apowell

I'll throw in my endorsement for the Steelcase Leap. I've had mine for three years and I'm very happy with it. Well worth the price.

Do you have a particular chair you recommend? I've been looking for a lounge chair for exactly this purpose. Something comfortable, attractive, well-built, and under $1200.

Definitely. In Twilio, you assign each phone number a URL that handles inbound calls. Create the Twimlet forwarding URL and paste it into Twilio as the "Voice Request URL". Once you do that, your calls will be forwarded.

You can provision a throwaway number on a trial account if you want to test it for free.

Twilio with calls routed to the free call forwarding Twimlet. $1/number/month, plus $0.03/min. The free $30 credit will keep you going for a long time.

http://www.twilio.com/

http://labs.twilio.com/twimlets/forward

Microformats are still supported, but they've been replaced by HTML5 microdata. If you're developing a new website, microdata is the way to go.

The microdata schemas supported by the three major search engines are documented at http://www.schema.org. Also, Google still supports microformats: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answe...

Shameless self-promotion - CallRail (http://www.callrail.com) provides call tracking numbers that are perfect for these tests. Give it a try, and feel free to contact me directly if I can help (andy at callrail dot com).

I believe you can do this via the eNom reseller API.

http://www.enom.com/download/DomainsQuickStartENom.pdf

It's a bit noisier than pure SERP position, but tracking actual weekly traffic from transactional keywords should naturally normalize the value of SERP gains across keywords of differing popularity and rank.

MSN.com will often include direct links to Bing searches relevant to articles or news items. If you rank well for the linked term, then you'll see a traffic spike. For me, the pattern has been a massive traffic spike for a single keyword which trails off for the next twelve hours or so.

This doesn't sound like what you experienced, but perhaps it's a helpful clue.

I hope the following is helpful. If you want rainbows and butterflies, avert your eyes now...

I don't see anything about this site that makes me want to type in my personal info, and the "schtick" is a turn-off. Are you, or have you previously been, a middle aged man going through a mid-life crisis? If not, then your caricature of their desires seems overdone. Plus, the divorce stuff is a major turn off to those who are still married.

Why does the M3 page mention an Eclipse, NASCAR, and a 6.4L V6?

You have some rendering issues in Chrome on Mac. Haven't tried any other browsers.

Most importantly, as a dealer considering this website as a source of leads, I wouldn't think the leads are serious inquiries with purchase intent. That's going to make it a tough sell.

I agree with this. Our daughter is 10 months old now. Originally I had a separate home office, but even that wasn't separate enough for me. I felt compelled to help -- it's tough to be at home, knowing that you can get up and help, and not do it.

Now I have a permanent desk in a coworking space that's five minutes from home, and it's better for everyone.

I love this concept, and I can see my business using it. We have three team members, so I'm surprised you consider us an Enterprise. I'd be more comfortable if you called us a "Business" or an "Agency". And should a true enterprise be capped at five users and pay just $69 per month? If I were to sign up, I'd get an Advanced plan and deal with just having two users.

As a business owner, this product solves two needs: 1) saves lots of time and 2) ensures that salespeople can assemble good looking proposals.

Do you have example proposals on the website? I want to see what this generates without creating a free account and doing a bunch of work myself.

I'm in your target market, though I'm not as serious as many.

My thoughts:

1. Figuring out how to register without Facebook was way too tough. I had to find two links that were indistinguishable from the rest of the text.

2. What is "Brand". Is that car brand (BMW) or part brand (Bilstein)?

3. Okay, now I've gone to the "What do you want to sell" page, and I see "Brand" is the part brand (this is just because I'm poking around -- as a regular user, I'd never do this). Which makes me wonder, how do I find parts for my particular year/make/model (E46 330i, in my case)?

4. I can't do anything useful from the home page. Show me a list of brands, a search box, anything to start me on my way.

5. What does "forensics" mean in this context? The "Show forensics updates" is neat looking, but useless for someone who is buying or selling (but interesting for wasting time / kicking tires). The pictures should at least tell me what the product is.

Hopefully this hapazard feedback is useful. It looks like promising concept and you've clearly worked hard on it, but I think you need to populate it with products and then observe first-hand how people interact with it.

I use Quickbooks as well. I entered everything by hand until we started exceeding a couple hundred transactions per month. Now I import transactions from the bank and reconcile against the paper statements each month.

I was anti-bookkeeping for a while, but now I'm hooked. I think it's good for the business if you review all your expenses and produce a P&L each month.

By suggesting several possibilities, you're saying "these times really do work for me, so if you pick one, we're set, you can put it on your calendar". When you say "let me know when works for you", you're still leaving open the possibility that you're not actually available at the time they choose, possibly leading to more scheduling emails.

