TimothyBurgess

Suppose I want to set up an area on my startup's homepage for pretty much anyone to invest in my company - whether it's $5 or $5,000,000 - and in return they of course get a percentage of the company proportional to their investment. The process should be automated. How would I go about this?

I've done a bit of research on the matter but I must not be using the right keywords because I haven't found what I'm looking for. If there are already services out there like this, I'm not aware of them and would love to hear what you all have to say about them.

I put 8 months of hard work (70+ hrs/week on average) into my app (my first startup) and just so happen to officially release it today... which had to be coincidentally the absolute WORST time to release it.

Without telling me, my host decided to perform a file system check (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsck) and so now my server is offline for a few hours.

An hour or two ago I began telling dozens of high priority potential clients to check it out... each of which could bring in thousands of dollars per month. About 30 minutes ago I noticed the site was offline... and I'm pretty sure quite a few have tried to look at it since then. None have responded. And I'm afraid they've all gotten a bad first impression, and may never bother to check it out again.

I've sent them all messages informing them of the server maintenance and that it should be back up soon. I'm planning on sending them all another message when it's back up.

This is absolutely infuriating. It feels like 8 months of work just went down the drain because my dumbass host didn't telling me they were going to perform some maintenance.

What can I do to make sure I don't lose these clients?

Well here I am again. I've done this twice before and received from seriously amazing feedback. I couldn't have made it to this point without you awesome people here on HN providing me with helpful feedback and criticism.

The current (third) revision is a million times better than the first two... and I actually think the first was better than the second (less clutter but less information).

My first submission's feedback: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2123579

And my second submission's feedback: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2206413

(The old site may be broken now... I haven't checked and I don't care to.)

So... here's what I did...

Someone said something along the lines of "the name is terrible" (and it really was)... so I ended up spending a couple of days trying to figure out a new name. It's seriously absurd how many .com domain names are taken for resell and not used whatsoever. Out of principle I didn't even bother contacting those nimrods for a quote. I put together a long list of potential, available domain names and finally got one... and registered it for $5.

Next I had to come up with a new design. I believe someone called my 2nd revision's design "appalling" (LOL) and it most definitely was. I had my reasons for doing it like I originally did but it just didn't work as I intended. I wanted to fit pretty much all of the information on one, concise page... but it ended up looking stupid and unprofessional.

I also got rid of the demo animations and video tutorial. Those were lame too!

As for the new design, I looked around the web a while for some inspiration and found a few sites of which I felt had a lot in common with my product. I combined the look and feel of one site with the structure of another and of course added my own touch to it. Some of you may be able to recognize which sites I used as inspiration.

It took me about a week to complete the entire new front end and recreate the sign up process to be much more user friendly and match the new look. And of course I had to tie up the old back end with the new front end and do a ton of testing.

Last... I added a walkthrough for first-time users. It should guide users through the entire app enough for them to know how to use it. This needs further real world testing, I'm sure.

I've also considered adding a demo button that has all the functionality of the free trial except for the networking aspects and no data is saved after they log out... so that people can click once to try it out rather than go through the sign-up process. Maybe I could give demo users the ability to switch over to the free trial mid-demo so their data stays intact. Anyone have thoughts on that?

Oh and today I added a small feature that should scale the text for various resolutions (since the app itself is based on percentages)... I still need to add an option for users to toggle this on and off and possibly specify their own font size.

And in case anyone mentions it (as was mentioned in revision 2)... I go straight to https because users can log in on any page.

There's definitely still some more work to be done but I think I'm finally at a point where I can officially release my product into the wild. And I couldn't have made it what it is today without the help of you fine folks... so thank you. HN is truly a valuable resource.

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