Hang in there - you never know. Plus, I could not find a link to your app on your blog post. To say it in your own words: you aren't yelling loud enough. Keep hustling!
Oh wow, I linked to it right at the top, guess it wasn't as obvious as I thought! I'll edit to make it a little more noticable, thanks for pointing that out.
With Gmail's "new" interface, I am finding it more and more cumbersome to navigate around. I practically run my business through Gmail - so it's great to see another stab at this interface to make things more meaningful and practical. Goodluck with Fluent.
It might be a bit more helpful if you can explain what kind of people you are trying to connect with. A majority of HN has some sort of web startup experience.
I think this is where proper mentorship is extremely valuable. If the student was consistently coached from the get-go he might have pulled it off.
On that note, is there a community online where one can seek out mentorship. It doesn;t have to be a community of who's who - just some decent nice people with common sense and desire to succeed should suffice. I am at a stage where I could use some advice as well.
Bob was taught by and getting advice from one of the best teachers of entrepreneurship, if such a thing can be taught, and he was still falling short.
Not only was Bob unable to get away from himself, he wasn't able to take advice from a seasoned entrepreneur and do a 'leap of faith'. I'm sorry, but if Steve Blank gave me valuable advice and I was starting my first company you had better bet I'd do more than stare blankly at him.
Some people just have to learn some things the hard way. You can coach, advise, mentor all you want and they will just stubbornly do what they are going to do until they figure out for themselves that it's not working.
My 15 year old is like that. It's quite frustrating.
Do you have any suggestions? Currently the business model works like this:
1)A user from your target demographics signs up at your website (or install your app on her device)
2)Responds to a series of questions asked by you - and provides some actionable feedback
3)Gets paid $5/website or $10/app (we are charging $9 or $15 respectively).
If there is a way to create a better model, I would be happy to consider it. My goal is to cater to new startups and give them a number of users from their target audience so that they can get their initial testing done and get soem feedback at a comparatively lower cost.
We created BetaUsersNow.com with the goal of allowing startups get immediate access to a pool of Targeted users and immediate feedback during their beta phase. During past 7 months of our own beta phase, we have been signing up users from all walks of life and have collected their detailed demographic information - including city, state, country, Gender,Birth Year, Yearly Household Income, marital Status, Web/Computer Expertise, Web Usage on a Typical Day, Areas of Interest and device ownership (iPhone, iPad) etc. This will allow a recently launched startup to directly go to a pool of its target demographics and test products out. In a nutshell, BetaUsersNow will provide you a pool of targeted users, that fall within your target demographics, who will signnup at your website, follow your instructions to use your website, app and give you actionable feedback.
Cogratulations to the LaunchRock team. Great product - like the look, feel and ease of use. It will be interesting to see how they fare once monetization begins.
