apowell

Perhaps you could work with some of the classified sites themselves (start with smaller ones) to add an "Organize My Search" widget. Pitch it as a way for them to increase engagement and drive more return visits.

Also, many car enthusiast forums have "Cars for Sale" sections, and they're utter disasters. It would be valuable to be able to save those listings easily (bookmarklet?). A little word-of-mouth campaign on a forum can go a long way, and you can kick it off with a forum sponsorship with commercial posting rights.

(Side Note: The question in your header is implied -- don't state it, just answer it.)

I think it's important to make a distinction between "doing consulting work" and "selling consulting work". I'm bootstrapping, and I'll do consulting work for clients I've worked with in the past, or with people who seek me out specifically.

There's no doubt that doing consulting work takes time from my business. However, I think it's an hour-per-hour trade-off -- overall, I haven't found that consulting work decreases my motivation.

On the other hand, selling consulting work can be stressful and exhausting; especially if you really need the money and you're not accustomed to selling. (And if you don't really need the money, then why do it at all?)

Some other thoughts:

1. If you get bad vibes from a potential client, politely walk away.

2. The more they pay you, the more they respect you.

3. Your client doesn't care about your startup, nor should they need to.

First, I hope you're receiving these comments in the spirit I intend them. They're meant to be constructive, and I'll be rooting for your success.

You'll have eventually have significant costs because to be viable you need generate 20M+ pageviews/month to make a good living with the sort of CPM rates I expect a site like this to get. With realtime updates and active chat threads, you'll need a bit of server horsepower to keep things moving.

I think it's a longshot because you're entering a market that relies on massive network effects to create a few dominant players, and becoming a dominant player is tough. Plus, there are already "close enough" sites that people are happy using. Due to network effects, you're going to have a tough time pulling people over to your service when their friends are on Facebook/Twitter/Reddit/etc.

To summarize, you're entering a competitive space and your revenue plan sounds shaky. On the other hand, no one ever accused me of being a visionary.

You have a cool concept, and I "get it" a little more now that I've read your recent comments on this page. However, it still seems like a longshot. Perhaps you're okay with that.

It's either going to catch on and you'll have to monetize very quickly in order to keep up with your ballooning costs (or get funded and kick the problem a bit further down the road), or it'll fizzle out. I'm having trouble seeing any middle ground.

Have you figured out how much traffic you'll need to be viable on advertising income? Are you aware of how many hundreds of thousands (or millions) of visitors it'll take each month to make a reasonable living that way?

How do you plan to make a living on this website? (And if the answer is "we'll generate revenue with x after we get traction", then how do you plan to make a living in the meantime?)

Why would I use this instead of just sharing links on Facebook or Twitter?

PS - Great domain name. Care to share how you got it?

No, no, no. I don't, and you shouldn't.

A significant fraction of my income comes from Google Adsense, so this behavior would benefit me. However, I'm far more interested in the long-term health of the online advertising ecosystem, and I don't want it distorted by "click-tipping" at the advertiser's expense.

When I check my stats, I want to be confident that I've earned my money by delivering value to my advertisers -- not because a handful of well-meaning visitors decided to arbitrarily divert a few pennies from the advertiser's bank account to my own.

On the other hand, if an ad on my site is genuinely interesting to you, go ahead. After all, that's the whole point.

Here's my stream-of-consciousness:

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I saw a huge "scroll down to learn more" arrow and thought "why don't you just put what I'm supposed to learn right here?". Why do I have to scroll for it? And what's this stuff underneath?

Reluctantly, I scrolled. Write a response? No... Curtis? Who is Curtis? Some acme inc files? No, that's not it either... Braintrust Features? Oh, finally, I'm here. So I see a list of features, and I see some benefits....but what is Braintrust? So I scroll all the way back up and look to my right, I see....Social Collaboration for your company. So now that I finally have some context, let me re-read everything....

---

I think the whole "fake mockup of a real interface" concept is flawed. Nothing I see on first glance (a) works or (b) means anything to me. I totally missed the big yellow box the first time through, so I had zero context.

This is unrelated, but your logo looks like Ubuntu+Joomla to me.

Finally, I'd rethink the "pimping" analogy on your philosophy page.

You can choose both. The AP courses were nice, and 11 years later I'm making my living running the business.

Have you experimented with 2 x 24" (1920x1200, not 1920x1080) running in portrait mode?

I recommend The Millionaire Next Door.

Go sit in everything before you make up your mind. You may have to drive to several office furniture stores to do this -- one store may not carry all the major brands.

In the end, I purchased a Steelcase Leap, and I've been very pleased with it. Unlike cheaper chairs I've used, it doesn't leave me feeling fatigued after hours of use.

Set up recurring billing, don't chase checks every month. Send invoices if it makes you and/or the client happy, but collect the payment automatically. I use Authorize.net for billing and Blinksale for invoicing.

