I received a lot of great feedback regarding the ALL IN Expert post.

Here’s a quick summary of the major themes:

Advertising

I think you should have put a lot more thought into how to get users to find your product. Like, sometimes (often, maybe), people don’t even know they could use something and that something they could use exists. You have to educate them.

Tichy

I think what really went wrong was not the product, niche or anything like that. It was the marketing/sales. You should never underestimate how hard selling even a good product is.

Mikkom

Many people commented that advertising could have helped a lot. I’ve got to admit that when I originally read the line “Advertising is a tax for being unremarkable” I interpreted it as saying advertising is a bad thing and that you shouldn’t have to do it if your product is great. The feedback has given me a different perspective. With an amazing product such as Facebook or YouTube you might be able to get away with primarily word of mouth advertising, but regardless of your product, a strong advertising campaign can help a lot. A great product is worthless if no one knows it exists.

Screenshots

I note that on the website there seems to be no real screenshots of your application in action that give me a good idea of what it does and how it works. In my opinion, this is a huge mistake – I generally won’t download /anything/ unless I’ve seen a screenshot first.

halo

Halo pointed out that the homepage didn’t have screenshots on it. While the grid was put there to lure people in, I think I missed out on a big opportunity by not having an expansive screenshots section on the site.

Online Version

Perhaps you can make an online free version and put some ads?

lazyant

Some people suggested I make an online version. Had the product been successful, this might have be a viable route. In retrospect, I should have attempted this to start with, as it would have differentiated the product and given me experience doing something new so that should I fail, at least I walk away with some technical skills that I didn’t start with.

How to approach a risky project…

Fail fast and move on!

Breck

Next…

This was my favorite comment, taken from a comment on the blog:

I don’t know why you’re calling this a failure. How much time did you spend on it? Three months of time to think of, build, and launch something, even if it doesn’t work out, is time well spent. Think about it this way: that’s 4 startups a year… Sooner or later, one of them will end up working out (and in no small part due to the lessons previously learned).

David Rusenko

Last night I had the pleasure of attending my first Philly on Rails pub night.

I found out about it a few weeks back after I asked on HackerNews whether anyone knew of any Philly based startup groups and someone pointed me to the Philly on Rails website.

About 20 people attended last night and I was told about a third to half were new. It was very laid back and I had a really good time. Just a bunch of guys (and one gal) sitting around drinking beer and talking about nerdy things.

From what I gathered only two of the people (Jordan and Joan) were startup oriented, but there may have been others. Several people worked for Comcast in one form or another, some worked at web development firms, a few worked at software companies, and a few, like me, had unrelated careers but dabbled in Rails during their free time.

I’m already looking forward to the next meeting.

Would I pick up the useless and destructive lenses left by millions of people both past and present or would I have the courage to look at the world, both outer and inner, with fresh eyes. To look at it as if I was the first person on earth…not be swayed by the masses that took into their souls what others deemed important in order to avoid the responsibility of independent action.

Marty

I took today and tomorrow off from work so that I can catch up on my work. When I moved positions at work my hours were increased by about an hour and a half per day. While that’s only a few hours a week, it’s a big cut into progamming/hacking time. On a given weekday I had three free hours of hacking and three to spend with my wife. With an hour and a half less, it’s mostly taken out of the hacking. A project that would have taken me four months turns into six or seven. I’d happily hack 12+ hours/day if I could, but… not yet.

The quote at the beginning of this post is from a short story my great uncle wrote. He’s almost 80 and is one of the most fascinating people I’ve ever met.

Here’s a rough todo list…

– Domain Pigeon – I’m probably 80% of the way towards a launchable product. For some crazy, stupid reason whenever I wanted to test out a new design I would set out doing it with HTML/CSS instead of doing a mock up first. Fortunately I came to my sense… Yesterday I created an entirely new layout in Photoshop in about an hour. With that to work off of, I fixed up the page in no time. No more of this blind “it’ll probably turn out ok” nonsense. If you don’t know where you want to go you’re probably not going to get there, right?

– ALL IN Expert – Plan is to make this available for download w/some background later today.

– PhillyOnRails meetup tonight – will report back tomorrow.

– Oh, and the wife gave me about 18 things to do since I have all this free time now… geeze.

I spent the morning reading about and playing around with Git.

Git, like the Macbook, is a big leap in efficiency for me. In the past when I wanted to make experimental changes in my applications I would use a combination of commenting and Save As to test and revert as required. Additionally, my project directories are littered with compressed zip folders containing snapshots at different points in time.

Git changes all that. I’m not entirely fluent with it yet, but I’m getting there.

Here are three resources which I recommend to anyone wanting to learn.

A Tour of Git: The Basics

Gittutorial: Manual Page

Peeepcode: Git

I’d do it in this order too. I started off with the Peepcode tutorial, but he used some terminology that I wasn’t familiar with at first. After reading through the first two tutorials I was able to easily follow along with the screencast.