It's always a brave decision to start a business, but this entire article reeks of the author trying convince/justify to themselves this risky decision.
From the article:
> [Staying with your job and working on your idea at nights and weekends] seems to be an option because you always hear about ventures starting out as side-projects built on late nights and weekends. Well, I only have a few hours of focus every day. By midnight, I just blankly stare at my screen. Maybe it works for you, but it took me 2 years to figure out it does not work for me.
You know, some of us make it work for the same reason the author quit his job: We don't feel there is another good option. I have 2 kids, wife stays home, and we have a mortgage. I don't feel I have any choice but to keep my full time job. So we make it work. (Yesterday I worked a solid day at my company, came home, ate dinner, spent some time with both the kids and my wife, then put in a solid 8 hours on my own product trying to touch up the marketing site and get a major new feature up for some new customers. I got to bed a little after 5 AM. It's hard work, but again, I feel it's this or nothing.)
The only recommendation I would make to someone who feels they must quit their job in order to do a project like this: You may want to try and find a better company to work for that is more compatible with this sort of work and your goals. Flexible schedule and an understanding manager, for example, makes a huge difference. That allows you to work all night when you've got the urge, motivation, or potential customer, and still be successful in the job that pays the mortgage. In 4 years at my last job, I was never able to get a product of my own out the door. I had one out the door within about 7 months of joining the consulting company I work for now.
As for self-justification, I don't think my blog post is any more self-righteousness than your comment.
It helps some people: http://carlosedp.com/posts/some-people-need-challenges-to-gr...
Lot's of people quit their jobs for their startups.
I switched to the tab, said "Ouch, my eyes," and left.
FWIW, I went back and took a screenshot, it currently looks like this for me: http://jlarocco.com/crap/ouch_my_eyes.jpg
If you send me the CSS code that would help make it more readable, I'll make it live.
Not to be disrespectful, just helpful, but I'd start with these three simple things. Right now the page looks tacky and doesn't invite you to read the content.
The piece itself is great by the way.
Without going into your css, perhaps just create a semi transparent white panel behind the text. It's a lovely site otherwise.
[1] http://www.typography.com/ask/faq.php#Ft_10 - choose #20
HTF Knockout (c) 1994-7 The Hoefler Type Foundry, Inc. http://www.typography.com
It's also a terrible, terrible mistake, because you're not just abusing the license, you're also publishing HF+J's font.
They should fix this now. Just kill the font declarations.
If it's not "Knockout", I'd love to know what it actually is. Always need more good fonts.
I apologize for any harm I may have caused with the previous font. Please let me know if you are having trouble viewing the font.
1. First off, congrats on quitting and going full-steam ahead on something you're clearly passionate about. That's a huge accomplishment on its own. The "having no regrets" part of it is especially important.
2. The charity element is a differentiator, but you're going to have to work hard to beat some existing initiatives in the industry (Op4g - www.op4g.com - is the one that comes to mind first). The MR industry has a bit of an "old boys club" feel to it, and there is a flood of DIY survey tools coming out each day that make it harder and harder to break through the noise.
3. I would spend some time on your site explaining why compelling people to participate through charities is better than direct cash incentives. There is a ton of great research on intrinsic motivation out there that supports this idea, with the book "Drive" by Dan Pink being one of the best summaries of why this concept works. However, your potential customers are not going to understand why that works to generate higher quality responses (as evidenced by some of the comments here on HN).
4. If you're truly in this for the long-haul, I would try hard to build your own panel of respondents underneath this. That is going to take you a lot of time to do, but it's going to be the only thing that separates you in the long-term from all the other DIY survey tools. Plus, if you ever try to sell the business the value of it will be substantially higher to a potential acquirer.
Just my two cents... You're off to a great start!
3. I will do that. Maybe a feature comparison page. Good suggestion.
4. What do you mean by a "panel of respondents" ? Do you mean that I would have people of different demographic areas taking public surveys?
PRICING 1) 1,25 $ is a lot of money for one (1) completed survey. 2) What prevents a company from doing this themselves (is your added value worth 0.25 $ per survey?)
SAMPLE 1) Charities are arguably not the best motivator for people. 2) In a world focused on the right metrics, your surveys automatically incorporate a bias into the results by only selecting those people who care about charity (to put it very blunt and stereotypical, you will only get tree hugging hippies). Same goes for prizes, but a prize is less about the core identity of your respondent (not a belief).
PITCH VIDEO 1) I felt a world-changing idea when you talked about "in person", was kind of disappointed when I realized it's still a survey with a different incentive 2) Half of the people a survey got mailed to don't respond. That's not a disadvantage, it's an awesome conversion rate. 3) I can't find any information except for that video (maybe a use case). 4) I don't really see a benefit for me as a user. Let's say deliverables: will you give me an SPSS database, a report, an analysis, can I import it in excel?, will it even have forms or is it just a way to give an incentive. Lot's of unanswered questions.
