

 Lessons of Y Combinator: Things I’d do differently after 2 startups - babul
http://gigaom.com/2008/04/02/ycombinator/

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axod
I hate to be a downer, but sometimes these things don't sit right with me.
"After successfully launching their consumer offering (7% week-over-week
growth!)"

Why are the traffic charts essentially flat for the last 6 months, or worse on
quantcast.

I think "3. We didn’t spend enough time on marketing" is probably the most
important, but then I'm not convinced the idea is "sticky" enough in the first
place.

Still an interesting read though :)

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mrtron
I use their product and haven't visited the site in months. I just look at the
weekly summaries to get a decent picture of how productive my week was (hours
in work opposed to waste of time).

Traffic to their site is not nearly as useful as their signups growth is for
statistics.

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axod
Fair point. Might be worth having the application show something from the
website, so that website stats are more representative, or at least look more
impressive :)

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mrtron
You are starting to sound like a lot of the big web portals out there.

'Let's break an article into 10 pages so we get 10 times the hits!'

'Let's turn that AJAX gallery that loads really quick into separate pages so
we get way better traffic scores!'

In jest to you - but they really have those types of meetings.

~~~
axod
Again, fair point :) As long as the subscriber numbers are good, that's cool.
I'm used to looking at websites rather than desktop software so it's a whole
different game.

Also depends on their strategy. I'd expect the summary to display some
recommendations from a website, maybe some recommended software (adverts), etc
Maybe some social networking - "Here's some people who have similar usage
patterns to you. Go chat."

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augustus
Not sure I would ever pay for software to tell me where I am spending my time.

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jfarmer
No, but your boss would.

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gms
Not exactly making the world a better place, is it.

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coglethorpe
I loved the landing page design. Great layout, big red call to action buttons,
multi-column displays... That alone got me to sign up.

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josefresco
Their web designers went to the "let's see how close we can get to a 37signals
design" school apparently.

I've seen it 100 times and it's always boring.

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jfornear
I wouldn't blame the designers directly. In my experience designers tend to be
pressured into trendy styles. The 37signals look just happens to be what's in
right now.

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redorb
I think the group version could be cool, and might be worth paying for...
Think as a project manager you can see how exactly everyone is doing - I.E.
the designer spending 30% of each day researching design, and 20% in
photoshop... just sounds neat, Im trying the personal version for sure!

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a-priori
It does, however, have the potential for being an employee's worst nightmare
in the hands of a micromanaging boss. That's my concern with it being used in
a corporate environment.

"Why did you spend 31 minutes 40 seconds reading 'Hacker News' today?!?" "Gee,
boss, because sometimes I need a break..."

However, that's not Rescue Time's fault.

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edw519
This is a great post with a lot of good data that oughta be very interesting
to people here. Possibly the best kind of post we could have. I'd like to see
a lot more of these. Thanks, Tony!

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DenisM
Tony writes plenty of good stuff on his blog over here:
<http://www.tonywright.com/>

In terms of amount-of-insight/word his blog is perhaps the most informative I
follow.

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mleonhard
I'm reluctant to have my data stored on their server. If it's software that I
run on my PC, why does it need to save its data on their system?

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bob_dole
Things we did right: "didn't focus on internet marketing" - Things we did
wrong: "didn't do enough marketing"

:/

