The majority of survey takers do so for personal monetary gain, not for charity. That's why practically all survey sites give points which can be converted into cash and gift cards. Now I'm not saying that eval.me will be unable to find users and companies to use its service (I'm positive it will), but my guess is that it will pale in comparison to traditional survey operations. But I do hope that I'm wrong and that eval.me becomes a great success.
There is a fine line and in my experience with a venture revolving around "portion to charity" model, it all comes down to one thing, your demographic users. I co-founded a startup (handled the tech) for an auction site where we promised HALF of every dollar we made would make to to charity. It was a risk to start and we knew that, but seeing as it hadn't been done, I can now say that at least I tried. It cost us so [insert frustrating word] much more to run the company, handle support, produce the product, market, mitigate fraud and deal with people trying to game the system than was worth it to even the charities involvement. We even took the steps to become a Commercial Fundraiser and be bonded in the states we operated to instill confidence in our users which ended up being a stark realization of why more companies dont do charitable acts, because theres so much in the way of doing good in this world when it comes to proper legal way of doing things.
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.
Interesting idea... I actually quite like the concept. I'm seeing this as more of an activist site than a sustainable business, though. What's to stop companies from just counting the respondents in their existing survey systems and just making their own donations?
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.
Nothing stops companies from doing their own survey system, and then counting responses and making charity donations.
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.
I second this idea... I've come across a few studies that say pinpointing exactly where/to whom the money will go goes a long way to increasing donations.
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 :)
It's always the response I get whenever I talk about a side-project I'm working on. "Oh, that's been done before." It immediately takes the wind out of my sail. It seems like schadenfreude to me. Don't tell me about other similar apps unless you know something about them. And if you know something about them, be helpful and tell me what you don't like about those solutions. Otherwise I'd prefer you just keep to yourself about it.
I think most of the comments so far are missing the mark. This article is about leaving the working world and building something on your own.
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.
> 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.
First and foremost, congrats on shipping your mvp (even though it went a little late by your original timeline), I hope it sustains well. Like others have said, the video is great and design is consistent and appealing - great work and thanks for sharing your story.
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.
This is ancillary to the effort, but I think it's interesting. So here goes, I am not certain about skewing the pool less than more prize-based incentives -- as opposed to somewhat evenly. However, I definitely agree with the implied concept that the resulting pool will yield more carefully completed (and hence more useful/accurate) survey results.
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.
Drop the drop shadow and the wooden floor background. Don't use 298301pt fonts for the headings.
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.
Laminate flooring as a site background was never a good idea. Dark text (#444444 or darker) and light, non-photo background. That alone will get you 95% of the way there.
Or, rather "I don't know if I agree that MVP's need to work well or even at all for over half the people using it."
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.
First, over half of people do not use IE8, so not sure where that stat is coming from. Second, not sure I'd call FF or Chrome niche.
Not paying too much attention to IE (IE8 specifically) is a strategy worth doing. It's a pain in the ass to support IE8 and not worth the extra development time in the short term. Plus, not sure if this applies to this startup (I'd say it does), users like those in HN (the majority of whom use FF or Chrome) are the users you want initially to use and support your startup. If they like it, they become quite the dedicated user, which really helps to get your startup off the ground initially. So targeting FF and Chrome users is hardly a bad strategy for release 1. Adding IE8 in the mix is way more frustration than it's worth.
Would it make you happier if I said 1/3? Is that a reasonable fraction of your potential userbase to leave with a bad impression of your business?
You make it sound like supporting Internet Explorer is difficult. If it's 2003, then yes, I'll agree with you. But today it's not.
Supporting IE in 2011 is a matter of building your site against Chrome while not going out of your way to use non-standard things like Object.keys, localStorage or Canvas when you can avoid them. Then you test on IE7, notice your corners aren't rounded, and decide you can live with that.
If, on the other hand, you go out of your way to cram in as much HTML5 nonsense as you can fit, or refuse to spend a few minutes getting IE to render, you need to realize that you're not taking a stand. You're just being lazy.
But then at the end of the day it's your business, so you're well within your rights to be lazy. You may or may not make less money as a result, but then again that's nobody's business but your own.
Good UI. I'd say, however (from a business model standpoint), with prices out there in the in-between 'almost free' (see: Amazon's Mechanical Turk; http://aws.amazon.com/pricing/mturk/) and the 'great value' range (see: Survey Monkey; http://www.surveymonkey.com/pricing/details), your per-customer costs might be a touch overly-ambitious.
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 am somewhat skeptical of charities so I use http://www.givewell.org to find the one that most effectively uses the money. I would suggest you research thoroughly the charities you work with so the money is actually put to good use.
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?
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.
Congrats on getting your MVP up and running. That's a big accomplishment.
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!
Your thoughts are spot on. I am a technical guy who is trying to bootstrap my startup.
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.
I agree. However, freelancing takes a bunch of time and focus and it's up to you to make sure you still give your startup enough focus. Otherwise, it may be better to take a lax job instead.
I like the idea, but I believe there are some issues.
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.
>> 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
I had the same reaction. I got excited to hear what was coming and then felt let down.
Pricing: It may be a lot but I think every customer's opinion should be worth at least $1.25. If a company does not value their customer's opinion that much, they shouldn't send the survey.
Sample: I would argue the sample is already skewed towards people who either love or hate your product.
I think the charity component skews it less because the act of giving your time and opinion is very similar to the act of giving to charity. Hence, more of your customers can connect with that charitable act than say, entering a drawing for a prize.