PERSONAL 1) Love the chat box and the 'I'm a real person and founder' part. Not sure how long you will keep it up :). 2) I like that you as a person are part of the brand, something very potent.
Pricing: It may be a lot but I think every customer's opinion should be worth at least $1.25. If a company does not value their customer's opinion that much, they shouldn't send the survey.
Sample: I would argue the sample is already skewed towards people who either love or hate your product. I think the charity component skews it less because the act of giving your time and opinion is very similar to the act of giving to charity. Hence, more of your customers can connect with that charitable act than say, entering a drawing for a prize.
Video: I am sorry you were disappointed about it not being an in person survey system. That was not my intent.
3. There is more information on the About page, but I think you're looking for a feature comparison page. That's a great idea and I will get on it.
4. The results is a webpage report, with the option of downloading it to excel.
We paid around 3.50$ per respondent (french speaking adults in Quebec) and it was significantly more for specific attributes. We used GMI for our samples. Phones survey were more expensive, something like 0.25$/question/respondent.
I had the same reaction. I got excited to hear what was coming and then felt let down.
1. evaluate.me or evaluate.it would be easier to remember.
2. I don't see why anyone would pay $1.25 per response. If I have 10,000 customers, you think I'm willing to potentially put up $10,000 for charity and give you $2,500 to have them fill out a short online form? I don't know...
3. This is way too much for something that should basically be free, since it's very trivial, there are tons of free services around, or it's not hard to whip up even for Joe's PHP loving cousin.
4. The fact that $1 of $1.25 goes to a charity is even more in my face annoying. It's sending the message that you don't really want all my money, instead you're giving my money away. Given that you're so small, it sends the message that you will go out of business soon.
5. You could say that the $1 is there to get people to fill out the survey. But wouldn't people just fill it out just to send the $1 to charity with junk answers, as you mention in your video wrt the iPad?
6. In the video you say that if I just do the survey per email for free myself, less than half will respond? In a pitch, I interpret "less than half" as "about half". That sounds pretty good, I wouldn't think more would respond anyway, and email is free! Anyway, I think you should change the text of the pitch.
Good luck!
1. I thought shorter = better in domain names. No?
2. It's an interesting point. Some think it's too much. Some told me it's too little. This covers credit card charges as well. Anything less than $1 donated is not worth it (hence why iPhone apps are .99).
3. By that reasoning any software should be free. But I would like to continue eating and sleeping in a bed at the same time.
4. Interesting point. I hadn't thought about it sending that message.
5. The research I looked at shows that if the company does a selfless act, their customers are more likely to be genuine in their acts. So, while you might give trash answers to get in to an iPad drawing, you're less likely to do that for the Red Cross to get a $1. Basically, people who like giving to charity typically aren't the type to give junk answers to surveys.
6. Response rates vary by industry. The university I worked at had a 80% response rate, whereas a local bank has a 10% response rate. So I tried to use an average response rate.
Thanks again for the feedback.
Note also that Apple batch up purchases to squeeze every last cent out of the charging process.
Have you looked at Dwolla's under $10 is free offer? As a UK guy, I haven't looked into it much yet so it may not be appropriate.
Best of luck with your endeavour.
All that said, about 8 months into the venture (and at the end of what we had left in the bank) I sent out this survey with the responses highlighted: http://9mtr.co/2v0S2X1C3G093t06273Y
As you can see, people responded with the best intention, but in the end, could care less. My point here is know your audience before you bank it all. We did our homework and found similar research that showed it might just work as well, but finding those people may be harder than you think, so don't underestimate the work involved. Regardless I wish you all the good luck and karma in the world to make this planet a better place.
However, you're at a point in your business's life where things might get dicey. I think you'll find that the business grows slower than you might hope, and no amount of coding will change that. For bootstrappers, it's just the way it goes. You're not going to spend $10,000 on ads, so you just have to do things the slow way (talking to bloggers, writing articles, posting on forums, etc, etc).
Your business will still require a lot of work from you, but at this stage it also requires time overall for people to hear about it, find it, leave, and come back later when they hear about it again. You have to give it time to grow and that means providing yourself with income. Maybe think about getting a job or doing freelancing. I know you said jobs require too much mental energy, but once the MVP is launched, you can dial back on the coding. You have to dial up the selling, but I've found this to be possible in parallel with a normal job, especially if selling doesn't involve phone calls and is just you emailing bloggers.
Anyways, I'm sure you'll find your way. Good luck!
I have an MVP which I have been testing with early users. But scaling up marketing is the really hard bit. It is something which will take time, because its not really in your control. You have to keep showing up in the right places in tasteful ways.
And then people _may_ convert.
But I think it all can be done with a side income. Right now, if you have web-development + mobile skills, getting freelance jobs to pay the bills is not a bad option.
