moge

This article had a ton of great minutia in it so thanks for that! Many times people gloss over the fine detail which is really the important stuff.

Question: Bringing in $3600 and only profiting $400; was the whole thing worth it in the end?

Probably not the best title but I enjoyed the article. I always like hearing what tools other founders use.

ps. all you project manager makers TODO list startups, listen up. Your app is not a project management app until it has dependencies. If you don't have dependenies you are just a TODO list; Basecamp, I'm looking at you ;)

I'm sorry, but this is terrible advice. Unless you have considerable savings you should always take a salary.

When I was 27 I raised 1mil in an angel round. I was just out of college (I'm a vet so my college was delayed while I served) and was flat broke. I was 'advised' to take a minimal salary and proceeded to bring on 12 employees all who made most money that I.

2 years later when we ran out of money I had zero dollars in the bank (zero). I had no savings, I had no safety net. I was F'd. I spent 6 months homeless traveling with a circus to save enough money to move back to Chicago.

It is my personal advice that you take a minimum salary, rent, food, bills, and have the company pay you $500/month into a savings account that vests when you leave the company. Doing this one thing will give you some peace of mind that when this wonderful ride comes to an end that you will at least have some money in the bank to make your way again.

I am all for ramen-rich I think it is actually a good thing but I am here to tell you that if you don't take care of yourself financially you are setting yourself up for huge failure if/when the money goes away.

Personally, I would like ALL angels, VC's and incubators offer young entrepreneurs these 'bronze parachutes'. You don't have to pay them much right now but I do feel you need to make sure they, at the very least, don't crash and burn if the second round of funding doesn't come through.

Sweet, hope the demo goes well!

awesome! I don't arrive until tomorrow but hope you all have a great time tonight.

really interesting. One comment on the UX. Since there are no clickable buttons/links I thought this was just a coming soon page.

Create a button that says 'track now' or some other call to action.

Once I read the middle paragraph I understood how it works but I bet most people will never piece that together.

and yes, package tracking would also be good. Have a look at Dominos pizza order tracker. Something as easy as that would be fun and engaging.

Yes: but only when the person getting the karma is not the OP ;)

I would agree with this. Leaving town is a big part of the college experience. I moved to Chicago (from Kansas) to go to school and when I finished a lot of my friends where, yep, still in Kansas.

agree with the above. I work at a federally funded research center and where you went is pretty important Carnegie-melon, MIT, etc.

However, if I was going to just get a degree then work at a startup just go somewhere with a good program and then let your git repo be your resume.

haven't had a chance to look at the other pages but the design of the landing is nice and clean. Within 5 seconds I knew exactly what it was and what it did.

I'd be curious of your abandon rate on your signup page. I'd A/B a 2 page form. Page 1 put the fun stuff name, url, timezone. Page 2 put the personal stuff.

lastly, the 'name' field is confusing. Changing it to 'project name' or 'company name' would help. I bet a lot of people just type their own name without reading the form instructions.

envious of the UX/Customer Dev position. This is exactly what I do in my day job and know the impact this has on the overall product.

What I loved about this article was the ending. By posting the sample job application it removes this article from a 'hey you should do it' to actionable direction on how you can do this.

like what? If you don't login then how do they know 'you'?

Are you saying that they should be able to know you via link hash? For single actions like 'confirm' or yes/no I would agree that it would be easier to not need to be logged in.

Can I ask you this, have you never not logged in and left the action not done? Or do you log in begrudgingly anyway?

wow, serendipitous timing! I am writing my first email newsletter and my unsub was to login to change your pref. Guess I may need to look at way to update my db from Sendgrid.

agree that it needs a search box. It doesn't have to be the primary function but it should be there. I clicked around and couldn't find 'pu-erh' and didn't want to scroll through the 2 dozen black tea pages.

As a huge tea drinker I love this site. Agree that the design is clean and simple.

Just as an additional comment; we just started sponsoring very small Starcraft2 tournaments and we are seeing excellent returns in clicks but also and hopefully in brand and loyalty.

There really is something to say for finding, building and participating in community.

yeah for HangWith. I will post a link to HangWith occasionally along with a comment when I see a post where someone is seeking someone to hangout with or 'forever alone' or something relavant to what the site does.

I don't do it very often. Only when I think the link and comment in appropriate and genuine to the thread. However, when I do and, I think, because the link it relative to the OP I always get amazing click-throughs. Again, the key is being genuine and relative to the thread. I've probably generated 20k+ site visits and well over 1k signups from reddit alone from maybe 3-4 comments posted in relavant threads.

16,330 76,30 293 308 1.79% 0.40%

Thanks for sharing these. I think I had similar numbers on the paid advertising. Then again, I average about 8-10k visitors whenever I or someone else links to my site and, depending on the thread, 1-4k visits if mentioned in a thread. After that, paying for ads for a 2% click seemed kinda silly. My site seems to pop up once a month and, if I wanted, I could find very relevant threads to link from daily. Though typically I only do that at most once a week.

No, it IS my primary source for tech/startup/entrepreneur news but not 'general news'.

that would be awesome, thanks.

Genuinely did not see the RWW post. I found this randomly elsewhere.

I was wondering the same thing!

I'm curious, what your results were from reddit ads? I did a few days worth of ads a month or so back with mixed results. How did yours go?

Having read the full article I noticed that this advise as given specifically in response to a tweet KS got from someone that 'had an opportunity to start over' in his life.

also 'being a programmer' is not the same thing as 'being a programmer for something you really want to be apart of'.

I was a 'filmmaker' for years and I was MISERABLE working at local industrial film houses then I got a job working on a TV show with a passionate crew and I literally sprang out of bed (at 4am) everyday completely stoked to be going to work.

tl;dr context for what you are passionate about is important. A talent/skill/interest isn't a passion; how that talent/skill/interest is applied, is.

Yes. I see where you were going but having watched the full animation I still don't know what you are teasing. I glanced away right as the text said something about social network-something-something. Get to the point. If this wasn't a request for feedback I would have bailed almost instantly. solution. Keep the 'fun' speech bubble on the right but put another on the right with the <140 character tease text.

knowing nothing about the company or history the line about lost revenue just made my blood boil. 22k unique visitors = 3.2 million in lost sales. 100% conversation. There is so much fail going on here and that before you include the insanity of the 'patent'.

First rule of fight club...

DC Week was a big eye opener for me. I thought that DC was mostly govies, it was great to see so many startups. ProudlyMade is awesome. Cannot wait to add a tag to the footer of my site.

I went to film school for 1 semester then studied performance art for a semester before dropping out. Less than 2 years later raised 750k for my first startup.

Formal education can be very important; being an autodidact is just as important.