Video: I am sorry you were disappointed about it not being an in person survey system. That was not my intent.
3. There is more information on the About page, but I think you're looking for a feature comparison page. That's a great idea and I will get on it.
4. The results is a webpage report, with the option of downloading it to excel.
Personal: Customer feedback is very important to me and if I am online I want any customer to be able to talk to me directly immediately.
I was a market research for a couple of years, and 1,25$ per completed survey is cheap if you don't manage your own panel database.
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.
Indeed. I also took issue with the insinuation that working for other people always results in your job becoming "soul sucking". I can be creative, innovative and be constantly learning new things while working with incredible people at my current employer thank you very much.
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.
Yeah, I agree. I'm really happy for the author to launch his product. It's an amazing feeling. However, I think it's important to stress that quitting your job to do this is not the only way for us to do this (as he says in the article.)
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.
I think maybe people are reading into it a but. I understood what you meant. I've been there. Jobs just feel that way, every single one I've had felt that way. There's a certain audience that this is probably directed to and we agree. You were pretty general with some of your statements and it was a good post as far as inspiring others to get out and chase that dream by sharing your experience. In terms of who I assume the intended audience was, I think it was a great post. Just not for everyone. Everything is relative.
Not to be "that guy," but the font you're using everywhere for your headers (which is called "Gothic" in the CSS) appears to be "Knockout" from Hoefler & Frere-Jones. The license for that font — as well as all of their fonts for that matter — isn't currently web-embeddable[1]. So either I'm wrong and you've got an extremely good replica font (maybe a little too good), or you're using a font against its license.
HTF Knockout (c) 1994-7 The Hoefler Type Foundry, Inc. http://www.typography.com
This is an easy mistake to make (you buy the font, you figure, "why not just stick it in the CSS; after all, if I could just make a PNG in Photoshop for each header, isn't this just a cleaner way to do it?"
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.
I am going to pitch for you. Let me know if I can help in any manner. I will surely spread the word etc. But if anything extra is needed, feel free.
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.
Here are my thoughts from someone who has been in the market research industry for 10 years:
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.
tchock23: I am working on something tangential to the MR industry, and would love to hear some thoughts from you on what I am building. How do I contact you?
That's exactly what I mean... If you can have the tools you have already built sitting on top of a large panel of people who are willing to participate in these surveys for charity then you have the recipe for longer-term success in the industry, as well as a competitive differentiator over the next guy who comes along and builds a low-cost survey tool. Check out SurveyBuilder (www.surveybuilder.com) for an example of what I'm talking about.
112 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 195 ms ] threadAll 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.
This is hard to test before having a product because most companies will say they would donate to charity, but then do not when it comes down to it.
I will let you know how it goes.
Thanks again.
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.
- Answer this survey, feed a child for a week
- Answer this survey, a village can buy a goat
etc
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 :)
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.
> 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>
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.
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.
If you have any other suggestions, please email me (flaviu@eval.me)
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
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.
Not paying too much attention to IE (IE8 specifically) is a strategy worth doing. It's a pain in the ass to support IE8 and not worth the extra development time in the short term. Plus, not sure if this applies to this startup (I'd say it does), users like those in HN (the majority of whom use FF or Chrome) are the users you want initially to use and support your startup. If they like it, they become quite the dedicated user, which really helps to get your startup off the ground initially. So targeting FF and Chrome users is hardly a bad strategy for release 1. Adding IE8 in the mix is way more frustration than it's worth.
You make it sound like supporting Internet Explorer is difficult. If it's 2003, then yes, I'll agree with you. But today it's not.
Supporting IE in 2011 is a matter of building your site against Chrome while not going out of your way to use non-standard things like Object.keys, localStorage or Canvas when you can avoid them. Then you test on IE7, notice your corners aren't rounded, and decide you can live with that.
If, on the other hand, you go out of your way to cram in as much HTML5 nonsense as you can fit, or refuse to spend a few minutes getting IE to render, you need to realize that you're not taking a stand. You're just being lazy.
But then at the end of the day it's your business, so you're well within your rights to be lazy. You may or may not make less money as a result, but then again that's nobody's business but your own.
All the best.
I would go as far to say that I would place a badge on my website to encourage users not to use IE, but use Chrome instead.
The charity niche is pretty rad tho. You may increase your chances of capturing a piece of the market if you exploit that benefit.
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.
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.
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.
I had the same reaction. I got excited to hear what was coming and then felt let down.
Pricing: It may be a lot but I think every customer's opinion should be worth at least $1.25. If a company does not value their customer's opinion that much, they shouldn't send the survey.
Sample: I would argue the sample is already skewed towards people who either love or hate your product. I think the charity component skews it less because the act of giving your time and opinion is very similar to the act of giving to charity. Hence, more of your customers can connect with that charitable act than say, entering a drawing for a prize.
Video: I am sorry you were disappointed about it not being an in person survey system. That was not my intent.
Personal: Customer feedback is very important to me and if I am online I want any customer to be able to talk to me directly immediately.We paid around 3.50$ 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.
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.
Lot's of people quit their jobs for their startups.
It helps some people: http://carlosedp.com/posts/some-people-need-challenges-to-gr...
(He mentioned it in this discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3328761)
[1] http://www.typography.com/ask/faq.php#Ft_10 - choose #20
If it's not "Knockout", I'd love to know what it actually is. Always need more good fonts.
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.
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.
There's a typo on your about page: anually -> annually.
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.
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?