A few thoughts I had while perusing eval.me:
1. There doesn't seem to be information about what charities you partnered with on the anonymous site pages. I suppose this could be contractual, but it was one of the first questions I had.
2. I was confused by the use of "Sign Up" and "Sign In" together; at first glance I thought there was an issue with your site and there were two Sign Up buttons. Maybe "Sign Up" and "Login" or "Register" and "Sign In"?
3. I haven't investigated thoroughly, but wouldn't a charitable incentive inherently skew your survey pool? Although upon consideration, a product-based incentive may do the same thing - just in a different direction.
1. Somebody else had mentioned this and I am working on it. Currently, the list of charities will show up when you create the survey and you have to select 5 of 20 charities.
2. This is a great suggestion. I wil A/B test whether Register or Sign Up gets more sign ups to be able to decide which is better.
3. Product based incentives are a great idea. I am not entirely sure how I would implement that though.
As for skewing the survey pool, I would argue the pool is already skewed towards people who either love or hate your product.
I think the charity component skews it less because the act of giving your time and opinion is very similar to the act of giving to charity. Hence, more of your customers can connect with that charitable act than say, entering a drawing for a prize.
And before we deviate too far from the core point of the thread, I'll simply echo my earlier sentiment regarding the act of quitting for a startup: great job so far, and good luck moving forward.
That's a good idea to give customers the option to do it on their own. However, in that case I cannot guarantee to their respondents that the company will make good on their promise.
Kudos to separate processing however.
That's what you're saying if you decide not to support the current most popular web browser. Like it or not, you need to build things for the platform your users are on. If I were building a product, I'd make sure it works in IE first and foremost before worrying about niche browsers like FF and Chrome.
Just because 100% of the people here use one of those two "niche" browsers as their main browser, don't assume your users will.
Criticism: The problem you are trying to solve is the lack of quality in online surveys. The way to improve the quality of the surveys is by enabling users to chose a charity wich will receive 1$. This doesn't really make sense to me. Can you rpove there is any correlation between both of these two elements and how do you mesure quality?
The correlation goes more like this:
Scenario 1: Company wants to take 20 minutes to complete their survey so they make more money. You delete it.
Scenario 2: Company wants you to take a 5 question survey, and they will donate $1 to a charity of your choice if you do it. You are more likely to actually take it because the company showed they're willing to do something selfless in return for your selfless act.
I think it's a good way to teach yourself to be "lean" (in the parlance of our times)
- Answer this survey, feed a child for a week
- Answer this survey, a village can buy a goat
etc
I'm sure that you put a lot of time into this post, so you shouldn't distract from the content by having a design that makes it harder to read.
And if you are wondering why I am ready to help, I have a personal selfish motive, Learning, Working with smart ass guys like you. So we have a fair deal.
The charity niche is pretty rad tho. You may increase your chances of capturing a piece of the market if you exploit that benefit.
I'm really glad you're propagating an idea that will raise a lot of money for charity, but I don't fully see how this can become a profit making business.
However, this is a service already built to do that and it may save them the time and money to build their own.
Moreover, customer feedback often needs to be anonymous. So, if the company runs it, the customer may not feel as comfortable sharing their true opinion. A third party would be more desirable in those cases.
Suddenly, an idea - what if you let charities request to be included in your service? Once a charity is on-board, they have a great incentive to tell people about you, link to you and so on.
I want to keep it manageable for my users. If you give a user infinite options, they will be overwhelmed. So, I am not entirely sure how to strike that balance.
Currently a company chooses 5 of 20 charities, and their customers choose 1 of those 5.
Lesson Learned: I thought you just pay and a video gets made. But there's a bunch more work I had to put in, like write the exact script, and make sure the story boards matched that script.
Same goes for design. You want the designer to have some creative freedom, but also enough guidelines to make what you want. I had already designed the site and logo and most of the functionality myself, so the designer had an easier time improving upon the ugly design I had made :)
There's a typo on your about page: anually -> annually.
For anyone interested, I am organizing a Startup Meetup in Cluj on Dec. 20: http://www.meetup.com/cluj-rb/events/43578682/
> Finishing the MVP is Priority #1. At all times. Anything else is a distraction: hackernews, twitter, food, sleep, gmail, friends. Saying no is hard (...)
I quit my day job in 2010 to work on my first web startup and to help fellow startuppers (and would-be ones) overcoming procrastination:
<on-topic-shameless-plug>
asaclock, an anti-procrastination web community for startup single founders and people working on side projects.
</on-topic-shameless-plug>
It's quite impressive that the author has completed their first project in just 4 months. The article provides a good dose of motivation to anyone teetering on the edge of pursuing the start up life.
It's great to hear about these stories on HN, everyone started somewhere and it's great to see the process.
Beer doesn't fit, sorry :)
Seriously, the expression is the other way around - What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger.