

What a Week Running a Startup Looks Like - tansey
http://wesleytansey.com/what-a-week-running-a-startup-looks-like/

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krashidov
The article was very interesting, as it highlights the specific bipolarity of
having a startup, but when I actually visited your site I was confused.

I like the idea of your app. I really do. But I had no idea what the hell
Curvio does from the splash page,

The first thing I read when I hit the landing page is: "New shows are being
added all the time, Sign Up to be emailed when they are!" -- When I read that
I thought this website was some sort of a tv guide. It emails me whenever a
new show is made or released on television.

The second line wasn't much better: "Find great looks from your favorite TV
shows:" I was confused from the first line, so I didn't understand the context
of 'looks'

It wasn't until I clicked on a show and saw that you were indexing specific
outfits from specific episodes that I truly understood what you guys were
doing. Otherwise, the home page didn't tell me anything.

Just my two cents.

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tansey
That's a great point. We have that signup header on every page for non-users,
but it does seem confusing for first-time visitors on the homepage. I'm
removing it now.

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thesis
Hopefully every week a friend or relative isn't getting divorced or ending up
with a terminal illness. Sorry to hear about that.

The AWS issues seem very solvable though.

Aside from what's mentioned above... that seems like a not so bad week.

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tansey
_> The AWS issues seem very solvable though._

Well, solvable at a cost (in both time and money).

 _> Aside from what's mentioned above... that seems like a not so bad week._

Yep. As I noted in the end, this is really not that extreme of an example.
However, most people who have never run a company probably would rank that as
one of the more stressful weeks of their year.

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TomGullen
Organic traffic drops 50% - what number of organic visits are you getting
daily? If its low (in the hundreds) a 50% drop could mean nothing at all, just
daily variance. Our organic traffic fluctuates up to 20% during the week (~7k
organic per day) and it's very cyclical as well (we expect the same pattern
the following week).

I don't think it's worth stressing too much about an odd data point, always
best to look retrospectively at the bigger picture!

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makmanalp
About the organic traffic, this has hit me before. I think it has to do with
the freshness categorizations google has. If you put in new content, it gets a
bump because it's fresh, but then the rank for pages that stay the same dies
down after a while, and quite suddenly.

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ahi
Adbrite was no big loss. Most of their CPMs were so small as to not be worth
the bandwidth of the link.

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jefflinwood
Are you still running Curvio? I couldn't find anything newer than November
2012 on the web site.

~~~
tansey
Yep, it's up and running. We stagnated a bit over the holidays because most
shows were over or on break. Then January we were slow to start back up
because our co-founder got engaged. We're pushing several new episodes this
week though.

We've reached a point where our revenue growth may finally take us to truly
cash-flow neutral (i.e. paying for server and content costs). If we can hit
that target in the next couple months, we'll start pumping out content much
faster. Stay tuned! :)

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jamesaston43
one word - ditto!

