jaxc

Hi,

If you could you freeze development for a small amount of time (other than keeping servers/lights on) and take some time out and basiclly take deep breath and relook over everything.

Its kind of hard to talk generalised and understand why you need to be secretive but financially long term if it is not flying then sometimes the easiet thing to do is pull the plug and work on something else whilst using the code/tool/ and most importantly knowledge and experience you gained.

If you've been working 20 hours a day, 7 days a week and perhaps feeled burn out then take deep breath and take time out, perhaps get some perspective on whats happening.

You could alwatys do like a weekend thing, get some beers/drink/pizzas/bbq, and relax and go over things with everyone being able to talk freely about what they think. Trying to get as many opinions as you can, different perspectives on where you and your other founders/team ideas are.

You don't have to set anything in stone but like a focus group and make it as informal as possible. Just for one brief weekend forget about stress/burnout and just focus on the future.

Think about whats working, whats not working, where do you want your start up to be in 6 weeks, 1 year, 5 years etc.

Then Marketing wise, is your site doing well in google/bing organiclly? Can you improve it with better marketing? Have you looked into SEO stuff, making sure your not missing anything?

Is your business idea sound or does it need to be reworked?

Sometimes you can a really good idea and your just going about it in the wrong way, execution wise? (sorry im not trying to be blunt but these things do happen.)

Then there is minute things like is your signup page asking too many questions? Do? you have a trial/free evaulation? Are you publishing prices or are you having people directly contacting your sales team so there is a delay in people signing up/paying for your widget? Does your site work in "the browser that shall not be named" aka IE6 or is it just one giant fancy flash thingy bob that takes 5 years to download when a simple static html page could do same job in 0.005 seconds of a time ?

If your business is making some money, could you afford to let developers work on things they want for 20% of time like say at google in the hopes of incubating new ideas. You'd be surprised at how many things get developed out of someones spare time that just grow or startups changing their business and model mid stream.

To be honest there's so many things that can be preventing your startup from suceeding without knowing more or you could be doing everything perfectly and its just not working such has no real customers. It happens.

Just take some time out, reveulate everything. If things have to change because they are not working then its better to make changes when your small and nimble(?)then when your a mega corp with shareholders.

Just be honest, don't hide away from awkward questions and just remember your not loosing anything by having a rethink. You have all the experience, code and technology that you have gained working on your startup. People often think they've failed because it didn't work out but don't realise what they gained through experience.

The background on the escape from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalag_Luft_III#The_.22Great_Es...

From Wikipedia:

"In Lovell v. City of Griffin, 303 U.S. 444 (1938), Chief Justice Hughes defined the press as, "every sort of publication which affords a vehicle of information and opinion." Freedom of the press, like freedom of speech, is subject to restrictions on bases such as defamation law."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_S...

The music is Enigma Variations: Nimrod by Edward Elgar. The Oscillation on the bells and mp3 compression made it a bit hard at first : )

If Mahalo is alleged to be a scraper site then just let Google handle it.

If you think about, if Google delists the site then thats probably their business model gone because Google is like 60% of search Market in the US and higher else where so if Google delists them and take away their Adsense then they are in trouble.

So let them taunt Google all they like and then see what happens when the Google Dragon wakes up because it won't be pretty.

(Edited for typos and readibility)

"Now it's emerged that those very same confirmation emails contain a web link - ironically intended to direct customers to Argos's security page - which contains the customer's full name, address and credit-card details in the URL itself."

I'm speechless... I may not understand PCI compliance fully but surely anyone with any brains could see that is a bad idea. I mean why would you reveal someone's credit card details in the URL. Not to mention emailing it. This beggars belief.

Edited for typos and readibility.

This could be less to do with Apple asserting its rights and more to do with protection. Don't forget Nokia is if I remember correctly suing them for patent infringement with Apple counter suing so it could just be for protective purposes as well as legal maneuvering. I guess we'll see where things end up in a couple of years down the line. I doubt this would be cleared up quickly.

I feel for Divvyshot, the actual event seems way beyond their control and this has brought a whole new angle. It just makes me wonder how many other eager startups may have/will/could be put in this kind of situation for 'positive coverage', when they have a lot at stake in their business.

If you wanted to learn about SEO then you could always jump in the deep end and setup a small website or blog with a dot.com domain name with some original content around a niche (topic) something small that you know a lot about and try play the Google/bing/yahoo(?) game and aim to get your site ranked well. It will take a while especially with a new 'virgin' site.

The best place to start would be google webmaster Tools. Follow best practices they recommend and go from there. There are loads of articles on SEO, some good, some bad and some erm shady.

Google's algorithm is regularly updated and changes and there is no 100% certified or guaranteed no matter what anyone may say or try to sell you to get to number 1 spot. It is a mixture of luck, links, good original content and more luck. There's no one way to be top and the best is to just jump straight into it and get your hands dirty. Build up experience and go from there.

Some people who I would trust with good SEO advice is Google's Matt Cutts. His blog at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ is a good way of keeping in the loop.

For search engine news there is a journalist called Danny Sullivan. His personal blog is http://daggle.com/ and he also blogs at http://searchengineland.com/ He is someone who I would respect with good reporting on search engines.

There's plenty of others too. Google et al are your friends there. They are just a couple that came into my mind.

The only way to stay on top is to follow Google's and other best practices as they evolve and experiment with your own site and plenty of research.

