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nicely done! as a beginner investor, i really enjoyed it

thanks everyone for the great feedback and responses. This was well received that there either needs to be lots of improvements or to target a specific niche within this. i've taken all the advice and will be re-using this to target a specific niche after a feedback i received through the site.

thanks again guys. this was truly helpful

that is great feedback. i got a feedback for a specific niche which I think i will pivot and target.

thanks for the constructive feedback. The reason i created the site was i realized all the tools out there (eg. spiceworks) are the ones you have to install on your lan and they would give you all the information and index your network. However, with my personal experience working at a startup and at a big bank, the teams all share a excel which gets emailed around and has multiple versions etc. I tried to make this site simple and target the small shops where they want to manage things from anywhere. This is just a first draft and i'll be adding more features as people request them.

personally i think the main value this gives over excel is that it allows you to edit it from anywhere, run reports (it's coming!) and get notifications on upcoming renewals for maintenance on gear etc.

i realized this might not have been obvious so I've updated the login page with the verbiage around demo login.

thanks for the feedback

there is no sign up required. if you click on "View Demo" you can login using the "demo/demo" account to use the system.

great job on getting an app created and out there. however, personally i don't think i would use yet another app just for the sake of sharing links. i already have whatsup which i use on my android to share anything and have the conversation in the same window or group chat.

but again great job on creating the app and good luck!

Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill

link http://www.invitebuzz.com

not sure if our website would be considered a "startup" since all 3 partners are doing it part time but we all invested around $5000 over a span of a year and by the end of first year we were profitable and didn't need to invest anymore.

being a technical cofounder i did all the coding so the only expense was the server costs and also the design company to put together a nice layout for us. so overall, not much overheard.

i don't think so cause it's only hitting 2 pages consistently.

it's direct traffic. they are mainly hitting 2 pages on our site.

the organic traffic from google has been consistent going up and down slightly which is normal.

however the direct traffic shot up from 1100 to 14000 a day!

i'm not too worried now since it's not eating too much bandwidth but it could cause an issue soon by bogging down all the bandwidth.

in my robots.txt i have: User-Agent: * Disallow: /rate.php Disallow: /ratewp.php Disallow: /brokenLink.php Disallow: /download.php

should i restrict the user-agent to only bing, google and yahoo to see if that might be it?

the fact that it's all US based IPs is what's weird.

personally i would draft a different email to each person and send it to them individually. i wouldn't just copy paste it either cause you never know if they are sitting beside each other when they get it!!

i think it would make a better impression if each of them receive a different thank you email.

thanks for the clickable link.

yes I did. They have an amazing API.

Thanks Kevin for the offer! i ended up using the bustaname website and got the domain!

cheers

thanks for the great response. i was able to use some of your advice and also the website provided below to come up with a good domain!

very interesting read. much appreciated.

it's not so much fear of shipping. i just want to make sure the brand is good. i don't want to call the domain xobiaseaf.com to just get it out there and have to send emails to everyone and notify them of the new name when i come up with it.

wow! awesome website. thanks a lot for the share. i was able to use that and come up with a cool combination that was available.

i would never even think about going that route. It's always best in the long run to try to outperform your competitor by offering better service, customer support and just better product in general. I always live by the old saying "treat others the way you like to be treated". beside, how would you know that the same group didn't contact the other company as well?! so this way they would get $100,000 and take down both sites lol

i don't think you are doing anything wrong. as others mentioned, you put in a lot of effort and developed something that people actually want to use and contribute to.

from a conscious perspective, i see how you could feel guilty and if i were in your shoes, i would probably just send them some money through paypal as a token of appreciation. don't need to get any lawyers invovled for min. wage etc. theya re doing volunteer work for you and you are giving them a "bonus" as a token of appreciation.

i'm sure they will be happy with anything since their expectation is to receive nothing!

good luck

could it be that you give up easily? i'm just trying to figure out why your last 6 startups failed? what was the reason? having 6 startup failurs in 7 years means you only allowed 1 year for each product before jumping ship.

maybe the problem is that you haven't found the product or startup that you passionate about to make it go to the next level without giving up.

so what were the reasons for the startup failures?

as it was previously mentioned, i don't see the need to send any passwords to the user to begin with. you can just follow this flow: 1) Port all the username and password to the new site and hash the passwords 2) update the login mechanism to check against the hash password 3) send a note out to users saying "we've upgraded our site to a new system. You can still use your old credential to login with no problem. if you've forgotten your password use our "Password recovery" feature."

then users can login just as they would before and the transition would be transparent. and if they've forgotten their password they can use the recovery feature on your site which would generate a new one for them.

have you tried to actually contact the head office for the specific hotel chains? for example, instead of going to a local Hilton and talking to general manager, why not try to get a meeting with someone at the Hilton's head office? i'm not sure how the hotel industry works, but i was under the impression that heado ffice sets certain policies and standards. so if you speak with someone there and they like your idea, they may agree to do a pilot run in one or two hotels and collect some feedback. if the feedback is good then they'll push it across all hotels.

on a side note, is it just me or is logo on the main page a bit pixelated on the top of the letters?

speaking as a University of Toronto CS grad, i would recommend him going through with it. Based on personal experience, i do agree that he won't code as much as he would if he took a college course but at the end it's worth it.

the programming work i'm doing now i didn't learn at UofT. I learned on my own, but i do believe my UofT certificate played a very big role in me getting my current job.

at UofT he can expect to do a few programming courses but if he decides to go under the software engineering program, he'll have to do a lot of algorithm and concept works as well. for example courses to figure out how BGP and OSPF algorithms work etc.

the way i look at it, if he goes to UofT to gets his fundamental CS and then try and learn different programming languages on the side himself, he will be good to go.

i may be mistaken but i believe since your average karma is below 2, i don't think your up votes even count! i'm on the same boat! my karma has gone up but for some reason my average has gone down!

i was leaning towards using paypal as well but wanted to setup that merchant account right from the start. i feel that it gives your site a bit more credibility that way.

I've bee very hesitant to go the chargify route for that exact reason you mentioned. I'd rather rely on a long running stable company like PP than to risk it all on a startup that may not be there in a year or two.

thanks for the advice :)

i'm not sure what your apps do but one method to promote them is to implement a referral service within your app.

For example if it's a game, maybe if the user refers 10 people they get some sort of credit in the game to help them advance etc. (however i'm not sure how you can track referals through app store. maybe someone else can chime in).

here is one i found which is done very nicely.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9oeJgrVrq0&feature=relat...

personally speaking, it helped me a lot. at the end of the day, it's not a magic pill that works, as it requires a lot of work and effort to be put in by the person but i find it very motivational and helpful for me.

i made my list of goals and how i wanted to acheive them with a set timeline. it requires you to review it every night before bed and every morning. this is the hard part to actually wake up 10 minutes early every morning and do this! althought i didn't meet my goal in that timeframe, it did help me get on the right path and eventually did accomplish it.so it requires lots of discipline.