papa

Nice work. This is a useful service and I'm bookmarking it since you've provided some neat naming ideas.

Only gripe, mentioned by others, is that I was a little confused by (a) the custom settings on the side and enabling them properly and (b) I initially missed the pagination/next button at the bottom - probably b/c it's below-the-fold. You should make that clearer, I initially assumed I only got 10 results back. Maybe add a results count at the top of the page and clear next/previous buttons at the top as well as the bottom.

Good luck!

Seriously, I'm impressed that the monkey (rta) only pushed the button for a mere 16 hours a day :-)

Lots of excellent pointers from others...I'll add a few I haven't seen posted:

- InstantShot: nice little screenshot utility (I use it daily)

- VueScan: swiss-army knife of mac scanning apps if you need to hook up a scanner. Costs a little, but you get lifetime upgrades. Well worth it.

- LittleSnitch: network monitor. tracks what kind of network activity your apps are up to. Costs a little, but also worth it if you value your privacy.

- JollysFastVNC: fast and free VNC client (I've been using it over Chicken of the VNC).

- OmniDiskSweeper: Disk utility shows you which files are hogging up the most hard disk space. Free. I also recommend many of Omni's other products. Omnigraffle (not free) is also excellent for diagramming.

Also, not mac specific, but the sqlite manager plugin for Firefox is also very helpful.

I don't know where others go to find different Mac apps, I usually hit macupdate.com (and sometimes versiontracker) these days, mostly out of habit, but would love to hear other recs for this.

Exact same reaction I had. I thought it was Safeway's house-brand as well.

Sadly having a big image of an orange and very clear indication of what type of OJ it is (pulp free, lotsa pulp) are pretty much what I look for. Guess I'm a simpleton when it comes to buying juice.

Just read Malcolm Gladwell's Blink and it has an interesting chapter on product packaging and branding. Definitely some cautionary tales in that book wrt to marketing/packaging debacles of this sort...

I'm in the Bay Area, but really I find the "I have a startup" only has the desired affect on similarly afflicted individuals.

If I say the same thing to my relatives, no matter where they live, I get the same blank stares.

I personally think it's not "where" but "who".

I'm living the dream ;-)

(more like jumped off the corporate cliff into the scary, vast unknown)

So true from my experience as a parent. My first child has about a 5:1 advantage in baby photographs.

The upside is that the younger sibling gets the invaluable experience of a sibling from day one.

But regardless of what happens or doesn't happen between child 1 and child 2 in the case of the original poster, this is a great idea.

In some ways, building the product is the easy part. Getting traction is the really dicey problem.

Check out some of the SEO/SEM sites like seomoz. SEO is very important. Link-building is also important. Look at getting some reciprocal links or at focusing on a specific niche within your site and really trying to develop a core audience around a few musicians/genres in order to get that "critical mass" of interest. Contact other sites in your space and figure out how you can get them to write about and/or drive audience to you. Hold contests. Build widgets. There's no silver bullet (for most of us).

Knowing the type of user that is attracted to your site is also very important. That will really help you narrow down what kinds of sites and techniques you should be using to capture more audience. Do you have a lot of kids on your site? If so, seek out affinity sites. It will be much easier for you to convert that audience to your product. Use sites like Quantcast to discover sites like yours that have traffic. Learn from the successful sites and employ their tricks (are you asking every user to invite their friends when they sign up? if not, you might be missing out on new users).

And, as always, be patient. My website is a little more than 2 years old and we've gone from 1000 visitors/day to 100k+/day. And even now it's still one of my primary tasks every day (figuring out new ways to get word out and encourage inbound traffic). You should be spending several hours a day working on this stuff.

Having done both, I'd say:

1. In a startup you do it*

2. In a big company you document it

* that's not to say you don't do some planning and sketching and the like, but you don't need a ginormous stack of docs.

It's worth remembering that one significant reason for heavy documentation is accuracy/fidelity of ideas when transmitting/coordinating across a large team of people.

Another great resource from SEOmoz that some might miss (b/c it's not exactly easy to find on their site) is their "Search Engine Ranking Factors" report (it's free).

http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

The report tries to identify which SEO factors have consensus among a panel of 3-dozen or so SEO experts (as well as which factors are deemed dubious). It's a great way to get a large number of opinions on specific topics and try to focus in on a few high ROI factors (if you've got limited resources/time like I do).

Looks neat, I'll have to try it out. Admittedly for someone like me working with a very small team pencil/paper layouts are fastest (and cheapest).

Previously, if I needed wireframes of the sort that Balsamiq appears to be good for, I'd use Omnigraffle. But I've known others to use everything from Photoshop to Illustrator to Visio to Excel. And, of course, for web apps and wesbsites, html mockups are always in the mix.

At the end of the day, you need to use what works well for you and anyone else you are working with. But a hybrid approach that mixes different tools depending on the task is generally what I'm after.

I agree...this guy deserves the $50. Knol sucks, but at least - by merely looking at it - you can sorta pronounce it right.

Good luck with anyone getting "cool" from "cuil". My first thought was "quill"?

Obviously they are not (despite their myriad problems). But nice link-bait headline anyway.

I enjoyed this post. For what it's worth, I often think of my startup as a kid (the analogy works both ways). Once the startup website went "live", it reminded me a lot of dealing with an infant. Site goes down any hour of the night, needs constant attention and tlc and doesn't give you much satisfaction for the first few months of its existence.

And I have 2 kids along with the startup, so I'd like to think I speak from experience. My personal feeling is that if you can handle raising a kid, you may be surprised at how prepared you are to handle a startup!

Go for it!!! Don't let anyone tell you that you are too old to do it.

I'm 36 - over-the-hill by startup standards ;-) - am married and have 2 kids.

The biggest issue to overcome is fear and losing the corporate financial/benefits lifeline (significant obstacles when you have kids).

But honestly, if you can handle kids you can handle a startup. I work all day while my kids are in school and then after they're asleep, I work more. The startup is kinda like another kid. It ain't easy and I won't deny the younger startup founder will have more energy and time. But don't forget that quality of time is a big, big factor! And if you LOVE what you're doing, tinkering on your product/business/whatever won't feel like work (even when it's consuming every waking hour that you're not dealing with the spouse or with the kids).

Feel free to ping me if you ever want to chat about it!

Jeff Bezos? Mark Cuban? the guys who founded bluemountainarts, Stuart Skorman?

Though I'll admit that many of these are either online retailing enterprises or internet/media type companies.

But clearly, there are successful examples on both sides of the fence.