grah4

I also agree. I've been with them for 10+ years and only had 2 or 3 issues which were solved in a few hours. Great support and an excellent company.

I remember a similar styled ad notification about a year ago for the cr-48 test in chrome & chromium dev channels.

"If you're going through hell, keep going."

First of all, congrats on getting this far. As you know, your consulting biz is a straight services play and will only grow in relation to how many employees you have. Increasing price to match demand will only get you so far (unless you're a superstar). You do have a lot of options to grow depending on what kind of work you want to do.

- Build a network and do a rev share with other freelancers with different specialities. This will allow you to offload tasks you are mediocre at and focus on what you do well. This should increase network productivity and deal flow IF you find the right people.

- Expand on the cheap. Outsource specific tasks offshore. Do not outsource entire projects. To outsource for cost, you must break down everything into small manageable pieces.

- Move into account management and client services. Find firms/other freelancers who compete on cost and distribute your work over them. Quality and profit per project will drop but you should be able to increase your project flow significantly.

IMHO the best way is to build products and move out of services.

(I've done this a few times and currently have a small network of other freelancers while I work at a bootstrapped company.)

Some tnooz coverage[1] hit my inbox which answered my question. I love the idea of room concierge and hope you guys can increase the granted request rate. Best of luck.

[1] http://www.tnooz.com/2011/11/10/news/room-77-launches-metase...

Great work!

Could you talk more about your room concierge service? Are you automating the request procedure or does the room concierge team contact the hotels?

I'm curious what the process looks like from the hotel perspective.

It is run by thinkmap.com and doesn't look like a for-profit project.

Here is the launch press release: http://www.thinkmap.com/pressrelease.jsp?id=1290

fwiw, that design pattern is called lazy registration.

I am not a gamedev but I am currently building what some would consider to be a large game[1]. It has been amazing to work in as it streamlines the development process massively. I have only spent about 20 hours with it so far and if I had chosen another engine I would not have progressed this fast.

You should take another look at Unity when v3.5 launches - they have made some advancements and fixes that are targeted for larger projects[2]. I can't wait for a better gui system and native lod support!

As for the negatives, so far I have only found the documentation to be lacking on some fronts (specifically regarding the terrain engine).

[1] http://trailsgame.com/

[2] http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Unite-11-Unity-35-De...

Not at all. The issues described in the linked post have arisen _because_ the community has grown so much and so fast over the past few years.

I think the pricing page is giving you a high ctr % because it's really the only option for a visitor to understand the product.

Perhaps you should work on your template and include a simple features page as well. CTR from features -> pricing would be more meaningful than what you have atm. The very best measure though is email subscribe opt-ins (bonus points for double opt-ins).

Although you should really have a statistically valid number of uniques to qualify the idea (a few k). Keep working on your process and generating more ideas and you'll find something with market fit!

I would use the email signup % on that page as the indicator for validity. Over 5%? Do it.

C.

We were in the same situation and settled for mispelledword.net while we were in dev - until we stumbled onto an auction for the word.com and picked it up for ~$2k. We were incredibly lucky though.

If you can't reach them or don't have the budget and that name is The One go with D.

The cobbler's children have no shoes.

sorry, i've hardcoded biz apis and can't release it without lots of sanitization. the rescuetime aspect of it is really simple though! they have a decent api and nice js embeddable widgets.

rescuetime. I put together a simple chrome extension which hijacks the newtab page and shows a biz dashboard + personal rescuetime stats/graphs. nothing gets you back to work harder than seeing that today was only 50% as productive as yesterday.

task.io expires later this month. maybe send an email to the current owner or backorder it?

Not a myth. It happened a few years ago to me for several (totally random) domains. Since then I've also changed to checking from the CLI.

Seminars about long-term thinking: http://longnow.org/seminars/

An incredible series of talks & discussions. The scope of topics covered is akin to TEDtalks. I recommend downloading the entire catalog.

edit: itunes audio http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/salt-seminars-about-long-ter...

alibaba.com and globalsources.com

As others have stated, choose a product and own that niche. There are alot of scammers and quality will vary significantly until you find a supplier you can build a good relationship with.

the noob guide to online marketing: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-noob-guide-to-online-marketin...

you will find it helpful.

pen + paper

Congrats!

You have some really nice apps. Perhaps you should try charging more?