webstartupper

Facebook ads are very effective in getting fans to your facebook page. Check out http://www.axemantech.com/facebook/get-facebook-fans-very-ch... for details on how to keep your costs down.

>>Also, how do cases like Steve Jobs and Harry Osborn occur where they are removed from their own company?

Check out the movie 'Pirates of Silicon Valley' - its about Apple and Microsoft and shows how Steve Jobs got fired.

I estimated the potential market based on how many people clicked on my ad. There weren't many.

Thanks for the comments. Now I understand why the web has turned white and blue everywhere. :)

"If you don't care enough about GIS to blog and speak about it, close up shop."

I really like this line. Should apply it before I pick another venture.

Thats True.

I am a big fan of Steve Blank's book. However, often in the past I would analyze, research, analyze and then ... nothing. I figured this time I would just get something up there - and then figure out what I'm building along the way.

No. This does not use OGR as the backend.

The idea was to have something out there and then build based on customer feedback.

You are right about the issue with the Beta. That never did cross my mind. I guess "Beta" is the new disclaimer and I got sucked right into it.

I have been thinking about individual users - but the 30 day 'all you can convert' plan might work very well with a company.

Thanks. That makes sense and was a very interesting way of putting it.

Since I have the domain and hosting for a year, I will keep it running. However, if it does not seem worthwhile I would probably not invest any more time in it - eventually it will die (or fade away into the oblivion).

So the way the pricing would have been figured - I started the pricing at $20 when I started advertising. I then reduced it every week by $5 all the way down to $5. At each point I could measure how many people were interested. Eventually this would lead me to a decent starting price. Unfortunately even $5 did not generate enough interest. The $10 on the website right now is just there.... :)

Thanks for the comments - the design definitely needed some work to make it more efficient. I think the contact page has worked fine for me on most browsers.

I got the initial idea from a customer I was doing some geocoding work for. The initial market research was figuring out if people were searching for such conversions (keyword tool), checking out current competition, reading forums and posts about how converting was a painful activity. I decided to just go for it and get an mvp up and running (I have had paralysis through analysis before).

This is the only GIS tool that I have as of now. I have spent time on the ESRI forums (since the shape file conversion is what most people search for). I probably should not give up on GIS as a market though. Thanks for that.

Unfortunately I don't have any potential customers in my network. If I did I would have picked their brain till they pretty much told me what to do :)

This idea was kind of a shot in the dark to start with - so I knew this was a possibility.

I believe google adwords is the easiest direct way to find out if people are searching for something and are willing to pay for it. I did this by ensuring that the ads stated that the conversion was a paid service. Unfortunately while there were many impressions, the ads generated very few clicks.

Is there any other way to figure out something like this?

clickable http://www.gisconverter.com/