stern

I should be uniques. I've changed it.

Thanks for spotting it!

We don't have the time to dedicate to it. If someone has the ability to attract traffic to the site, I believe there is lots of potential to scale.

I am sure I'll be setting a reserve for the auction but until I figure out what the market is willing to pay for the site, I can't give you a ballpark.

Thoughts on eBay vs Sitepoint?

On AWS it costs less than $200 a month to run.

Cherrypeel’s revenue was planned to come from a variety of sources;

-Selling music through iTunes,

-A for fee service to help bands get their songs listed on iTunes and other online music stores (Tunecore.com),

-Selling advertising space,

-Receiving sponsorship of specific events and competitions on Cherrypeel,

-Selling ‘sponsored artist’ spots to artist to help them self-promote,

-Future premium pay services for artists/record labels and content providers.

Whatever someone is willing to pay.

I know. Should I take it out or leave it in for full disclosure?

I'd be happy to hear if there are further suggestions on how to create an audience for an auction.

I think the purpose of these plans are to raise awareness in the mainstream media. This article is a good example of this tactic working. It doesn't matter if the decidion makers know what Twitter is, they know what newspapers are.

In Canada when the government introduced their new copyright laws about 100,000 people joined a facebook group overnight. Alone that group wouldn't achieve much, but all media picked up the "100,000 people Facebook group" and it was headlines for days, causing the government to backdown on the bill.

I do agree that if people want to change the world they should get out and do something to change it directly, but if they aren't willing to do that these small online protests still do affect the real world.

>The advantage of the download (desktop version) is that users can run in a borderless window with six color schemes and the ability to close the side palette.

Is this really an advantage? I'd want to confirm with potential users that they are concerned with color schemes (as I know I'd never pay for color) and having it in a borderless window as opposed to an additional tab in an already open FireFox.

You really need to define the additional advantage of the pay vs non-pay version. What is the screaming need in your users lives that paying $15 is going to solve?

I suspect some users might prefer a paid advanced version online instead of having to download a desktop app. You could either try a monthly subscription of $1 or a one time fee the same as your downloaded version.

To see which wording of "BuyNow" or "free trail" etc works best you should do some A/B testing using something like Google Web Optimizer. Hopefully it will speed up the process of finding the correct wording/strategy/layout.

I run http://cherrypeel.com and we are redesigning to solve a lot of the problems we had with people not understanding the site.

You need to have a tag line right at the top saying: "my website does X". Check out http://99designs.com as they do a great job of this.

Often people don't view the arrows as a voting button, so either change the icon to a heart or cute bunny etc or have some explanatory text describing how to vote or both. I've got feedback from people saying they thought the voting arrows were rising/falling icons, such as on the top 40 chart when they say; "this song moved up 6 spots".

People don't understand why they should vote. Explain that the more then vote, the better the site becomes for everyone. You might need to give people incentives to vote, such as karma, a level system or special names based on involvement.

Make the site look cute. The design doesn't say "this site serves up cute animals". I also wouldn't forward it on to my girlfriend as I don't think the cutness jumps out at you fast enough, which brings me to my next point.

What about having a preview function? There are lots of sites that have lots of cute pictures so why would I want to visit one that each picture is behind a click?

Have you check out the cute sub-reddit?

I got off topic but I hope this helps.

Thanks for the tip.

Does anyone have good designs that stray from the general HN look?

I think Cherrypeel (my startup) is well positioned to help bands and fans connect. I wrote a response to this post here: http://cherrypeel.com/#p=/b/blog

A few important questions that weren't asked:

Would your friends also pay for those services? - If your friends are no longer on FaceBook, what value does it have for you?

While those sites might be worth that money, would you switch to a free service that does the same thing? - Why pay for Twitter when a free alternative will be made available and this alternative will more likely grow faster without the barrier to entry of a credit card.

Where does the music come from? Are they pulling from other music services, hosting it themselves without permission of the rights holder or do they have deals with these bands/labels?

At first I had that problem, people stopping by in the middle of the day because they thought 'working from home'/'self employed' was a pseudonym for early retirement. I have since created solid work hours (9:30-6:30ish) that I treat just like working for an employer. My family knows that within those hours I am as available/unavailable as I was when I worked for a corporation. I find that this puts me back on the same page as the rest of the world so during the evenings I am no longer running off to check up on something and whoever I am with has my full attention.

I checked that out about a year ago. How come you moved on?

it seems like a lot of that music is pirated.