Plus, when I'm on the receiving end of a "let me know when works for you", I feel a little presumptuous assuming that I really can pick any time and that person is going to clear their schedule for me.

While your fear of hidden code is probably well-founded, I don't think it's piracy to redistribute the WooThemes. They have been released under the GPL. (http://www.woothemes.com/2009/06/woothemes-gpled/ and http://www.woothemes.com/terms-conditions/) For what it's worth, I've happily paid for the WooThemes I use.

1) I clicked a ton of shirts; does it ever end? Where are the suggestions?

2) I clicked "help" and got nothing. Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, all on a Mac.

3) Could you preload the next comparison so the site is snappier? If the next comparison depends on the results of the previous comparison, perhaps load the comparison tree up 2-3 levels deep. The experience would be much nicer if it everything was totally instant.

Will a backup created in 1.0.28 still be de-duplicated against backups created in previous versions of Tarsnap?

Perhaps those are good ideas, but they don't sound right for you right now. Building a network-effect business that requires buy-in from Paypal and/or national brands? I can't think of much that's tougher or more speculative.

You should consider creating something that individuals or small businesses will pay for because it scratches an itch. I pay for several services like that each month -- Blinksale, Springloops, AuthorityLabs, Chargify, WebsitePulse, Postmark, and Basecamp. (But don't limit yourself to tools for developers -- there are many industries with un-scratched itches.)

Don't be wrapped up in creating the next Paypal. A very small business can be a big thing for you and your family. Once you've created a healthy income from full-time self-employment, then you can start changing the world.

I've known from an early age that I wanted to work for myself, and I've structured my life to make that possible. I've always had side projects going - through high school, college, and two full-time jobs.

When the side projects grew profitable enough and we had socked away enough money, I quit my job to work on my business full-time. My wife was about twelve weeks pregnant when I gave my notice.

That was a bit over a year ago, and I haven't looked back. I'm financially conservative, so I probably waited longer than others in my shoes would have. I had enough income to support a basic lifestyle (I call it "pork-chop profitability"), and if the income dried up we had enough savings for a couple years. It was a high bar, but with a baby on the way I didn't want to be reckless.

Start working on small, attainable side projects with immediate revenue potential. Pick two targets: self-employed income and non-retirement savings. When you hit both targets, it's time to go full-time. And most importantly, make sure your family supports you and understands your ambition.

Best of luck.

Very true. And with the Amazon iPhone app, you don't even have to leave to finish your purchase. Just scan the barcode, purchase, and continue enjoying your coffee.

It'll be tough to avoid supporting the hardware. If it's provided by you and used to run your application, then you're going to get the support calls.

You can push the client to call the hardware vendor ("we don't support hardware, read your contract, here's the number for Dell"), but that's going to frustrate the client and reflect poorly on your business.

It sounds like a losing proposition unless you price the hardware and hardware support into the cost of your system.

Yeah, it's probably a bit late for that with current customers that have given you an explicit denial.

I've never done it, but I suspect the easiest way to get "permission" (and I use the term loosely) is to add a section to your standard T&Cs, which customers agree to when they sign up, that allows you to identify current customers in your marketing materials.

I work at home with my wife and six-month old daughter, and that list describes our Amazon buying habits very accurately.

If it isn't too late to select a payment gateway that supports a secure vault, perhaps Recurly.com would fit your needs? Personally, I don't know of any services that provide only the vault without the gateway or billing logic attached.

Plus, if a service had an API to transmit customer credit card data to your server so you could forward it to the payment gateway for processing, I don't see how that adds much security over encrypting and storing them on your own server (yes, I know this is a bad idea). A malicious individual with access to your server could still compromise your customer data.

I checked out SEOmoz, but I didn't know they offered an ad-hoc rank checker until you pointed it out. PRO members can check 100 ad-hoc rankings per day, which isn't quite enough for us on a busy day (a 3,000/mo quota would likely be plenty, but 100/day would leave us short some days).

Plus, I don't see an API for that particular tool (they have an API for other tools), which makes it tough to integrate into our internal toolkit.

If you do release your tool to the public, please let me know. I'd be interested in it as a subscription service or installable server-side software.

Returning things in a different order is a total deal-breaker, and the mere possibility of that happening makes me wonder if screen-scraping is the only way to get reliable data.

All the factors you mention do influence ranking (local, preferences, etc), but I'm content to get de-personalized, non-geotargeted search results for this purpose.

How are you going to handle gathering model releases for the individuals in the photos? For example, iStockPhoto has detailed requirements on which photos require a model release (http://www.istockphoto.com/tutorial_9.0_modelrelease.php).

I deploy my CodeIgniter apps via the Springloops hosted SVN service.