farout

I always hated wearing the company T-shirt - I felt like a drone. Also at Sun they never gave women sizes - 8 years - not once. Tons and tons of night shirts for me.

Plus the damn logo is right across the chest - yeah that is exactly where I want people to look when talking to me.

My husband wears his as yardwork clothes especially the long sleeve ones since they are made of poor material and look crappy after several washings.

At another company the receptionist (a woman) bought extra tight shirts for the women - all 3 of us decided to throw them away - no way in hell were we wearing that. It was degrading. Then we were taunted by everyone why we were not showing company spirit.

If you want to give swag - give something useful like a electrostatic-free strap. That always comes in handy.

For something to display - how about a baseball hat. Sun gave jean jackets and other jackets - all too big - can not wear but at least it was different. I love the PR suggestion - put your benefit statement and then your logo and your URL.

really? I did not code that anywhere - all I am doing is javascript and jquery for setting up the form - but nothign gets downloaded except images and code.

are you sure you went to cardealerquotes.ORG

I do not own cardealerquotes.COM

I agree - downloading anything without permission is no bueno.

If this is really happening on my site - I have an issue. But I do not see it.

I would really appreciate it if you can confirm this is or is not happening on .ORG

I do not think I got hacked. But...

Thanks for the retract. I am trying hard. Working in a startup is easy but your own is very very hard. Gut wrenching.

I am curious: What made you think this was spam since it is not?

I beg your parton. This is not spam. I worked hard on this. There are several companies that in the lead generation business as viable business model.

This is not spam.

I am asking for technical and design feedback, if you want to use that is up to you.

I did market research, I did design, yeah the coding part is dirt simple, but this is a real business that I am trying to start.

I agree with you - critical mass is required in B2C market.

There is an excellent book called Viral Loop that dissects past companies that were able to do this correctly in the B2C market. Also Mark Bao talks about this threewords.me has a double viral loop - which is fantastic that he thought of this - I wish I had thought and executed this idea ;)

I just emailed you about a way to do this without producing anything yourself.

All the ingredients to do this are easy to assembly and easy to buy. You should be able to get this done in 1 hour - a working prototype actually not even a prototype, a salable item. Let me know if you did not receive my email:info@bestwhich dot com

Thanks for sharing. Screw the English - the ideas were spot on especially about market reach. In general I find people who have no real value to add with usually criticize not the ideas but the person. It shows low self-esteem in my eyes.

My biggest beef working with start ups - they only focus on technology.

When I am doing sales and marketing for them the times I have succeed is when I figured out a well defined market that not only feels the pain but it actively looking for a solution and that also easy to reach. An example: software security inspection software

Before I came, the company focused on VPs of engineering for SMB market. Now this is well defined. But no VP of engineering is going to say - oh we need to pay someone to find all the security breaches in our software. However I went after CEOs and VP of Sales - and angled it as 3rd verification if they are in the middle of strategic relationships: OEMs, exits for buyouts, selling to financial or insurance industry, or even working with Fortune 1000 companies. What a difference - we suddenly had their attention and were able to close some business quickly.

I am very good at B2B. But I refuse to sell anymore. I hate doing business with people are want the easy money and screw customers meaning they fail miserably in operations. They also think very badly of sales. Typically coders who have never sold, being a techie I have looked at some times at their code - for shame!

So I am on my own. I am trying the B2C market but have yet to succeed: 30 itunes apps, 3 websites, etc.

I am tempted to go back into B2B since that where my strengths are but I just want to a small shop so I am kinda stuck until I succeed :-)

Your point about not doing business in a domain that is not of your interest or expertise - valid point. I would suggest getting a partner that does have the domain expertise and enthusiasm. I know plenty of successful who are not enthusiastic about the industry they are in. And tons of CEOs who can not tell you a single benefit statement of why to use their product/service. It would be odd but to me it is normally. In front of customers, I always have to check my CEO to make sure they don't hang themselves.

the biggest issue usually between idea and execution is locating and actually reaching the market cost effectively and in a timely manner.

Suppose your product is for x people who like y.

Good. You have an Ideal Customer Profile.

Then you say, they will need my product when they do z. Those are the triggers. Meaning person has problem and knowledges problem and is actively looking for solution and at the set of a trigger they will do this.

