
My experiment gone startup... - mdolon
http://www.devgrow.com/
======
benhoyt
Nice look, though my first thought was, "Oh, it's just News.YC with a sweet
logo." Has some cool features that News.YC doesn't, but also seems a bit too
complicated. Do you intend to compete with News.YC, or try to gather a
different user base, or none of the above?

~~~
mdolon
Well, I'd like to gather a similar user base to sites like GoBigNetwork (.com)
and Vator.tv, while encouraging the great discussions had at places like
news.yc and Reddit.

Just a place to showcase your companies, write about any of your experiences
and have thoughtful discussions.

Which features do you think are somewhat complicated? I know I started off
with a lot of features (which may not have been too wise), but I tried to keep
it as simple as possible.

That said, I am very, very open to suggestions and will mold the site around
the community, not the other way around.

~~~
benhoyt
I guess it just seemed like quite a lot was going on right on the home page --
too much for me to get my head around all at once. It's possible you're trying
to achieve too much: discussions/comments like News.YC, longer articles,
featured member pages, job openings, generic wiki, etc. Perhaps not; maybe
just simplifying the home page a bit would help my perception.

------
mdolon
I started this off 1.5 months ago as a project to work on while I learn Ruby
on Rails. I think it turned out decently, so I've decided to share it with the
world.

Use the invite code "yconvicts" to register. :) Please let me know what you
think, I would love some feedback!!

Also be sure to check your spam filters to see if the activation email got
caught, I'm still working on that issue (pointers would be appreciated!).
Thanks! =)

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Do you have spf records for your domain set up optimally? It looks like you
have 'v=spf1 mx ~all'. You could switch the ~all to -all and turn the soft
fail into a hard fail.

~~~
mdolon
Thanks, I've changed the SPF records like you suggested. I'm using my other
server as the mail server since I was having some weird issues with the one at
DevGrow.

Whenever I would send an email from the DevGrow mail server, it would go
straight to spam in Hotmail/MSN. In Gmail, it would go to the inbox unless the
body of the email had my domain name in it, which essentially meant all useful
emails would go to the spam filter.

I haven't figured out why that is happening or how to fix it, so I've
temporarily resorted to using my other mail server. I'm using SoftLayer for
hosting if you're curious, but their support seems to be taking a vacation
(maybe just from my question?).

~~~
sbraford
Nice first RoR app. =) Mine was much less slick.

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BrandonM
While making a cursory clickthrough to your site, the first thing I noticed
was that higher-than-default font sizes flows outside the divs and disappear.
I have seen this on several sites (even some large ones), but that doesn't
change the fact that it's a bit bothersome. I just wanted to let you know in
case you weren't aware of the issue.

------
myoung8
Just curious, how do you plan on sustaining it?

I realize not everything has to be a business. It would be great if people
just provided us with things for free out of their own charity, but not
everyone can do that forever...

~~~
mdolon
I'm hoping to get support the site with advertising and sponsors, preferably
from startups and from VCs. It's not a YouTube-like site where I'm expecting
multi-million pageviews a day, but I think building a small yet strong
community of entrepreneurs and VCs may be an attractive place for either of
these groups to advertise in.

Edit: I'm not trying to break anyones bank or wallet here, if the community
can be built up, I would just like to keep it self-sustaining, meaning paying
for the dedicated server. Like I said, this was just an experiment - I am
working on another project I hope to release as my primary source of income.

~~~
myoung8
The trouble with getting VCs to advertise is that their preferred way to
generate deal flow is through trusted relationships. It would be difficult to
do this purely through advertising (and it costs them less to just use word of
mouth, not that they are tight on the money these days...).

Getting startups to advertise isn't very logical either because most of the
time the target audience isn't the so-called TechCrunch 50K (unless they are
advertising a job opening, but again, this is more often that not fulfilled
through word of mouth and personal recommendations).

This is an unfortunate reality of the way the world works (although arguably
word of mouth is a lot more effective in some cases).

Honestly, I think you're best chance at monetization is advertising for
companies that provide the proverbial "picks and shovels" to startups--cut a
deal with a hosting company, a domain registrar, The Company Corporation (to
register as an LLC or C/S-Corp). Perhaps you'd have better luck getting some
lawyers that deal with this stuff to advertise on there. (Think about this:
you know who all the big VCs are, but do you know any good lawyers?) There are
few other types of services that fall into this category. It would be neat to
let people rate their experiences with different service providers.

------
adamhowell
Um, did Dan Cederholm <http://simplebits.com> design this? Because if not,
well, you stole his design <http://corkd.com/> bud.

~~~
mdolon
Cork'd was definitely a lot of inspiration, but how did I steal his design?
The color scheme is straight from <http://kuler.adobe.com/> (under popular)
and while I totally stole his idea of the character in the welcome box and
search bar placement, the layout is different in all other respects. I took
ideas from lots of places, including the Expression Engine site - and the logo
is simply a modification of a free Illustrator icon from Komodo Design. :)

Anyways, I did send him an email to show him the site and make sure he's
personally OK with it, but haven't heard back yet. It was more of a courtesy
than anything else for using the similar character + welcome box combo.

~~~
adamhowell
Your design -- original (though still same family of shades, etc.) colorscheme
or not -- is just too similar. It's obvious you started with his design and
built on top of it. Same width, same logo position, same search box, same
zebra-striped tables, etc. And those similarities are exacerbated by the use
of the illustration and the checkmark icons.

~~~
mdolon
While I'm guessing Dan would most likely be OK with the design, if you think
of it this way than I'm guessing lots of others will too. I'm changing a lot
of the front page layouts around - I definitely don't want that impression to
be the popular one.

Thanks for your input, I very much appreciate it. Check back a little later
and let me know what you think. I'm keeping the color choice though, that was
the first thing I picked when I decided to make the site.

