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  • [-]  nreece 12 days ago link
    Poster here. Disclaimer: I didn't build this.
    Reply
  • [-]  nreece 16 days ago link
    Basically, having a blog at yoursite.com/blog is more SEO-friendly than something like blog.yoursite.com
    Reply
  • [-]  nreece 22 days ago link
    I recently wrote on the subject. Have a read:

    How Can Hackers Help In The Fight Against Cancer? - http://www.nilkanth.com/2012/04/18/how-can-hackers-help-in-t...

    Reply
  • [-]  nreece 26 days ago link
    Assembla offers free private repos: http://www.assembla.com/plans
    Reply
  • [-]  nreece 47 days ago link
    I suppose IMDB (http://www.imdb.com) already provides most of that.
    Reply
    • [-]  DanBC 46 days ago link
      But IMDB is hideous, and also crowd sourced.

      I'd prefer something more carefully curated, and more tailored towards different cinema. (Indie movies; Foreign cinema; art house nonsense; etc.)

      Reply
  • [-]  nreece 63 days ago link
    The first thing you must do is find out why your customers are abandoning your product. I think increasing the price without fixing the core problem will not help much.
    Reply
    • [-]  3a0e8ff4e557 63 days ago link
      Talking to them, I realise that a lot of it is just, "Wow, it's taking up much more time and money than I expected." While we can abstract away some of this time and money investment through better features and better UI/UX, a lot of them are just gunning for building a passive income engine without even investing much money and time in the initial stages. They are the classic get-rich-quick-passive-income-work-from-home crowd, if you will.

      Certainly, there are many aspects of our SaaS platform that can be improved, but we have been constantly learning from our customers who are still continuing their subscriptions with us. So hopefully we are indeed improving our platform over time and tackling some core problems (sample bias, of course, but better than nothing).

      P.S. Out of 39 people whom we surveyed over a few months (mostly people who continue to upgrade after the trial), 26 said that they will be "very disappointed" if they could not use our platform again, so hopefully this says something about our product/market fit.

      Reply
      • [-]  nreece 63 days ago link
        "Wow, it's taking up much more time and money than I expected."

        You need to ask 5 Whys here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys):

        1. Why are your customers abandoning your product?

        .. because it's taking up much more time and money than they expected.

        2. Why is it taking up much more time and money than they expected?

        and so on.

        You can certainly increase the price, but it's a dangerous proposition, that can be counter-productive without knowing what's causing your customers to abandon the product and how can you improve the overall user experience first & foremost.

        Reply
      • [-]  kappaknight 63 days ago link
        What is taking up most of their time? What can you do to help reduce that, if anything?
        Reply
        • [-]  3a0e8ff4e557 63 days ago link
          The nature of our industry (our customers' industry, to be precise) is that you need to have fresh products/offerings up every other day or so. So the process of adding content is time-consuming. But the same can be said for our competitors. This is one aspect that is very difficult to abstract away.

          We have tried: letting them create copies of content, letting them create drafts, and also letting them appoint other users to create content on their behalf.

          Reply
          • [-]  kappaknight 61 days ago link
            Not sure if you've tried this because you didn't mention it...

            How about letting them schedule and set future publish times for the items? As a small biz owner, if I'm in the groove of adding products, I would love to just spend 4 hours straight on a Sunday night adding all the products for the week and have the system publish them on a schedule I set. It's much harder (and more annoying) to do this fresh every day for 15 minutes than doing so in a large block of time.

            If freshness of the content is a real concern, I'd pay for something like that to make my site appear more fresh.

            Reply
          • [-]  politikus 63 days ago link
            I think you have answered your question. If your customers are telling you "adding content is time-consuming" you should ONLY be focusing on solving THIS particular problem.

            "Should I increase my prices?" is a "vanity question" ( just like "vanity metrics" (E Ries Lean startup philosophy) >> They do not help you build a better business, they take you away from what is REALLY important) Finding why your customer do not want to spend more time adding content and/or why they consider spending more time adding content is not worth it definitely help.

            Good luck.

            Reply
  • [-]  nreece 69 days ago link
    While a new search engine or email reinvention sounds daunting but lucrative, in my opinion the most impactful "frighteningly ambitious startup ideas" are like Kiva'.
    Reply
  • [-]  nreece 71 days ago link
    (shameless plus) Our startup does exactly that, create RSS feed for any webpage - http://feedity.com
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  • [-]  nreece 76 days ago link
    We had a quite similar experience (not just with Sencha Touch, but with jQuery Mobile too): http://blog.roveb.com/post/17259708005/our-experience-with-j...
    Reply
  • [-]  nreece 78 days ago link
    With Phil Haack recently moving from Microsoft to Github, you can expect a polished Git client for Windows sometime soon.

    If you're working with Visual Studio on Windows, for now you can use Git Extensions (http://code.google.com/p/gitextensions/) + Git Source Control Provider (http://gitscc.codeplex.com/)

    Reply