This will save major headaches and improve long-term advertiser retention. (And if your advertisers aren't long-term, I suspect you'll have a tough time continually generating the new accounts necessary to make this worthwhile.)

I'm not sure if it's "web 2.0", but it's nice looking and has an iPhone app to accompany it -- I've been using Things for a year now. I have definitely become more reliable and efficient since I began using it seriously.

Have you tried Alltop.com?

Agreed, but again, what's changed? This problem has always existed, and it's getting some airtime now because someone made a little blue box to that makes it a bit easier to configure.

If I'm missing something, please tell me -- but the whole scheme relies on obtaining a fake SSL certificate. This type of attack has always been possible with a fake SSL cert. I don't see how this little blue box changes anything.

Until recently, I worked for a major retailer of online legal forms. You can get in touch with me if you'd like to learn more about the landscape. To answer the questions:

1) I'd expect my attorney to react like my doctor would if I brought him a kidney in an icebox and asked him for a transplant. The kidney might be good, but how does he know?

2) If you're giving away a usable product, don't plan to sell much of it -- even if the full version is better in some significant way. If the freebie is good enough, why buy?

Overall, I think you're going to find that you have tough competitors -- huge document libraries, low prices, and solid marketing. Have you surveyed the competitive landscape?

There is absolutely nothing dishonest about clearly communicating to the customer what you're going to do, then doing it. You may run your business differently and wish others did the same, but that doesn't make intro pricing dishonest. This is doubly true when you're marketing to internet marketers.

I've done exactly this in my MBP and been very pleased. 80GB X25-M as the primary drive, and a larger disk as the secondary drive.

As an aside -- for whatever reason, I couldn't get my optical drive to work in the enclosure provided with the Optibay. I didn't investigate too much, since it just doesn't matter to me.

I'm very interested in reading about the accomplishments of others, especially when they're particularly unique -- and I was happy to share my own.

I don't want my contribution to this interesting discussion to be read as "me me me", so I've removed it.

I'm self-taught -- bought Frontpage in 1998 and a PHP/MySQL book from Sitepoint a couple years later and did all the examples. Building a successful web business has very little to do with how well you know the newest languages, fanciest design patterns, or fastest algorithms. Those considerations are way, way far behind 1) does it work 2) is it usable and 3) did I ship it?

Things that were non-obvious to me in the beginning: version control, database normalization, query optimization, and the importance of reliable infrastructure and testing your backups.

I'm curious to see what the HN community thinks of this. I've used 99designs in the past with moderate success, and this looks like a natural next step for their logo market. For a while, the participating designers have submitted the same logo, modified for a company, for any contest where it would fit. This marketplace appears to be aimed at ending that silly charade.

Would you consider buying a logo here? I can see using it to get a quick-and-dirty logo for an early stage project, but I didn't see many I'd be excited to build a major brand on.

To follow up with some potentially helpful feedback: Why not allow people to create "regular" accounts, and then they can associate their Facebook account with the account later? I'm not opposed to associating my Facebook account with services I value (for example, I connected to Flippa) -- I just don't want to do it upfront.

This is a valid concern. I'm not too keen on connecting my Facebook account to things either. This may be an incredibly cool product...but I wouldn't know. I'm not clicking that blue button to find out.

The fact that Comedy Central is your first example of an ideal advertiser means that you're probably not in a high-CPM niche. That's okay, but it means you probably ought to be running a couple million impressions each month to make direct sales realistic.

At lower volume (say, a 500k/mo+ impressions) you can investigate banner networks like Valueclick, Casale, etc. If you go this route, hopefully you're not turned off by flashing punch-the-monkey ads. It's not high-brow advertising.

Also look into augmenting your income with the contextual link networks -- Infolinks, Kontera. It's decent supplemental income.

For a general-interest entertainment-type site without a high page churn (that is, not a forum or social network), I'd aim for $2.50 overall page CPM. This might require lots of ad units and creativity, but you can make that happen without direct sales.

(Apologies if I've totally misread your niche -- in that case, hopefully all this is useful to someone else.)

Just initiating a page turn by tapping the right half of the screen would be a dramatic improvement over paper.

I lend on Kiva, and I don't have a problem with it. There's a lot that has to happen between my Paypal transfer to Kiva and the money being distributed to the local entrepreneur...and even more that has to happen to collect the payments.

I'm happy to set aside a small amount of money as a catalyst for progress, and thankful that others are doing the heavy lifting.

(Apologies for continuing this off-topic line of conversation.)

Quickbooks. Best feature: my accountant knows it.

It charges interest to borrowers, but it doesn't pay interest to donor-investors.

The question didn't mention startups at all. You can be a single founder without being a startup.

If a defining feature of a startup is that it's unprofitable and likely to fail, then I think these single founders should be pleased not to be considered startups.