So that now moves us into demand harvesting stage caused by a trigger (not demand generation which is missionary convincing a person they have a problem).

All good. Now all that was easy. The real hard part is reach. How will you find these folks?

Google is not enough. How will you access the hubs, the well connected early adopters to try your product/service and do word of marketing/referral for you for free?

I find in most of my sales jobs, reach is always the issue. Marketing is usually clueless. So I need to usually figure out clever ways to identify and reach this market.

Example from a recent consulting job. Mechanic wants to focus on Minivans since they are constantly used and constantly need repairs. Ok who drives minivans: moms.

Ok which moms will be hubs early adopters? Moms that are on committees that will tell others so that will we will get word of mouth.

How to we do reach these moms - through their hair stylists. What. Huh.

To go after your hub early adopters you need to find the people they will listen to and trust.

These high influential moms that will tell other moms are usually in charge of groups and constantly need to maintain their appearance. They regularly go to salons. They trust their hair stylist more than they trust their husbands.

Great: We designed a campaign to have hair stylists at select locations to try the mechanic's services at a deep discount. Immediately after trying our services, we gave them discounted coupons to give to 1 or 2 of their clients.

Then the these high connected (more like switches than hubs since they become to a number of groups) early adopter moms a chance to try us and subsequently tell their friends. Essentially the clairol commercial tactic with a twist.

Hope this helps. No time to make it shorter.

tldr: pick the one that easiest to reach the well-defined market that can purchase your product/service. And that has easily identifiable highly connected early adopters. This will make marketing easier and actually doable.

darn - I feel like a groupie - but it is true. I can't believe you are on HN!!!

here are the three that within in a month you should be able to write some sweet apps quickly.

1. Head First Rails I first poohed this book but I had read 7-8 other books adn still was confused so I thought what the hell. I did each project several times and started making changes. Totally awesome especially the ajax integration parts. This is when I could actually make my own simple apps in less than a week.

2. I loved Agile Programming book - totally awesome. Not enough apps though. Great explanations. Gentle exposure to Ruby.

3. beginning novice to professional for ruby. I love this book. It is just plain fun. Good examples. I totally had fun with this. Peter is totally totally awesome - I wish he would write every tech book!!

Now you have the grounding, start making and asking questions.

What killed me was the UX/UI stuff. Then a friend suggested CSS Mastery book and using blueprint this got me clued in. Now I was not paralyzed. It was so awesome to see an app created in literally minutes.

I loved RoR - I miss it terribly. I disliked the community. Fanboyish. It was like being in all male high school with everyone thumping their chests and no help.

I still miss it very much. Whenever I code I first think in RoR then do it in php. My background was coldfusion, c#asp.net, java, etc. I need something dumb simple and php does the trick. And the people are nice and there are tons and tons of example to do anything. Also I needed something that is simple to deploy and maintain. Yeah yeah -RoR is easy to deploy - my first deployment took me several hours. Whereas php was minutes. In terms of sys admin and performance and optimization, I rather deal with php. As DBA, I do not really want an ORM. BTW when you feel good with RoR - check out Enterprise Rails - wow - good stuff on performance and optimization.

I am not sure who you are asking, but I will respond.

There is no such thing as an easy wins. Most companies do not realize a customer is not a sale. A customer is a customer that renews, tells others (referral aka word of mouth), or comes back as repeat business.

P&G has 4 moments of truth: First that the customer knows about you, second customer buys you, third customers accepts that you did what you claimed, and fourth customer tells others or buys again.

The more customers that are using your product the more sales you will get; kinda like network effect. They each can talk to each other about their experience and how it improved their lives/company. Since more people are using it, it is easier to get internal buy-in and sales on new accounts.

I agree with the person that said sales are hard initially. You have no brand awareness. Make it easy for your rep to sell. Sales is hard. Ask any CEO who has done it. I would pay the person for the numbers in each of the stages in the sales pipeline since that is how sales are made: step by step. vary the commission rates. Like the other person, focus on the process and then conversion rates for each stage.

My questions to you: How much profit will you make on 0 sales? What are you waiting for? Either close the business yourself or let a professional who has vested interest do it. In the beginning it is not about profit but market share and building brand equity.

Edit: andrewstuart's said the quote on item 4. I am just responding that I do not agree.

