Probably not the best title but I enjoyed the article. I always like hearing what tools other founders use.
ps. all you project manager makers TODO list startups, listen up. Your app is not a project management app until it has dependencies. If you don't have dependenies you are just a TODO list; Basecamp, I'm looking at you ;)
I'm sorry, but this is terrible advice. Unless you have considerable savings you should always take a salary.
When I was 27 I raised 1mil in an angel round. I was just out of college (I'm a vet so my college was delayed while I served) and was flat broke. I was 'advised' to take a minimal salary and proceeded to bring on 12 employees all who made most money that I.
2 years later when we ran out of money I had zero dollars in the bank (zero). I had no savings, I had no safety net. I was F'd. I spent 6 months homeless traveling with a circus to save enough money to move back to Chicago.
It is my personal advice that you take a minimum salary, rent, food, bills, and have the company pay you $500/month into a savings account that vests when you leave the company. Doing this one thing will give you some peace of mind that when this wonderful ride comes to an end that you will at least have some money in the bank to make your way again.
I am all for ramen-rich I think it is actually a good thing but I am here to tell you that if you don't take care of yourself financially you are setting yourself up for huge failure if/when the money goes away.
Personally, I would like ALL angels, VC's and incubators offer young entrepreneurs these 'bronze parachutes'. You don't have to pay them much right now but I do feel you need to make sure they, at the very least, don't crash and burn if the second round of funding doesn't come through.
Create a button that says 'track now' or some other call to action.
How about 5 or so entry fields for tracking numbers and a button to "Create Dashboard" to track all of the at once? You'd get back a page with a long universally unique random URL that you can bookmark.
Once on the Dashboard, give the user the option to password-protect the page by registering.
I would agree with this. Leaving town is a big part of the college experience. I moved to Chicago (from Kansas) to go to school and when I finished a lot of my friends where, yep, still in Kansas.
haven't had a chance to look at the other pages but the design of the landing is nice and clean. Within 5 seconds I knew exactly what it was and what it did.
I'd be curious of your abandon rate on your signup page. I'd A/B a 2 page form. Page 1 put the fun stuff name, url, timezone. Page 2 put the personal stuff.
lastly, the 'name' field is confusing. Changing it to 'project name' or 'company name' would help. I bet a lot of people just type their own name without reading the form instructions.
First of all, thanks for your comments about the homepage! Good idea regarding changing "Name" to something else, we've gone ahead and changed it to "Company Name" to see if that makes it easier to understand when signing up.
As for A/B testing the sign up page, a 2 part sign up process is something that we've considered and will most probably look in to when we develop a proper sign up process for when we launch publicly (with a pricing model).
Thanks for all your thoughts, we really appreciate them!
Question: Bringing in $3600 and only profiting $400; was the whole thing worth it in the end?