neuen

Wow - what an opportunity. Honestly - you have something great here.

I hope this doesn’t come across as an insult as you’ve already expressed your dislike for Outbrain and Taboola but you’ve stepped right into their market and have a huge opportunity to shake things up.

I’d say you’ve figured out what every publisher loves - or should love - keeping traffic and keeping the audience engaged. I assume most smaller publishers >10m views would make more money keeping readers clicking around their own site several times compared to losing them to a “click-bait” sponsored content ad.

I would however recommend after spending a decent amount of time on your site to take a look at Taboola and Outbrain - the copy and design of their sites are very to the point and informative - to publishers and advertisers. I don’t really get that from your site. I’d try to be more like them in those areas - they have a knack for grabbing both publishers and advertisers.

As for getting the advertisers, get on LinkedIn - search for people with job titles like Manager of Digital Marketing - poke around their profiles see if their company might be a good fit for you then fire them off a quick email.

Just my two cents!

As a quick note, I don't know much about the industry or claim to do so but I do feel I have a better grasp on it that how you've broken it down.

You've taken a job that you know very little about, that thousands of people try every year and fail and broken it down to simple 6 hours to rent an apartment and make a cool 1k an hour - seems like you've been watching alot of HGTV.

Thousands and I mean thousands of people try to make it in the NYC Real Estate world every year and come out broke and jobless. Most of these people probably came in thinking along the same lines you are.

Is the fee unfortunate? Yes, do people understand exactly how much their paying - maybe not. Does it take someone six hours all by themselves to rent an apartment? Nope.

I'm not sure if you're a programer or not but what you've done here is basically the equivalent of me saying "Eh, that's one page of code? And he types at 60wpm? That only took him 4 minutes. Why am I paying him more than $2.44".

I've enjoyed using it - I was already checking my mail online, using Google Docs and Calendar to manage my documents and time so the transition was pretty smooth. It's become my daily browsing, bookmarking and emailing machine. As for using it for any type of development, well - I can say I tried haha.

I know COLOURlovers had been around for a while before joining YC. Airbnb did a re-launch after joining but had been around perviously as well.

Now I've spent a few minutes playing around with it, I can say that I really like it - direct email is great.

While I like that you've given users the option to customize the feedback box (background, text colors) I'm still not the biggest fan of the styling for the box - I'd much prefer to have a centered box, more in the style of Fancybox.