vetleen

Came here to say this. Management already knows what needs to be done.

You did get me to click the 'upgrade' button, but the pricing is too high for me.

I did one search with 4 criteria, then added the two free columns, and at this point i had spent 750 of my 1000 free credits. The next tier being $49 with only 8000 credits, which means only 10 searches a month.

The search I did was super useful, and I would love to use the product, and reccomend it to my coworkers. But the pricing is what stops me.

Best of luck. I'll probably use it once a month if I can remember :)

I didn't mind, and I think alot of people don't mind.

"More differentiating features coming in 2003." Can't wait :)

DK says: True

DK is Autocorrelation says: The DK article is based on a false premise, we got to disregard it

"I cant let go..." says: Actually, given that we assume people are somewhat capable of self-assessment, which is reasonable, "DK is Autocorrelation" is the one based on a false premise, and we should disregard that one instead, and not DK.

I would ask people to spend 2 minutes with the website/product and then answer: 1) To what extent you understand what this product is? (scale 1-7) 2) To what extent do you understand how you could use the product? (scale 1-7) 3.1) How probable is it that you will start using the product? (scale 1-7) 3.2) Please explain why/why not? (open ended).

Having people understanding what the product is and does and how and why they should use it is the first gate you need to pass.

I work with a startup that sells education games to elementary schools in Norway. We did a survey, where we sent out 600 forms to teachers and got 154 responses. At the end of the form we had an extremely short description of the concept and a check-box for “yes, I would like to try this product together with my students”. We got 94 signups from that.

There are a lot of great answers here already, however if you just do everything at once, you have no idea what works and not. Therefore, my advice is to take all of the great strategies mentioned here and write them down in “column A” in a Google Docs spreadsheet. Then write todays date in “column B”. Then choose one of the strategies in the list, preferably one you believe in. In the intersection between the date and the strategy write “Procedure: <exactly how you plan to proceed>, Measure: <exactly how you plan to measure the result, i.e. pageviews, signups etc.>, Result: <the results per metric>, Comments: <any comments that you think you’d like to remember when you read this in three months> ”. Then do exactly what you planned to do, measure the results and write them down in the designated field. Next day (or when the first strategy is done) pick a new strategy and repeat the process.

I work with a lot of startups, and one of the things we keep learning is that it is a lot harder to get customers than it is to build something. Therefore try to think of marketing as a puzzle, a challenge to be solved. The key is to keep experimenting, and measure everything until you find something that works, then keep experimenting and measuring.

This is a fun experiment, but in real life transactions create wealth. If a buyer doesn’t feel that the widget she's been offered at a certain price is worth more than the price then she won't buy it. Similarily, if the seller feels the widget is worth more than the price, he won't sell. Therefore, a transaction means wealth wads created since both parties' wealth has increased after the transaction.

I’m pointing this out because it is quite a common misunderstanding that a certain amount of wealth exists in the world, and that it is a zero sum game, where someone has to loose every time someone wins.

I get the same..

I think it’s sad that people at one of the world leading machine learning institutions would name “Recommendations” and “Online Advertisement” as part of the top 10 challenges for machine learning in 2013.

Don't bother. You're frustrated and want to vent, that's understandable. However, your feedback will most likely not be taken seriously. Instead, take the lesson to heart and be better when it is your turn to be a manager some day.

Don't you think you need users to move towards product-market fit?

Have you given any thought as to how you might grow later on, when you want to scale? I ask because this is a good opportunity for you to also test (“validate” as you put it) that part of your business concept.

Looking at the history of Bitcoin and saying “Wow, the price of Bitcoins will never drop because it hasn’t dropped so far” is like looking in the back mirror of your car saying “Wow, there will always be a freeway ahead of me because I have been driving on the freeway for so long now”. The fact that is has flourished can have a million explanations, where one is that it does actually have a long term viability as a currency. We do, however, not have enough information to say with any certainty that that is indeed the case.

What we do know, is that so long as new users flock to the currency there is an increasing demand, and this will drive the price up – until the recruitment halts. Then what will happen? We don’t know. It might disappear, it might drop slightly, and it might stay the same. That will be the true experiment. Right now we don’t have enough data to say whether it is sustainable over the long term.

This looks really neat. I wonder if you could add automatic configuration of, and deployment to, a production environment as a premium service as well. I know I would be in the target audience for that.

Hustling is not a scalable activity for your company. You should ask yourself why you have to hustle your way to the right people. Is it because the decision makers that buy the kinds of products you sell are hard to get a hold of, or is it because they just don’t want your product? The latter is a far more common reason for failure than not marketing “enough”. If your product is truly something they need and want, then you will find a sales model by iterating – but only if that’s the case, otherwise, you should spend your time iterating the product – and not scaling customer acquisition efforts until you have a model that is profitable.

Check out these readings: - Steve Blank. “The Startup Owners Manual”. Also available as a lecture series on Udacity. - Eric Ries. “The Lean Startup”. - http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html (numbers 3 and 10 might be especially relevant, and I suspect 16 answers your original question specifically) - http://www.paulgraham.com/13sentences.html (numbers 4 and 5 might be especially relevant)

I used this and a bit of playing around, to learn the basics of python/programing: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...

However, I wonder if learning to program is really the best use of your time. Have you considered finding a co-founder? There are many good programmers out there that are eager to do a startup, so it’s clearly an option for you to use the money you are planning on using to outsource the job to get a co-founder instead, which you can then pay, and that can maybe even put some of his own time in there.

I wish I knew how to make circuits, because that looks like fun!

Interesting questions, indeed. But i feel they miss a point by not mentioning a single remedy to a low score. The conclusion doesn't make sense to me:

"(...) by asking yourself these questions and by scoring well on at least some of them you are very likely to substantially increase the long-term competitive advantage of your business."

Wouldn't you need to actually increase the score to increase competitiveness?

VERY rarely do I stop and think "Wow. I was worng!" This is one of those times. GJ!

This doesn't quite capture the picture because Europe often have public subsidies as well. For instance the publicly owned "Innovation Norway" in Norway has a budget of NOK 1,5 billion, which translates to about US$60 per capita. Most of this is spent on subsidising entrepreneurial ventures.

Exactly, maybe they should let people who complete the "Why I don't want to sign up form" look at the site without signing up?