turn to them for motivation and inspiration. I think that the opportunity to help other entrepreneurs is a big factor in folks being so candid with you and I hope that they continue to be so willing to participate.

I'll gladly pay for your stuff, but I don't know that I really want subscribe to a service. What about charging for a podcast like product that rolled your transcript, interview, and bonus content into a single purchase? Throw it on iTunes and I'd give a few bucks per interview.

Here at my day job we have a at least 5 dbs/apps with more than 500, and a few with north of 1000.

If your primary revenue stream will be ads (and I hope it isn't) then you should probably run them as soon as possible. I think you should launch with ads and make a concerted effort to find a new revenue model as soon as possible.

an off-the-cuff (and probably bad) metaphor: It would be insane for new restaurant to give away excellent food (a useful, ad-free site) for its first few months, and then once it had a strong clientele, start charging for a product that is not as good (same site, loaded down with ads).

iTunesU has some courses for stats, but they may not be suitable for learning in a hurry.

-jc

I would agree that decisions with 2 people are difficult, but I don't think they're impossible. A marriage could be considered a startup with only 2 founders, and in that case, making a decision where the equity is 50/50 is essential to making it work. And while many of these 'startups' fail, countless others succeed.

In marriage, as in business, honesty and the ability to take another's perspective go a long way. Ideally, you've chosen a partner whose abilities and insights compliment your own and decisions can be made by the one most qualified to make them.

I would think twice about starting something with anyone who was immovable in their opinions. (and you'd know if they were or not pretty quickly) It may not be the first instinct of entrepreneurs, but there is a possibility that both parties are wrong! ;)

-jc

*edited for word choice

Can we get a mute button? For those discussions that stay at the top for hours and usually degenerate into name calling anyway?

I guess part of my complaint is also this: People often put a bunch of answers to questions out there that no one asked, usually because the site isn't self explanatory, if people are really asking you questions, you have a great opportunity to fix your site, not make a list of fixes to the stuff that is broken on your site.

This article brings up an issue I often face when looking at articles from sites like this. How do I know the slant of a news site I don't often read? I don't have a problem with a little bias, (in fact, bias is nearly impossible to eliminate imho) but I'd like to know how to approach the article in the first place. It is easier with sites like npr, cnn, foxnews, but it takes a little bit of googling to find out about many others.

How do you guys do it?

So your frustration in bed is Apple's problem? ;)

On a serious note, I agree 100%. There are lots of time where disabling rotation would be useful: in bed, in a small plane, or anything else super jostling.

Maybe the ability to lock the perspective, but also switch in manually.

I like it, but saying "Check us out at www..." at the end of the first paragraph seems like a tacky segue. Maybe move it to the end of the 3rd paragraph?

Does anyone know of an open-source alternative? I don't mean "lift up heavy shit until you get tired, don't eat bad food" either, I mean a tested, regimented, and focused system?

I participated in the 911 Fitness Challenge http://www.911fitness.com/ a few years ago and it was particularly helpful to have everything spelled out for you, but it was expensive to implement, given the gym membership and dietary requirements.

Emacs would be a great OS if only it had a good text editor...

Seriously though, isn't this like asking what kind of car is the best to drive? I like vim, nano, n++, and textmate, but the "best" for me changes as often as my mood.

I think your concept is sound, but I'll second the addition of a reputation system. Also, you're front page needs to let me know whats going on. If you cut down the number of auctions on the front page (maybe by only show the most active, which might also allow you to show just the best auctions), you'll have some room for a brief description of the site.

Overall, I like the idea. I won't dwell on the price thing for too long, other than to say I agree that it is too expensive and that I'd much rather pay a monthly fee for an appropriate level of service than pay per message. Something I don't see mentioned a lot (here, and at messagepub.com) is the escalation feature. It is really cool to be able to call your api once and know that one way or another my user will get the message. Also, I was pretty annoyed that signing up resulted in 2 emails in my inbox.

Even if you couldn't narrow it down to an exact person, it seems like you could get good accuracy on socioeconomic status, cultural background, political slant, etc. Once you had that data it might be valuable from a marketing standpoint. It might not be useful for sites where there is a very specific user group, but for sites with incidental user generated content--even if it isn't anonymous per se, you could get a more accurate picture of your audience.

Who are you trying to market to? You can't really market a product to "people". If you have a specific product, you likely have a specific audience. It could be as simple as redesign refocusing your current campaign/ads.

Try testing your ads on people you know. If you can't get your friends and family to bite, you can't really assume that anyone else will.

Wow, pretty cool to see other people have a lot of irons in the fire too. Working on a (yet another) better financial management tool, raising a newborn, and the day job :).