First off, what is the "happy path" on this checkout page? Right, totals + shipping costs + grand totals + checkout button. What else is hiding in this element? "Promo Code: 50% off your FIRST item", emphasis mine. What this is telling the consumer, is NOT that you are signing up to the VIP program and getting a discount because of it, it's saying "hey, since you're new, we are giving you a discount".
Would a consumer walk away from the happy path with the assumption that they had signed up to a subscription in exchange for the 50% off for their first item? No.
Yes Mr. VC, the subscription info is here on the page, but the location is not an anchor. The way the page is designed is to funnel the users attention down to the continue checkout button. The product designers knew this. At least GoDaddy puts their useless up-sells in the middle of the page, but they clearly give users an ability to opt out. They don't try to fool users by hiding them on parts of the page where they know they won't look.
Wow, I just said a startup is worse than GoDaddy. Getting frosty in hell no?
I'm glad Josh is donating the money to charity, but the onus was on him to claim the bonus while he was employed.
Schedule was:
- Hang w/family from the time I got home until their bedtime, roughly 9:30 PM.
- 2 hours of work, then 30-45 min of useless TV (Family Guy or TAR)
- About 5 hours of sleep
- Another 2 hours of work before hopping on the train
Somehow I kept this up for over a year, though it has to be said that I curtailed the workload to just 2 hours a day (and a bit more sleep) over the weekend to spend more time w/the family.
I think that's the only real guidance here - as long as you can budget adequate time to recharge the batteries, then you can keep this up for the long haul. For me, hanging with the family kept me fresh, kept me sane.
With $41M, color has more than enough cash to pivot onto something that will work - but for me the real reason color hit a big fail at launch was the same reason cuil was - the level of expectation people had about the company due to the fact they raised so much/had so much hype. If color had a different name, and was written by a small hardy team from y combinator or whatever, I think people who have still had some scepticism but would have been generally positive.
I, like a lot of people, looked at that app and thought, "this is $41M of development?".
They can still pivot and do something interesting, but I think this is one of those times that "release early, release often" does not apply. It's a great app for when your at a big event, but as I asked on twitter, what if there is no there, there?
Sure, your shell account, bank website, ebay/amazon password should be very secure, secure to the point of not needing to be prompted, but does every site on the net, ie your blog, twitter, etc, need to have a min of 8 characters w/at least one number and one capital?
Oh, agree with everyone here on the creepiness factor here...
With a street number, and a zip/postal code, you can get Street Name, City, and State in one fell swoop.
In one case I was able to find the guys new Paypal account, but they refused to go after him.
Agree that Paypal has a lot of challenges to run their business, but I disagree that the bulk of risk is being taken by them...
I'd love to get some feedback from the HN community about my startup. We are a mostly bootstrapped crew of ex-Apache guys, who wanted to solve a problem with search in the "real time/social" era.http://www.nsyght.comThe goal was to give people the ability to perform real time and archival searches across their social graph. This includes the ability to perform faceted searches, searching only...
Granted FB's first homepage was ugly, but as other have commented solid engineering != good design skills. We've all been there. ;)
I think lost in all this is regardless how easy it is to create a company in the UK, you still have to deal with European taxes and completely moronic banks.
If you have a cool service, then find a way to get people to tweet about it. imho, a far more relevant way to drive awareness.
However, I felt the same about the AppleTV and the iphone, but still ended up buying both once I knew they were hackable.
Personally though, I prefer acupuncture, which is also available via the NHS.
Any feedback on the product?
nsyght is a different kind of social aggregator. While similar to Friendfeed and Cliqset, nsyght is not trying to replace social networks, but to enhance them. We are able to not only aggregate your own social information, but also information from your friends, even if they are not nsyght users. So, instead of joining nsyght and being forced to spend time re-friending people you already...