She seems to be very disciplined. I am seeing/finding out that , in the startup world as well, discipline to deliver consistently is much more important than any other form of talent. Given the opportunity, everything else can be learnt.
I am offering a free 30 day listing, if you want to test it out. Like any site, we are just starting out - so obviously we don't have a pagerank etc. But hopefully, with support from customers like you, the ranks will come in near future.
Regarding fees, to be bluntly honest - it just takes too much of my time to be doing it for free (even the most subtle of tasks end up taking a good chunk of your day). Moreover, I do not want to offer any advertisement, nor do I want to clutter the site with any and every submissions. So, the only way towards any revenue is a small fee.
Most of the directory or listing services are worthless from a browser's point of view. Your startup(or any listed business) gets lost somewhere buried under categories and sub-categories. So, while these directories do offer a link or two, they really do not provide any value or a good user-experience to a casual browser who simply wants to check out cool startups, quickly find out a bit about them and explore further if interested.
I created StartupOnTop to address this very issue and offer a directory that presents startups in a clean, clutter-free manner. It offers a top-down view (startups first, categories later) and also shows a "quick - view" for users to quickly learn about a startup.
Most importantly, I intend to vigorously maintain it - I would like to keep it ad-free and spam-free. That means, the site is not meant for ‘every’ startup and will try to prevent the site from generic dilution. After a free first month, charging a basic maintainance fee.
It is interesting to see whether users interested in new startups want a directory (links organized in a category-based model) or a blog (where new, fresh information is served periodically on an ongoing basis as it becomes available). I assumed the later when I created http://www.DailyWebApps.com ; I use WordPress which has built-in support for a category taxonomy so I kind of get the best of both worlds.
If you're interested it would be nice to collaborate in this area. Thanks for the useful resource.
Agreed - as long as quality/depth is of critical importance.
A trivial fee ($2) does not warrant such response and neither do we guarantee that.
However, by charging that trivial fee, the goal is to "guarantee" an answer to anyone. In sites like Reddit, unless you can pique some corners of one's brain, you are not likely to get an insightful response in a private setting. We allow you to 'own' your advice and women understand that it is only seen by you and not the whole community. Therefore, they tend to have a more 'personalized' approach.
Of about 65 questions asked and a few hundred responses received so far we have noticed that women are actually taking the time to respond. It's not the $1 they make, but the trend seems to be that they actually 'enjoy' providing advice to men.
How do you guarantee the answer? What hold do you have over the ladies that makes them answer?
If someone is only going to pay me a dollar for something, I'm not likely to do it were it not something I'd do for free anyway.
This is the point of the "pay enough or don't pay at all" statement. Both quality and quantity tend to go down if you go from pure volunteers to paying below market rate.
To earn US Federal minimum wage, answerers would have to spend, on average, 8 minutes on each question. This is not just the reading and writing of the question and answer, but also any time spent getting ready to work.
Obviously, you're the one who has real-world experience of this, and I'm just an armchair pundit who has read a few articles; so you know more than me. I'm just curious about how you have managed to go against the current received wisdom.
Please click on the "Check status" page which shows your current questions. Click on the view details link - which show a status of either :
(1)Waiting for a respondent (i.e. no one has reserved your question yet.
(2)In - Progress (i.e. Someone is working on the answer. But it has not been submitted yet).
(3)Completed. [ You will be able to view the response, and rate (1-5) the respondent]
Hope that helps. I just found out that the system does not send out emails when answers are complete. I will have to get that fixed today. In the mean time, please log in occasionally to check status.
That's true. This seemed to be the most simplistic way I could come up with without discouraging registrations. I would be happy to entertain your suggestions.
I don't really have any, aside from the 4-chan approach - send a photo holding up a sign with the date and some random string of characters - but that might also discourage a lot of women.
