wittjeff

Have you seen launchrock.com? It might help with growing your list.

On you question, I suggest monthly updates until you have something live. But if you post your list ("ton of things") of ideas, we could comment on them specifically.

By the way, I like your business concept. Except I'd remove the Chicago-specificity from the tag line, as I would assume you can probably scale this quickly. If you need to start with Chicago, put that in secondary text on the front page.

Consider this a WAG because I don't know any of the people involved. I assume that in the VCs world there are winners (high multiple return) and losers (not a high multiple return). While you may have attained profitability, in his mind you're actually a non-winner, and that is a continual cause of stress. To his peers he has probably been talking up the various angles for potential growth for your company for a long time, yet the desired growth has not been forthcoming. It looks and feels like failure within that peergroup (for their objectives), so a) that's where the reluctance, animosity, and faux-professional posturing came from in negotiations. Now he has to have a story for why the deal fell apart. That story is either that he believes you can grow the investment more going alone, or that you personally sunk it. Either way, it's on you and his pessimism is probably high. Not good, but then where else is he going to go with this?

I think of VCs as managers, and I'm usually of the opinion that the most likely solution to a bad manager is a new job, so I'm inclined to favor any path away from this guy. What path would be best?

Having a profitable company with 10+ employees is a pretty good position to be in if you want to launch something new. I'm inclined to recommend making full use of that opportunity, whether new equity from this VC is a possibility or not. Another concern, though, is that you don't want to risk the health of the company by diverting too much of the available cashflow, or by hurting their market positioning. So it seems to me that any pivot is going to have to be a soft one, or else you'll have to find a growth or new opportunity that really does seem like a sure bet. So my recommendations are: 1) Swallow your well-justified bitterness. It just won't help you get through this. If you want to spread truth about this VCs character, do it after you have gotten out of the current stickiness, and even then I think some coded politeness can suffice. 2) Tell the VC that you're going to double-down on finding new growth opportunities. Lay it on thick, and check in more frequently to give him backing with his peers. 3) Assume that the VC will talk smack (widely) about you if ever challenged in any public context, and may be doing so anyway now that this deal exploded, so be proactive about working your relationships with his peers and your peer community. Consider this your ongoing side project as you... 4) Work on finding the right pivot for you and for the company. Consider this your top priority. If you find another startup that has a better opportunity that you can jump to, take it. But don't risk your current profitable status. Tipping into negative cashflow will endanger the whole situation but will also give the VC more ammunition in laying blame on you.

When I try "furniture placement" on images.google.com I get a wide variety of levels of drawing fidelity, so I don't think I can recommend any particular one.

Have you considered file storage in the cloud? I note that some services like chart.ly are becoming very popular for sharing compelling visuals. On a similar note, are you sure you want to use the Drawing1.xml as the default bookmark text? I don't know if that will help me remember the site a year from now. But diagram.ly/myusername/mydrawingname would be cool.

I use Visio for drafting home renovation plans. It isn't the easiest tool to use for this purpose but the results are good enough to save me the expense of hiring an architect, and the city government hasn't complained. So a set of primitives for architecture would be appreciated and might get me to move off Visio. Related to the architecture primitives, a set of furniture and cabinetry primitives would also help, as they help to visualize how reasonable a building design may be.

I did some usability testing on the drawing layer that was added to Microsoft Word back in Word 6 -- so around 1992. One study specifically looked at the UI for resizing and moving objects. There were several interesting findings. The most important was that the conventions commonly used (grab objects by solid edges to move them, grab by "grow handles" to resize them) is not very intuitive. When naive users want to move objects, the grow handles seem like plausible candidates to many. And as you noted it often seems reasonable to click and drag in the middle of any region to move an object, though this isn't feasible with some objects. A second finding is that discovery of the "correct" methods is a surprisingly steep curve. Inadvertently resizing objects is frustrating and does not lead easily to deducing better interaction alternatives. It's a surprisingly hard UI problem calling for creative alternatives. On that point the third interesting finding is that creative alternatives may not be well received by design or development teams. At the time I did the testing, we compared results with the UI from Microsoft Publisher. In the Publisher UI the mouse cursor switched to a little moving van when the mouse moved over anything that could be used for dragging. This gave immediate feedback that the grow handles were not intended as a tool for moving objects. Ultimately the Word team decided the moving van didn't look professional enough, despite strong usability results. As an aside, some members of the Excel team resisted the idea of changing the arrow cursor for any reason, but lost to consistency within the Office apps. A fourth finding was that the strong difficulty with discoverability of the drag vs. resize UI that has been implemented for so long is not a function of age, education, or intelligence, though when educated geeks see such dramatic results in the usability lab they may be tempted to jump to these conclusions.

This study is obviously not comprehensive, especially regarding current UIs. I just want to encourage you to consider it an area for potential innovation, one where further study with a sizeable pool of novice users would be worthwhile.

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