jrallison

Thanks for the feedback, Andy!

I'll follow up with you directly via email, but all good points that I want to address in the near future.

I wanted to launch early, get feedback, and iterate quickly.

That's good feedback. My thoughts were mainly along 3 lines:

1) With the demo on the homepage, you immediately get a good idea of the usefulness of the tool.

2) I'm not really interested in a freemium model where I support a large base of non-paying users.

3) I'm trying to see if this is worth working on, and the number of people who are willing to pay is a good indicator of that.

I'm interested in your thoughts on the benefits/downsides of this approach.

Probably not just you.

I changed it, hopefully now it's less headache inducing. :)

I would love to hear your thoughts on pricing, the homepage/demo, and the product in general!

I've linked to the blog post describing the launch. The homepage of the product is http://chatteranalytics.com (obviously)

Thanks!

Thanks! You nailed the difficulty right on the head.

Heh, I noticed that problem from watching the stream.

I thought it may be nice to keep it there, so people can fill it in if they left it blank, or maybe edit it.

Turns out, people don't expect it to be there, and I saw several people hitting "Send" multiple times to (I assume) get rid of that box. :)

Good catch :)

Yes, for now it's very basic. It'll be better fleshed out when I launch it (grouping on the backend instead of the front end, for instance)

Re javascript: thanks, will do!

Re page load time: I'm using asynchronous loading of the scripts. This allows the page to load fully, and the JavaScript is loaded in the background.

It's not completely cross browser, but speeds things up for people with modern browsers. There may be a similar approach for adwords, but I wouldn't know for sure.

Thanks! That's exactly where I want to take it! It'll be hard to do right, but definitely the vision.

Will do, thanks!

Thanks, I'll check into it.

Mainly just because I wanted to keep it simple for this test, and I assumed there would be enough people who would either enable, or use chrome/safari to get some good feedback.

I'll use the data I get from this test and decide whether I should support older browsers or not.

Right now, just the live stream. No historic data.

I want to add historic data in the future.

Sure, Node.js and Redis to track and store events. The front-end is a small rails app which will manage user accounts, etc.

I built this out of a desire for a simple tool to give insights on user interaction/usability without the need to define and track a ton of custom events for basic web interactions.

I started with a basic real-time stream of common events, used it in a few projects, and gained some valuable information from it.

If there's enough interest for this type of tool, I'll build it out and launch it.

The long term vision is to visualize individual user sessions.

Thanks!

Appears to be Ruby on Rails (looking at their job postings: http://www.airbnb.com/jobs)

Clicky: http://www.gemfury.com

Interesting... what links are you seeing with "#" as the href?

I agree about the "Join today and earn money" call-to-action. Any suggestions for better copy?

My first step when determining whether or not I want to talk to a candidate, is finding any code they've made available online. I'm much more willing to talk to someone who has published bad code online, than someone who hasn't published anything.

It's great if I'm impressed with their code, but bad code isn't necessarily a negative. I'm much more interested in why they wrote it a certain way then looking at their code with no context. Everyone out there has written bad code, it's understanding the decisions made behind the code that's interesting to me, in regards to whether or not a candidate will make a good employee.

You're right that a competition isn't the most efficient solution from a total effort / end result perspective.

However, that's not what competitions are designed to provide. This isn't a corporate productivity debate.

Competitions generate excitement, stroke entrant's competitive nature, provide some openness (in cases where the public participates), and promotes more out of the box thinking.

You see it all the time with sports, the increasing number of hackathons (where yes, developers, designers, and others spend X hours building something nonstop for zero guaranteed reward), government initiatives (challenge.gov), etc.

Religiously calling all competitions/contests bad because there are some companies which exploit the characteristics of a challenge is a bit naive.

Note: I recognize that design is time intensive and not always fun. Hell, it's the same thing for developers.

I don't think I am. I never said Aaron and the potential designers are in the same position. I was merely responding to sudont's notion that a person's time must always be compensated by an up-front, cash contract. In reality, people spend their time on many things for many different reasons.

My understanding is http://www.no-spec.com/ is a reaction to businesses exploiting designers through spec work (if that's wrong, please enlighten me). There is no one exploiting anyone here, just a developer who would like his open source, zero revenue, app to look presentable.

A designer who only opens photoshop for cash probably won't be interested, but a designer who also loves to design in their free time may.

In that way, Aaron and a potential designer may very well be similar. They don't treat their craft as a day job, but more as a lifestyle.

I'm pretty sure building http://rubycommitters.org/ takes time as well and I don't believe anyone is paying Aaron to build it. In fact, it sounds like it's costing him his hard earned "love bucks".

Get over your hostility and either do something fun on the internets, or don't.

This isn't a startup. It's a fun side project no one is expecting to make any money from.

I understand the no-spec mentality, but it seems odd to apply it to open source or a fun, no-profit side project.

If a designer is interested in Ruby committers and wants to make it look pretty, then have fun!

Free labor for them? If interview test code is in anyway a part of their codebase, you should be running the other way.

Programming tests are simply to make sure you can actually code. You'd be surprised how many people interviewing for engineering positions can't.

Startups are generally very small, and can only afford to hire engineers who are going to get a tremendous amount of work done.

If you want to delight your potential customers, ask for it after the free trial. It's a way to garner instant respect and trust. They're most likely used to being asked for their credit card up front and having bad experiences (or scared of having a bad experience).

I'd definitely be more willing to try and eventually spend money on a product where the company understands the spirit of a "free trial".

support@challenge.gov, thanks!

Sorry about that. We'll get this fixed.

We'll fix this, thanks!

Our startup is ChallengePost.com. Challenge.gov is the second site to use our platform.

I wouldn't assume they don't care. The majority of people still using IE6 do so because it's the only browser their IT department will allow on their workstations (http://about.digg.com/blog/much-ado-about-ie6).

That said, because of the difficulties, it's generally acceptable to provide some base functionality/design for all browsers while layering on cool CSS effects for modern browsers as a form of progressive enhancement (using CSS border radius for example).

Of course, all of this depends on your specific user base and the importance of those IE users.