Haha - you are so right on several accounts:

1. Any good sales rep should be able to sell self, their best product.

2. When I went for jobs I was mainly interested in commission. However if the sale took long that is not good enough. You can have the commission stagger - matching the sales pipeline stages. This meaning - they get x for number of potentials in that have been qualified, y percentage for that have been demod, z for starting eval, p for finished eval, q for proposal, w for closed, and t for getting referrals. You get the idea.

Selling to big orgs is painful and time consuming. However if you can find something that they already are buying, partner with those folks since their sales reps are already in.

Always look for a personal stake when selling. The best way someone described it is like buying like you would do for yourself except it is someone else's money so even less diligence is needed. You have to work on literature to answer all the thoughts in their head that makes this a near risk free proposition. This means answering concerns from the CFO and how it compares with existing solution, and how to incorporate it so they get the full benefit.

I hate distributors in general. They do very little to make sales. Instead go with a value added reseller. They have the feet on the street. Plus if you treat the valued added resellers are you sales rep clones, they will sell and sell. Go for a reseller that is number 3 or 2 in the industry. They have something to prove. Then train the sales staff yourself. This means real practicing and providing excellent marketing collateral and support for questions. The marketing collateral does always ned to be fancy - remember they will not be fired for not using your product. Most places have inertia and they have more to lose than gain by switching to you no matter how much they save the company or make the company. Always find out how the switch will personally impact them - now they have real motivation.

PS in terms of English, I liked "Niches to Riches" book about benefits pieces. it is more B2C but remember folks are folks. It helped me tremendously. She is PR consultant.

Another sales book recommendation if you in a established market: The Wedge: How to Stop Selling and Start Winning It talks how one goes about replacing the existing competition that already has the business.

I worked in both greenfield and established markets - they both have unique challenges. If you want to talk more let me know, info@bestwhich.com. I am in the middle of product coding so...

Having been a hi-tech quota exceeding :-) sales rep for a number years, here is what I advise:

1. Hire two reps: one for each coast. Even two part-time reps at each coast I say is better than one rep running around from coast to coast. Time wasting and regionally differences do crop up.

2. Read the the book, Selling to Big Companies.

3. Yes sell yourself so you understand the issues involved.

4. "Salespeople are notorious for giving excuses when they don't meet the sales targets they agreed to."

This is usually when the owner does not understand the market or misestimates the market. Any good sales person will leave and stop wasting time with people that will not work with them to make sales happen. It takes a company to sell. Especially if you want the easy and lucrative referrals.

What is the price point for this product? Who at the customer site will ultimately say yes?

At one company, it was easy to sell since the network engineer was the main guy/gal that had to approve the technical aspects. I just made sure they understood the personal utility of our product as well so they had a personal stake on how their life would with us or a competitor's product.

read the book, it is totally awesome. Having done the job for a number of years, I still learned lots of usually things that I was able to use immediately.

In terms of what to offer, I guess it really depends. Realize in the beginning you are really doing business development not just sales. So there needs to be more of a salary cushion. A low end salesperson is usually 40/40. 40k salary and 40k commission. Realize that the you are hiring a profession and not asking them to necessarily do charity work. However, together estimate the metrics of sales and the where the number of sales at each level in the sales pipeline. Also come up with remediation plans. Say in 2 months, you expect the rep will have made 5 sales. What happens if they have only made 2 sales. Have everything spelled out so everyone knows the ramifications and there are fewer surprises.

Ruby on Rails. Get the Head first Rails book then the Agile programmer book, see amazon. There 2 excellent Ruby books:Beginning Ruby and Pragmatic Ruby but you can do those later.

Then practice like hell. meaning do each project in each book 10 times until you understand how to do it without look at the book. Then do some screencasts. Put all your projects even the ones from books and screencasts online. In the meantime, make something, anything. Take a project from one the books and modify it. Then make another thing. Then make something that someone else already made with rails.

Now you have 3 sites in your portfolio. A month has passed.

Send the links to your projects and a brief email to the companies that do rails regardless if they have opens or not.

Also list the 3 things unique about you. Why should they hire you versus another person who also knows some RoR?

With this you should be able to a choice from several junior rails positions.

Yes you are right. One sample is not representative.

I should have added that I also noticed - of the 35 people (that I knew very well) that I checked in LInkedin, all 35 had misrepresented themselves in Linkedin to some degree.

