September 2010
1 post
Style Guidance Style and Fashion Newsletter Launch
We’ve decided to launch a newsletter for all the folks interested in improving their looks.
Big deal right? Plenty of other sites have them.
Well…yes and no. It seems that all the fashion/style newsletters out there seem to be focused on the high fashion. They report on the fashion shows, they tell you about all the expensive dresses that the celebrities wear. But they don’t...
March 2010
1 post
Tried out reddit ads, here are the results.
I kept seeing sponsored links by reddit admins urging people to try out the reddit self serf ads, so I decided to give it a try.
If you don’t know what those are…reddit ads basically allow you to throw in a certain amount(at least $20), which then gets summed up, and divided by the dollar amount to figure out how many ads you get. If you spent $20, and the total for the day was $200,...
February 2010
10 posts
YCombinator's Etacts steals Ballpark's layout
So YCombinator’s Etacts just launched today…but wait the site looks familiar.
It looks like they borrowed Ballpark’s layout. Even copied their logo’s font and all the buttons.
If you expect us to trust you with our gmail username and passwords, it’s probably not a good idea to ruin that trust by copying other people’s work.
You are a FUNDED company, amateur...
New Update
Going to have another update Monday or Tuesday.
Some changes you’ll notice:
The 2nd ad spot will now show up all the time, for those users with less than 200 reputation.
Fixed a few badges
If you have more than 20 rep points, you can post as many Qs/As as you want.
Relaxed the rules for unregistered users: can create new tags, can vote.
You won’t see the human verification...
Month #3 stats
I’m just going to plug in numbers from the old post.
So it’s now been 3 months since I launched Style Guidance.
So here is the report for month #3. I’m comparing December 18th-January 17th numbers to January 18th-February 17th numbers.
Visitors: 35K —> 64K(up 82%)
Returning Visitors: 7,491 —> 12,543(up 67%)
Daily Visitors: 1,200—>1,500K (up...
StackOverflow getting VC funding is a recipe for...
So we find out today that StackOverflow is going to start looking for VC funding in order to expand the StackOverflow business.
Basically they are going to do a land grab, put out a ton of StackOverflow like sites, and grab the market before it’s too late. So in essence, they are going to do what StackExchange users have been trying to do for like 4 months.
The whole idea here is that...
Just launch already.
Failure to launch seems to be a disease in the startup community.
Everyone is working on a ton of projects, everyone is plugging away…but noone is launching. Everyone is waiting for perfection.
WHY?!
Do you honestly believe that if you don’t release a perfect product right away, noone will care? Here is a dirty little secret…noone will care even if you do release a perfect...
Why isn't Eric Schmidt following anyone on Google...
Does he have no friends…or does he and his friends know something that we don’t?
BTW on Twitter, the guy follows 92 people
Google profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/109938146389129062343
Twitter Profile: http://twitter.com/ericschmidt
Why is the startup culture so eager to forgive...
Why is the startup culture so eager to forgive unethical behavior?
Remember Zynga?
10/31/2009 Techcrunch started the whole Scamville issue over Zynga’s lead gen business with rebill offers.
01/08/2010 Techcrunch awarded the CEO of Zynga, the one they blasted just 2 months before in over a dozen posts with “CEO of the Year” award.
How about DB?
02/05/2010 He gets caught...
The Techcrunch intern who sold posts is Daniel...
All the evidence you need:
we’ve also deleted all content created by this person on our blogs.
http://www.techcrunch.com/author/danielbru/
P.S. it is fully appropriate to make the name public, nobody should ever get a free pass on unethical behavior.
P.P.S. here is my followup post…Why is the startup culture so eager to forgive unethical behavior?
Google's porn problem and how to fix it
Have you used Google Images lately? It’s filled with porn, even for the most innocent of keywords.
Now to be clear, this is me using it with safe search off…but that shouldn’t matter. If I search for a completely innocent key phrase, I shouldn’t be seeing porn on first page of results, regardless of whether or not I have safe search turned on or off.
I’ll give you...
Latest update.
The latest update has just rolled out, here are the changes that were implemented:
Regular username/password login/registration option was added. As usual you can still use 99% of the features w/o registering, but for those who want to vote, now you can register easily.
Every registered user can now create new tags
Every registered/unregistered user can now edit tags
Every...
January 2010
16 posts
Techcrunch just deleted all comments older than...
Seems like Techcrunch just wiped every single comment older than 1/24/2010.
My guess is that this has something to do with them getting hacked two days in a row.
