yeti

This is a great session by Kirsty, but in a couple of slides the calculation isn't explained ("it's complicated").

Does anyone have a copy of the spreadsheet she refers to?

favoirte spelling mistake. just fyi

We built this as a very simple free habit tracker. No need to register or create an account or download anything, just set your goal and start ticking the days. Thoughts?

Hi HN, cofounders here.

We built this to scratch our own itch for productivity and personal growth. Habit apps are great, lack human accountability. Exec coaches are great but expensive and time consuming. So we built an app that brings them together and pairs you with an experienced coach.

Happy to answer any questions... Simon & Joel

Is it just me or is this URL hard to navigate to? eg- for Word of Mouth

I don't use any other site with a .ge extension. I tried thefridge.com and got to something totally different.

Searched Google for "Fridge", "The Fridge", "TheFridge" and no where on first page did it appear (not surprising given how much money should be in SEO/fridge sales)

Am I missing something?

Well done, great concept and already I see a practical use for it in my life (tracking a new fitness program)

Thanks guys

Agree, there is no need to put the founders pics on the main page - seems distracting and off putting.

Especially as none of them are Asian, and the whole point of the site is to learn Chinese Japanese characters (it lowers my trust in the site)

Thanks, I have some reading to do :)

The company is based in HK, so have to filer out the non US company options..

Cheers

Thanks Schill, can it load MP3 streams as well as MP3 files? Assume so, but just to check. Any suggestion on player?

You can get a regional job without Chinese language skills (what I did), or if you're a specialist in a niche field here is another way to go. Or invest and setup a new business here.

It's Hong Kong, not China. No firewalling here.

Usually they waive the install fee.

Connection is pretty fast to US (eg video streaming), although of course not at 1G rates. P2P is popular as is online gaming, so having high speed locally works out well.

Paradoxically, the high speed Gig / Ethernet connections are much cheaper than the old DSL slower speed broadband connections (even within the same provider!), which sucks when you're in an apartment building like mine which isn't fibre wired yet.

Is there really nothing else?

Our development is in another country from where all our users are (the US)

So we need to use a remote usability service as its not easy for us to easily recruit people and run the test ourselves. But thanks for the reply :)

Find 3-5 people/friends, get them in front of a machine and run through it. No fancy software, just sit next to them and observe, ask questions if they seem stuck or confused. We do it every couple of weeks, seems to work well. Also consider paying for 1-2 hours of a usability experts time to review your site in person, a very good investment.

Based in Hong Kong which is a much lower cost base than US for engineers/designers, and we have a US based remote intern who helps with doing focus groups etc

Working out ok so far

You can always go into Second Life, there are a bunch of cartoon avatar shapes you can start with then customize..and then take high res screenshots to process in GIMP or other

thanks, will try that.. actually before wanted to use facebook paid polls, but found out they discontinued that recently..

thanks, that's helpful... yes we're thinking of exactly those two points...registration funnel and purchase funnel to begin with.

We started this way and was fine at the start, but problem is that we have many 1000s of customers now, and any bug that affects service causes us lots of hassles to clean up after.. (we had bad email problems and currency issues last month which took us a few days to recover from)...hence the need to test at least somewhat thoroughly..

Good point

yes, we'll introduce the "refer a friend" + "import your contact list" in a couple weeks

thanks guys!

Thanks Nathaniel, we use analytics a lot and have some ad:hoc ways of getting some stats, but haven't properly setup the goal/funnel view... we should.

Free for now, introducing paid options starting later this month. Yes, we'll do Facebook app/connect to get our viral growth rate up, planned for next month.

Any suggestion how to find the sites targeting particular demographics and their rates? Sorry if that sounds like a noob question, we haven't done any advertising before and are not in the US (although most of our new users are)

Yes, we have plenty to improve in improving the flow and newbie experience

Always wondering about what priority should be new features we need for stickiness vs improving the first time experience

Thats a good suggestion, thanks! ps - got any links to the digg examples?

Thanks, froo, we did a little test of a couple of viral things (tag a friend / youtube etc) but to be honest they didn't really do so much, maybe because the content was cute but wasn't funny/shocking/bizarre enough...the hard part is to come up with a creative idea

Oops, am on a Mac and have no budget. Any other solutions? Surprised if this isn't already done, if not it sounds like a great startup opportunity..

Polyvore impressed when they launched a while back because they have a very simple, clean and functional interface.

Actually their functions weren't and still aren't as advanced as other online scrapbook / graphic sites, but their UI has let them grow to be very popular...

I guess a good lesson for rest of us newbies out there building consumer web apps.