As a statistical analyst, I realize that a sample size of 30 or greater is actually pretty good. So... I stand with my conclusion to be weary of Linkedin profiles since they are in the end what all resumes are: marketing collateral.

I guess the issue is this marketing does not accurately represent the product or service. And in a sense this has nothing to do with Linkedin specifically. Only that they display the marketing pieces and I somehow misunderstood that what I would find there would be more realistic/truthful and match my empirical info.

Edit: My editing and typing skills suck

Oh and one more, always ask the designer for the psd (Photoshop) files not just png or jpg - this way you can easily modify it.

I remember looking up a former coworker who was a great coworker who I was trying to recruit.

It was so odd that he had links to people that he hated. Not only that they each had written about each other and how good the other person was. It was all made up. It was weird since I had worked there and knew the calibre of their work.

I remember asking him why. He just said that is how he and the others networked. Or maybe they all hoped that the others would get another job and leave -- you know when someone gives a stellar reference.

Linkedin is too faked.

Stop reading unless it can help you immediately - got this tip from 4hour week from Tim Ferris's book.

Books are first vetted for fit by analyzing the star3 comments in Amazon. Then I write what I will do once I read this book before I read actually it.

I read the book and then do the items. Then I analyze: did this book do what I needed it do. To help me become better at predicting.

I used to read about 10 books/week for the last 15 years. Now I only read 2 per week and many weeks none because I am too busy doing ... and WOW what a difference. I wish I started doing this earlier.

good questions.

However the first question "Who is your audience" should include implicitly - how will you reach and find your audience. Too often the market is there but very hard to reach economically and efficiently.

Thanks, these are great ideas. I never thought of doing this way.

The site dos not take in user generated content that is immediately displayed. The data is first curated and verified so the attack will be a bit harder. So there is fresh (delayed) content constantly.

That is exactly the reason of the captcha: to give a person something to do that wastes a bit of their time and that is familiar to them.

Yes, in other sites I have used captchas to prevent automated abuse.

my 3 favorites are:

http://allrecipes.com they have ratings; large selection

http://epicurious.com they have ratings; more sophisticated

http://showmethecurry Indian recipes that actually work via video

I want to make sure a person votes only once. But if they want to game the system fine as long as they are willing to submit a captcha

For another website, I used to store the IP address and do checks but for a simple system that seem to be overkill.

All of the websites have no user accounts.

Is there another way to do this? Where you want some voting to happen but with no user accounts. And you want it to be dirt simple.

As you stated: If computer wanted to hack it - sure it is easy enough. But I was looking for a easy way to do some verification.

I asked this because I was creating a reddit clone and wanted a captcha system. I detest the ones that exist right now.

This focus translates into the questions we ask to begin with.

What are we asking ourselves when we solve something? What questions are asking when defining the problem? If the problem definition is askew than ...

As a side question, why are captchas using alphanumerics? Any reason why you can say, what is 1+1?

And flip the terms and answers for each captcha.

Is it because a person can't solve 3+8?

The problem is as an UX programmer everyone in the company gives you their 2 cents (the bike shed issue).

However as a backend programmer you are left alone to do the job at hand without either specs changing at the speed of light or having to explain/teach people why an idea may have issues and finding websites/case studies to support your argument.

I'll start.

Water.org because without clean water there is no possibility of a good life.

Halotrust.org that does landmine removal in countries and helps people with prothesis. My tax dollars removed these people's limbs, this is the least I can as a sorry to US's use of cluster bombs.

And TheFood Bank, where my dollar can magically buy 4 dollars of food.

(c) is the 'problem'. Smart people aren't always good sales people. And it is fundamentally a sales problem, where they need to identify the right people to make the change, and then sell them on the idea (by convincing them they will save money, and that it was their idea in the first place). Now the geeks with low social skills is a common cliché, lets ignore that tired and played out meme...

>>I used to be in sales . I have made millions for companies. Sales was easy since I was helping people with pain they already knew and were looking to remove it. I also wanted them to feel good about the company so they would tell all their friends. Referral are sweet!

It always frustrated me that I could not sell management many of my ideas. Part of the problem was they saw no problem. Lying to customers. No problem. Screwing up services. No problem. Etc.

I got tired of it. That is why I now program.

No it is horrible but it is something better than nothing to help me with issues with IE