So if you find an old Techcrunch article, dated 1/23/2010 or older…and it has 0 comments…now you know why.
Google hates Survey.io - 32% drop in SE traffic
So I’ve been reading Venture Hacks lately, and there was a post about how you can use surveys to find out what your users think. Good idea right?
So I install the Survey.io javascript snippet…and sit back and relax.
And BOOM, my Google traffic takes a huge hit. 32% drop in traffic overnight(went down from 531 to 364) just from installing a little widget.
Granted my traffic is pretty...
Apple releases the tablet.
So today is when Apple releases the tablet.
Whether it’ll be called the iPad or iSlate or iTablet, it doesn’t really matter. Same goes double for features…as the iPhone showed us, any missing features will be provided by the thousands of developers at Apple’s beck and call.
The ONLY thing that matters is the price. Price it too high, and the revolution is over before it...
The startup culture is filled with people with ADD
It seems like the startup culture is filled with people with ADD.
They come out with a project, see little or no traction the first few weeks-month, ..and then abandon it to go work on something else.
Everyone needs to take a moment and realize that there is no such thing as overnight success. Putting out a project, getting covered in TC, getting millions in VC, and then becoming a top 1,000 web...
HN needs to post new stories on the front page to...
If you know Hacker News, you know that it’s a pretty big programmer/startup site.
But it seems like noone views the new tab(i.e. in the example below, not a single one of those stories got an upvote…even after 27 minutes.(this was in the middle of the day too)
What I think HN needs is to post the latest submissions on the front page(like reddit). That way every new story gets the...
Make me shave my head
I’ve noticed that you guys really step up whenever we have a special number to hit. For example, when we were aiming for 2,000 Qs by our 2 month anniversary - you’ve stepped up and made that happen.
We now have 971 Facebook Fans, and 1582 twitter followers…and the site had 35K visits last month. So it’s time to get us another bump.
Remember, questions are the lifeblood of...
Promoting on forums is a huge waste of time
So you think you are going to market your new site by posting on forums? Hit up a few dozen big sites? A site with 100,000 users…you gotta get a few sales/users out of it. Right? WRONG!
Here is the dirty little secret. Most forums are dead. Sure they may say they have 100,000-400,000 users. But in reality 99% of those have stopped coming. You gotta realize that forums has been around for a...
Site statistics for month #2.(35K Visitors, Top...
So it’s now been 2 months since I launched Style Guidance.
So here is the report for month #2. I’m comparing November 18th-December 17th numbers to December 18th-January 17th numbers.
Visitors: 11.6K —> 35K(up 202%)
Returning Visitors: 2,773 —> 7,491(up 170%)
Daily Visitors: ~700—>1.2K (note, the ~700# was in the middle of a big promotion, the 1.2K# is...
Did I just catch Techcrunch astroturfing?
So I’m reading Techcrunch, and what do I see?
A story titled: Buy and Sell Proprietary Knowledge Through GenApple.
Interesting…right? So I click to read…and what do I find?
People are continually looking for new pieces of information. We go to school, read articles on a variety of subjects, have free websites such as Wikipedia, and use search answer engines such as Aardvark...
My typical day running a startup
Info: Style Guidance is basically a Q&A site for fashion and style. So basically style questions, social shopping and decision help. If you are a techie, you’ll probably hate our current design, but you aren’t the target audience(and yes we are already working on a redesign)
My day begins at 10 am, and ends at 2:30 am. That’s 16.5 hours, of being up.
For those 16.5 hours...
Good for Google
Here at Style Guidance, we’d like to take a moment to applaud Google and its threat to leave China as a response to recent hacking attempts.
It’s not every day, you see a big company put ethics above profits. And they are losing money over this, as usual Wall Street doesn’t fail to disappoint.(GOOG is down 1%).
And sure a lot of people will say “blah blah Google was...
The Crunchies are the Kid's Choice Awards of the...
So the latest Crunchies just ended yesterday, and as usual everyone is pissed. How the hell did THEY win?
You can probably say that for every winner(except Dropbox), but the biggest I’ve seen, are in regards to “Best social app: Zynga’s Farmville” and “Best CEO: Marc Pincus of Zynga”….I mean here we have a company that Techcrunch spent over a month...
Your guide to fact checking website traffic claims
Every now and then I see a story, where the reporter just repeats the traffic numbers that were given to them by the company.
You even have to deal with this when you market your site….I even had to deal with this myself, when I was promoting Style Guidance. About 1 in 5 blogs that we contacted, would get back to us trying to get us to pay $250-$500 for posts. Now that’s just not...
