prashantdesale

Video is also available at http://www.vimeo.com/1594866 Let me what inner workings of the system ud like to know. App is on PHP, MySQL. Most of the JS/CSS is coded by ourselves. Documentation, there is some and there is PRD as well that explains how things are supposed to work. About it being easily translatable, I don't know because we never thought of outside US market while developing it. So seriously I don't know. I assume there will be work.

Thanks, Talking to Partners and see how we can sell it. We never sold sites in past and coded most of this ourselves, so were not sure if it is worth anything. But yes, Seems like we should at least give it a try. Need to find out how we can transfer domain names as well.

Yep, I remember we discussed Onista and Sormpulse. Hope all is going well at your end.

Certainly.. I do plan to write all my experience on what we were trying to do, what went wrong and what I myself will correct when I build next startup.

About pulling the plug, We are thinking around couple of months process. Like putting announcement as you suggested, and informing users and then pulling the plug.

Thanks

How do you find buyers though?

Thank you so much. Exactly what I was thinking. The great thing about hacker news is the feedback and wisdom that we can get from other like minded and smart folks.

We are pretty flexible in changing ideas to make sure we build something that people will like and use.

Thanks for pointing out. Soon I will fix these issues.

Thanks for the honest feedback.

About the design, yes all points taken. Actually we are programmers and tried to do as better job at design as we could. May be we need to get professional designer and I surely hope to generate enough business to be able to afford that.

You are right, we need to reword lot of content to express the exact message. I did 4-5 rounds of user-testing from usertesting.com and redesigned, but sure there is lot of room for improvement.

I think we need to do better job at explaining that we are not auction site and we are not trying to attract users who like auctions. Rather we are trying to attract people who like the price-negotiation and also Alibaba model. We tried to explain that in the demo video, but seems like we need to do better job.

Thanks for the feedback. This is what I love about hacker news. Very good and honest feedback.

We are charging 3% of the closing value for each product that is sold. We also offer optional premium services (like eBay) that enhances look of the listing. There is some charge for showing product in "featured products".

In future we also plan get some ads but nothing decided on that yet.

Hope that explains,

Thanks a lot for great feedback. Soon I will change the page using all your suggestions as they perfectly make sense. As far as design goes, there are only 3 of us working on this app on part-time basis and work includes design and coding.

Great suggestions. We just came out of coding phase last week and now we are going to give our best shot to get sellers and buyers. Suggestions like these really help a lot. Thanks again.

Yeah, I never thought of that one. Sure we will work on hiding the address.

We did talk to attorney and I think we need to do more research to be absolutely sure

Thanks. Yeah, what you suggested is better wording.

Thanks, I think we need to rework on wording to express the exact message out there.

I think you can take money by giving investor a convertible note.

Here is what I found on web regarding Convertible Notes.

------------------------------------- Convertible note is a debt instrument that can be converted into stock at the option of the holder or the issuer. More specifically, the investor can choose to convert the total amount of the note into equity when an institutional investor (such as a Venture Capitalist) makes an investment. ---------------------------------------

but off course you should talk to Lawyer before making decision.

Thank you everyone for your feedback.

Thanks a lot.

How come these meetups are not over weekend?

Is there a HTML version somewhere we can read this online?

Why ask people to download and print PDF? not that you have to, but PDF's are meant for that and there are 40 pages.

40 * number of readers who will print = Lots of paper waste.

Will check out content though.

There is lot of code. Onista is amalgam of eBay, Priceline, LendingTree, Alibaba and LinkedIn. When I say that, what I'm trying to say is that site has lots and lots of features. We have done testing using different data set and lots of scenarios to find bugs. We also redesigned lot of features. It did take us to fix close to 2k bugs to get to stable state.

Thanks a lot. I was not aware of it.

Sure,

To find those more 1k bugs to fix I would need to open it to some users. We are testing it almost everyday and now are unable to uncover more bugs. I mean bugs will always be there. Windows XP has lot of bugs. As I am advised by others, at one point if you feel codes is stable enough, you need to open it to get more feedback.

Very good advice. You are absolutely right. I did not think of that.

Thank you very much.

Missed addressing the payment question.

On Onista, users can pay each other the same way they do on eBay.

Paypal, Credit Card, Money Order, Cashier's Check, Personal Check

We have done lot of testing on our application using some external users as well and fixed close to 2k bugs to make it more stable. As you are suggesting, we are planning public Alpha.

Sounds like a good plan and yes this is what we shall do. Iterating is the best approach as we get some time to fix the issues before more users know about it.

Any idea on how to find influential bloggers? (Besides Googling) Like is there any blog searching place that shows me ranks of blogs (based on traffic) and and have those distributed in categories like (Technology, Business, E-commerce, blah...)

Thanks, The plan (and more) that I am outlining on blog is something we are planning to follow in stages. not in one day. So it will be as you are suggesting.

I have had it testing from some eBay sellers already, but certainly having it testing from couple of hundred users will help a lot.

Hey Matt,

Yeah, that video will be linked from our index page to show demo. Regarding accent, yes that is one thing we need to fix. I and my partners all are Indians (moved to US almost years back) and hence have heavy accent. I am trying to find somebody who does not have accent and willing to help us do the narration.

About negotiation process, buyer can attempt as many times as he wants to negotiate the price, but if it is accepted then it will be locked for that particular product for that particular buyer. We have written pretty smart algorithm for negotiation and it will be impossible for buyer to know the minimum because it keeps on changing based on demand, requests, popularity, and lot of other factors.

So far we are 3 working on this parttime. We all have fulltime jobs and are developing onista on weekends and evenings.

Thanks for pointing it out. Fixed. Moved to new server and missed recreating this table. This table was not part of the other schema.