yeti

I agree, HK is great - low cost and good infrastructure, access to great, English speaking and globally aware talent

I'd agree with this. Good tax system, government support, close to China etc... let me know if you need any feedback, my startup is based here

Good suggestion, yea I agree.. I would also make it so real name is hidden, they pick their own nick or if they are an existing user just link to that

thank you, that's helpful. will ask more..

always good suggestion... well our current front page is pretty good to grab interest, but our registration flow has a lot of room to improve..

especially coz we require a plugin to use the site. we're working on that.

still thinking about whether to also drop the email/activation requirement, and make it optional to further reduce the barrier

good suggestion, agree initially we'd be looking at it more for getting friends of our already active users aware of it, and then if they join, they can see on facebook the updates off site which will drive return visits. so it's incremental off existing users rater than driving huge viral growth of random people to our site at the start at least

thanks for that, agree with u actually there is a class of user who would be put off by FC on a site. So we would only offer it as an option, in addition to our current account system, not the only choice..

1. 13-20yo, 80% girls 2. USA, Hong Kong, Netherlands, UK, Belgium are top markets now 3. Roughly 50% 4. Roughly 60% 5. this is the tough part.

We have features planned that could improve stickiness and make it more likely visitors will enjoy and return and in time tell their friends. But doing those features won't help get more new registered users in the short term. So I'm still debating whether to add FB Connect first, get those users then add features, or make sure the user experience is great before adding FB Connect and driving traffic (if it really will help a lot)..

any practical suggestions would be great..

yes, exactly :)

It should give an improvement in registration rate as probably half our prospective/users are on facebook also (the other half are in other countries where facebook isn't so popular) but what I'm trying to get a handle on is how much it will drive new visitors based on friends of users seeing mini-feed updates back at facebook.

Any real world figures to share?

once we finally made the tough decision to abandon the first product, then designing and making the second product was so much (3-4x) faster, as we knew exactly what sucked the first time around and how to avoid all the inefficiencies as well.

so i guess, actually failure was very valuable. i actually see 3-4 much larger / better funded startups in our field who now are repeating the mistakes we made in our first product, but somehow I guess they won't be able to make that decision to change course.. easy when you're smaller and flexible.

We have had a couple of CS interns work with us (1 on remote basis), and it's been great for both sides.. send me an email if you're interested simon a/t frenzoo d/o/t com.

I think people give up mainly due to lack of momentum leading to lack of motivation.

I can tell you how we failed with our first product. Bad design choices (that people would accept a large client download, that Mac wasn't that important) and a bad UI meant a bad user experience. Plus a lack of up front planning about why would users want to use us. Therefore the users never returned - the lack of momentum had a big negative effect on morale. Every day in the office was miserable then because we knew people weren't using/enjoying our product and we weren't growing.

We made a tough choice to abandon that first product and our new site is starting to rock and is heading in right direction. The positive momentum has such a big impact on morale and every day hearing a user say "I'm so glad I found this site" is best motivation to keep going through all startup challenges. So it comes back to momentum from users, and that comes back to good design and understanding what people want and why they would use your product.

just my $0.02

I'm in Hong Kong, if you're in town we can catch up with a couple other startup folks... email me simehome at gmail com

It really depends how critical the team are and how much they are giving up to join you. In my case, I agreed with my co-founder (engineering leader) to just do it as up front equity rather than vesting and we agreed 20% plus a nominal salary (before dilution in funding rounds). IMO Don't be too greedy and try to retain too much yourself, your founders will be key to your success or failure.

And then for the others who joined after we did it as share options, up to 4%. A way to calculate is to use sweat equity.. what would they/you normally get working for a large company for that time against the valuation of the company you work out.

We have already built in the tech, so now we can assign users to be a special "translator" class and when they log in they can click a button to translate the page. Then they enter the text for the language they are set up with.

Now our challenge is to find good and reasonably priced translators to do the service (preferably uni students who are in our target demographic and "get" the service as well)

But as we're still small it's hard to find volunteers who could do the job well (and we're in Hong Kong so don't know any Spanish native speakers).

If your website is better suited with real usernames (eg - not a entertainment virtual world or game etc) then suggest go solely with Facebook Connect.

It will simplify development for you and make it clean for your new and existing users.

If Facebook changes the policy, you can always adapt at that time (as will lots and lots of other people). Better spend coding cycles on user features not planning for unknown future permutations?

Hey, we faced the same for our site.. imho:

1. Show the features, so people have some anticipation of what they get if they register / upgrade. Suggest you mark them differently graphically so people get an idea that this is "pro" or "vip" only.

2. Haha..we agonized over this for a full 5 mins! We settled for "Sign up" and "Log in", not "Sign in"

3. We let them login directly on home page - for your returning visitors its a massive saving every time. Your users will thank you

4. no idea :)

hey, i was in your situation (actually i had started a lot of work on my website before i started panicking about it)

i actually made friends with the company lawyer and asked her informally about it first. i suggest you can try first. if the work contract. then it's not unreasonable to ask for a letter from the company saying its ok... as long as you're doing a good job at work i guess it's fine (people may even see you as with a lot of initiative to be starting your own idea outside of work)

good luck...