Sorry its not quick but best way to learn is through experience.

Good luck.

Edited for typos and readability.

Hi before I give some feedback I just wanted to say congratulations and good luck with your startup. It's a big step and fun long journey and i wish you well : )

Now some things that could be improved on.

First of all the landing page. You describe the product well, its a good hook but you also need some information about your company too on there such as:

One or two lines of text explaining what you do such as Manufacturer of Wireless I/O modules based in (state and country you live). If you have a question you can call us on [Sykpe, VOIP or a 2nd number (don't use your personal home phone number -unless you want to be spammed with business to business calls - and not mobile because it doesn't look professional)] or you can email us at sales(at)yourdomain.com. Just something simple that makes it feel friendly. Just look at say some of your rivals or even say Rackspace.com. Just pad out a little more.

Also another thing to think about is who are you selling your product too. Is it home hobbyist or wholesale? If its both think about having two separate websites or even different section eventually instead of trying to do both. One consumer friendly and the other towards wholesale.

Another thing with your landing page is the colours and theme. It doesn't look bad but this is where I hope you don't mind me saying it but you could do better too. When you have the money think about getting a designer for your brand (logo) and site. Its a lot I know when you start out and is expensive so take it slow and at baby steps.

Now an example of a direct retail to consumer site that isn't super sexy but practical is http://www.google.com/phone . Okay its different product but for a consumer site from the manufacturer its one way of doing it as Its clean and simple. You can never have too much white space or even take a look at http://www.apple.com/ main site and their store. There different ways of selling but are clean and attractive without feeling cold but don't just try and copy them use your own ideas like you have done so far.

On your product item page, to make the icons blend in, there's a quick way of making them feel apart of your site. If you download GIMP. Take a screenshot of your web page. Load it and your icons in gimp. Use the color picker tool and select your grey web page background, then on your icons use the magic wand tool to select the white space and then fill the area with the grey color you selected. Then upload, your done or making the whitespace transparant and saving it as Gif. A simple little hack that blends your icons in. Just don't save over the originals as you never know when you might need them.

Also your datasheet download was two clicks instead a simpler one. You know the less hoops people go through the quicker they can make a purchasing decision. but your Datasheet is impressive. Its clean and attractive and the graphics are good.

Instead of using the html tables, why don't you consider using some of the graphics in the datasheet instead?

Also another thing (yikes this sounds like a lot of feedback sorry) is the shopping cart doesn't feel sexy. On the store page, the text is small and the picture with number underneath then select from menu seems too many clicks compared to a simpler picture with just a add to cart button underneath.

Also another thing is you don't list any icons for how you pay such as is it paypal or google check out. Do you accept VISA etc Is there a security seal saying your site is safe to buy from (which is snake oil but is psychologically reassuring).

Also using Chrome on Linux the add to cart button didn't update the shopping cart for me and even though I added products to the cart (At least I think I did) it didn't update so I was unable to go through your buying experience.

Now there is easier way of fixing it, if you don't mind outsourcing your shopping cart to a 3rd party. If you use http://www.e-junkie.com/ with paypal and google checkout, then it solve some headaches for you so you can just concentrate on designing and building your modules then having to fix your site. I haven't personally used them but I know of them and how simple they are to install and use and take care of the buying experience. There is also http://www.shopify.com

Also I personally wouldn't use a forum starting out till you have a customer base because an empty forum doesn't look good. Think about using a simple blog to start out with and maybe disable comments so you don't have to worry about the 'empty comment syndrome' where it looks bare and not used much. Its just an idea after all then once you've been around for a while and have some customers add it again so they'll be more people.

Also a blog and twitter is handy for PR and Buzz. Think about say a separate blog for products with case studies and real life examples of using your products in the real world and how to's and one for electronics with say tips on making circuit boards, circuit design and stuff like that. The idea being is that helps put you yourself out there and as a trusted source. If you can provide good advice that people find useful than maybe what you make is good too and people might buy it. Using a blog to sell a product is one way of doing it.

Yikes, sorry for such a long post but I hope that you'll find some of it useful but its not gospel and use your own commonsense, judgement and take it with a pinch of salt : )

Edit: Typos/Small Corrections to make it more readable.

"How I turned hating on unmarketable products into a $10 million a year business"

This article has lot of facts and figures and i really apologise for just dropping this like this (late night/early morning) but with the median figures adjusted for inflation from consumer price index, I don't think its quite fair to say that you can just drop numbers and compare them to present day. I didn't see this mentioned but then again my eyes are really tired and maybe missing the point but:

$148,800.00 house in 1975 is the equivilant of $595,484.88 in 2008 in buying power

Median income of $42,936 in 1975 has buying power of $171,826.20 in 2008.

Roles Reversed

$245,300.00 house in 2008 in buying power is $61,295.66 house in 1975

$50,303 median income in 2008 is the equivilant of $12,569.73 in 1975

Buying power calculated using the inflation caluclator of http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm

"The CPI inflation calculator uses the average Consumer Price Index for a given calendar year. This data represents changes in prices of all goods and services purchased for consumption by urban households. This index value has been calculated every year since 1913. For the current year, the latest monthly index value is used."

Now maths really isn't my strong point. Actually really bad and I know that there are many of you far far clever than me so I reserve judgement and hope someone can double check for me but i just wanted to mention this because I didn't see it discussed.

(edit: i see it mentioned - sorry)