I'm in a similar boat. It really depends on how marketable your name is.
In my case, I made it up. I'm planning on getting a trademark before a full launch. They key point about trademark law is that it's hard to defend it if you go a long time and allow others to use it.
BTW, there's a good law question & answer site that you can ask your questions for free: http://www.avvo.com/free-legal-advice/Trademarks/ (no affiliation w/ me)
Appreciate the support. Your email isn't the goal -- just wanted you to have a decent experience.
Thanks for the tips. Always nice when you have two contradictory statements in the same thread. Because your feedback requires me to do no work, you're definitely my hero.
Cool idea. I checked it out and thought it was a nice site.
Yeah, I'm not really going for emails, just thought it was funny to have a talking owl try to coax someone to sign up for something they had no clue about. I think I may enjoy it more than anyone.
Thanks for the help and I'll make sure to pass your link along next time I see someone considering building an "under-construction" page.
Agree with your sentiment which is why I only allowed an afternoon to put it together and out. My reason for posting was, honestly to see if people actually felt it reflected so poorly that I should replace it with the standard hand-drawn peni chewing on ear.
Re: focusing on the actual product. This was the first "hello world" deployed with the dev-environment setup. SCM, scripts, and all that BS that's annoying to setup after you haven't done it in years was where the majority of the time was spent. I'm pretty sad how long it took me to setup everything.
Re: random emails, great point. The majority of the people who sign up are people I speak to directly or are in my network.
You may be interested to know that today I've only had about 36 non-garbage looking sign-ups and seems like around ~630 page views. So about 5% of views today resulted in a sign up.
Appreciate the time/effort/honesty.
I appreciate the candid feedback. I'm not going to say, "I know," although a lot of what you've been saying was bothering me as I put it together.
Re: collecting email - that's not actually the goal. However, I'm collecting WAY more than I would if I put the logo and a general tag-line.
The goal was to just let people have some experience with the brand. Be it amusing or fun. I was hoping to garner a smile. I actually didn't think it would be considered disrespectful, and I question whether you'd feel the same if you stumbled upon it via my Twitter, etc.
Nevertheless, I really do appreciate the time you took to write up your thoughts and appreciate your well wishes.
Building a two-sided market it tricky but early on (as I've read) it takes a lot of non-scalable seeding. If you read up on Reddit and AirBnb, both attacked the problem by going out and manually adding content. In Reddit's case, they were adding the majority of content early on. Re: AirBnB they travelled and found early adopters.
You have a link I can pass around to send some folks your way to check it out?
What would you do if you wanted to put up a landing page for a company you weren't ready to go public with?
My hope was just to have some fun with it and garner a smile.
This community is really thoughtful and helpful. Really appreciate it.
Appreciate the honest remarks. Problem with my HN post is that I thought my comment (below) was the description for the link :) Probably gives you a better idea of where I was coming from. Quite a noob I am!
Thanks for the feedback. I wish I could divulge more!
Hahaha. That's brilliant. I'm questioning whether my business can succeed in such a thrilling competitive market.
What a great affiliate play :)
I guess that begs the question, what should you put up when your business is stealth! The hope was people would enjoy the experience enough to "trust" us with the email and a follow-up down the road.
Thanks for the feedback, I appreciate it.
Interesting, thanks for sharing. I'll check those out.
thanks for the feedback. fixed the FB link to my fan-filled page.
Re: the length, I realize it's a tease.
Re: trusting us with your email. I get where you're coming from. If I put a static page I knew I had little to no chance. I've got a few people and I'd assume it's because the conversation intrigued them. I haven't reached out so, I guess I'm in the "better than nothing" ship.
Yes, that's the dilemma. I didn't want to have a blank page, but I'm not ready to chat about it -- well, unless you are liquid and want to share some wealth! Thanks for the feedback.
Hi HN. I'm working on a new project, but wanted to have a splash page to send people. I wanted it to be a bit different -- hopefully more engaging. The other key limit was I refused to spend more than an afternoon putting it together and getting it live as I never expected too many folks to randomly stumble and go to it.
Feedback, suggestions, slander are all welcome. I realize folks have strong opinions. Happy Sunday.
I'm curious to know what do you think is a reasonable wage in SF for a "full-stack" developer. Feel free to break it down by years of experience.
And by full-stack CEO, you mean someone who understands all the aspects of the business and isn't a pandering, disconnected, figure-head? In a lot of companies they'd be called the operating CEO, or in more cases, the COO/president.
I'm hopeful that someone on HN will provide a substitute shortly.
The model is interesting but Groupon's margin will drop as more competitors come in and self-service comes in. I don't think that a 50% margin is tenable for many small businesses.
I disagree with the statement that Groupon sheds light on issues in a business. Restaurants, for example, aren't structurally built to handle that. Think about it for a second - it's really hard, even at scale to make a $10 (market price) tuna sandwich for $2.50. There are companies focused on better-serving restaurants like Corner Dish.
I am really amazed by the irony in the writer's bio:
"I’ve held senior positions at large global companies including IBM, Nortel, Siebel Systems (the world’s leading provider of CRM solutions acquired by Oracle), and Sybase..."