Posted by Luca on March 9th
Not much to say really today, but I have come across some interesting essays about startups and the initial ’idea’ for your product. Paul Graham made his dosh by creating a platform for creating online stores (in Lisp, yes he must be crazy) and selling it to Yahoo! in 1998 for nearly $50 million worth of stock (nice!).
He then started writing a number of essays about various subjects on his website. In 2005 he decided to start his own startup funding firm Y Combinator which provides seed-stage funding for startups, specifically run by young people.
Anyway, onto the essays. The first is called How to Start a Startup a gives a nice insight into what things need to be done and how to get there (it also gives a nice overview of the various types of funding available if you are not sure on those). The second is called Ideas for Startups and discusses how to come up with the initial idea. One thing I like (and what we are doing with Juvely) is that he points out that a completely new idea is not needed, but just to do better than what other people are doing.
If you are remotely interested in how startups work or interested in starting your own I suggest you give the essays a read. Unfortunately essay is the correct term rather than article as they are rather long, but they do provide a lot of interesting information.
Posted by Luca on March 5th
Right, as you may have noticed on the right hand side we now have some (evil) Google Ads. I decided to put these up as a little experiment because I am not really convinced that you can make money out of them…
Now you have probably heard all of the stories about Google not paying people who use their ads - I have too, and know of a friend who had this experience. He got the $100 over about 3 months but didn’t recieve any cheque, a little while later he reiceved an email from Google saying that they believed somebody have been clicking the ads too much.
Also I am not really convinced as to why people would actually click on ads. The only ads I usually click on are in Gmail as they usually match my emails quite well. Anyway, this is what I expect my experiement to shed some light on.
Another important factor with ads is placement. I wanted the ads to fit in nicely with the site so I put them in the sidebar and opted to have text ads only. Unfortunately the Adsense docs say that the place I have put it in is probably the worst place to generate clicks. Oh well.
Anyway, a few calculations. During Febuary we had between 50 - 100 page views per week, by looking at other peoples views per click ratio it is around 2%, so if we are lucky we shall get 2 clicks a week. Woo….
So far it doesn’t look like we shall be making any money out of these ads. We are a fairly small site at the moment, so that has a great deal of it, but more often that not it is the small sites that need the revenue.
Within 48 hours we should have some ‘targetted’ ads, so lets see what we get…. I will report pack in about a week with the results.
Posted by James on March 2nd
I’m not dead, I’ve been extremely busy with university so apologies for not updating the blog in a while, however i feel compelled as some people are wondering what the status of the app is, in this post ill try to make it a bit clearer.
On the development side things are making progress at a steady pace, we decided to scrap our own MVC system and use CakePHP instead as Luca has previously mentioned, this has done wonders and has speed up the development process quite a lot. We are still coming up with features which need to be implemented, however we don’t want to bloat the app, so careful consideration goes into the features we select.
On the design side of things, we have the main interface ready, we are now spending time designing other elements, such as forms, how things are going to be displayed etc. This is taking time because we want to keep it simple, elegant and gain the best usability possible.
Thats about all there is for now! Once we make more progress i will let you know!