majesticbeans

What would I offer someone like him, if I deem him capable of helping me grow this? A % ?

I'm new to all this stuff. What's the difference between hosting on a VM and hosting on a VPS?

And apparently a basic plan starts at $9 just for the datastore + 9.99 for ClearDB? Meaning that it will cost me 18.99 a month from the get go? Is that how it works?

I know this sounds silly, but where would I even start if I wanted to move my site over to heroku?

Heroku looks awesome. All I need atm is Linux, and a MySQL datastore. Does Heroku do that?

I was originally tempted to incorporate for liability protection as well, also provided that I may be stepping on the toes of someone big companies who might cause me trouble. (they've caused trouble in the past to startups that my lawyers have worked with)

Blog posts. Hm. Should I write about my market research? Interesting people I've met (Without naming names) who've taught me something about the field I'm working in? Features for the website and how/why they do what they do?

email sent.

I don't see an email?

I really need an advisor. Although I "have" one, it takes him many, many days to reply to my questions. So much for being put in touch with him by one of leaders in tech. startups....

By marketing, do we mean advertising?

Hi again. So, say I have a mailing list of about 500 people, and I want to know if they will pay for what I currently have has my MVP. How do I do that? Do I just open them up to registration and see what happens? Should I test on a subset of those people? If I need to pivot, can I re-email those same people in the test group that declined to purchase the first time around? And what if they did purchase and they are enjoying the original product?

Still a bit perplexed.

also: Is AdWords necessary?

Sheisse. Thanks.

Why Twitter over FB ads, or search engine ads?

Thanks!

Thanks for that. My service up until this point has been basically a giant research project from Day 1. Before I built anything, I met with firms that work in the segment I was researching both large and small. Then I built from there.

Thanks for bringing up Steve Blank again. I have the 4 Steps and I should probably revisit that in addition to his blog .

Totally taking your advice on that. I just assumed that to be the status quo, but I can't believe I never realized that it really cuts into the sense of continuity I want my business to have.

I figured. You'd be surprised how your reply still provided me great stuff to work with. It's what I was aiming for, actually.

It's a business. Not sure if I need a beta 2, how can I tell? My market is small, but I'm doing this to see if I can start and run a successful business. As for willingness to pay, I've asked most them personally or by survey and most of them have said YES.

I agree that success and failure are both inevitable and part of a symbiotic process of progress, but as far as the individual entrepreneur is concerned, failure doesn't need to be an option. I've met way too many entrepreneurs in the city who crash hard and then boast about it as if they're some kind of sexy daredevil living on the edge. It's not healthy. Let's stop glamorizing failure.

It's about time someone decided to debunk this awful bromide. Everyone who will fail (and succeed) conjures some personal lesson that is ill-derived, and eventually gets passed on as ambient, philosophical noise that people mistake for wisdom.(cough Brad Feld) You can only learn what not to do again from a failure, but a success gives you a recipe for future success, at least to a certain degree. At the end of the day, there are guidelines to follow, but everything is personal. Everyone has their own methods. You are respeonsible for your own pool of wisdom, and that requires building it from the ground up. I wouldn't say that an example of said pool that was constructed without any experience of failure is any worse than one built from success.