2 Months Since we entered private beta.
Just so I don’t lose the date. This is just a reminder to myself, that we entered private beta on November 4th. So today marks a 2 month anniversary.
What bloggers need is a union.
I was reading the article about how bloggers need to protect their sources even from gov’t subpoenas. And what bloggers need is a union/association.
Just a disclaimer, I don’t count myself as a blogger, this blog is just a way to bs a little about general things, and once in a while give updates about the site. So consider this a post from an unbiased position.
Anyways, bloggers and...
Why do people continue to sack ride twitter?
I just read Vivek’s post on Techcrunch titled Twitter and Me! Why It’s The Only Social Media Tool I Use. and I figured, I’d give my two cents.
Twitter sucks. There is too much noise, too little quality, and if you are a business, the engagement time is non-existent. Putting all your eggs in that one basket is insane. You gotta diversify.
But for now let’s focus on twitter....
December 2009
10 posts
Happy New Year!
Yes I know New Year, is still about 12 hours away for the East Coast of United States, but it’s already 2010 in China…so on behalf of http://styleguidance.com we’d like to wish you a Happy New Year.
Google just updated their page rank...we are now...
Thanks to all the sites that linked to us!
Our launch press email and press page.
For those who don’t know, Style Guidance is basically a mix of Style Q&A, Style Advice, and Social Shopping…at least in this iteration(we have big plans for the site, but need to build up traffic before we can release the true vision for the big idea)
I posted the thoughts on a failed launch post a few days ago, and a few people on HN were wondering about the emails we sent out...
Thoughts on a failed launch
I was going to write this later, but I saw Paul Stamatiou’s post on HN, and figured I’ll give the other perspective.
Disclaimer for our users, this is written for the guys at HN, so it will cover things regular folks could care less about.
Style Guidance is a site that is meant to cover all those topics that have to do with style and beauty. Deep down it’s “just a...
One month anniversary.
Almost missed it, but today marks one month since the official launch of the site.
I’ll make a detailed post about our progress with all the different metrics, after the 12 days of style contest ends.
You’ll also notice a few other changes:
1. we moved the blog to the site url. Which you can reach by going to http://blog.styleguidance.com
2. You might notice that we changed the...
12 Days of Style starts...why we are doing this.
The 12 Days of Style contest has officially began. We are giving away close to $5K worth of fashion and electronics stuff. You can see the giveaway detail here.
Now you might wonder why are we doing this. We are a new site, why are we spending so much money on this promotion?
The answer is simple, BANG FOR YOUR BUCK. $5K may seem like a lot of money, but it’s peanuts, when it comes to...
12 Days of Style starts tomorrow
Our 12 days of style giveaway starts tomorrow. For more information about the giveaway go here: 12 Days of Style
500 Twitter Followers, New Facebook fan page
We just hit 500 twitter followers(well 512…but who is counting).
To “celebrate” the event, we are launching our facebook fan page. You can find it here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Style-Guidance/175631552612
It’s just another way for us to gather feedback and interact with the users.
To encourage you becoming our fan on Facebook, all our fans on Facebook will get an...
Another day, another update.
I know it feels like I’ve been doing a ton of updates to Style Guidance this week, and you are right. But there is a method to this madness, I’m trying to make everything perfect for that big promotion we are having less than two weeks from now.(starts December 14th)
If I’m shelling out more than $5K of my own money, the least I can do, is make sure the site look it’s...
Few more tweaks to the site
I know we had that huge update, just yesterday…but I had some inspiration today so here are a few more tweaks.
I’d say the most important one is support for Youtube videos. Now you can embed youtube videos, just by linking to the video in question. The system will automatically convert it to the embed code. As an added bonus, I’m using slightly wider resolutions, so you...
November 2009
6 posts
Update Monday Morning
Tomorrow there’ll be a site wide update. It’ll happen in the morning, 9-12 EST.
Shouldn’t have any problems, but hey, you never know.
Update basically covers three things:
1. Email Notifications - you’ll finally be able to get notified when you get new answers. Shouldn’t affect the regulars, since you guys check the site daily, but will be useful to new users, who...
Few changes
Modified the login/register page to be a little bit more user friendly. Also there’ll be a small update on Monday, so if something breaks, you now know why.
We are officially launched!
I’m happy to announce that Style Guidance has officially launched today.
What it s, it’s basically a site to get a second opinion when it comes to style and fashion. So the next time you wonder which shoes to buy or what kind of hair product to use, think of us!
We are also running a contest where you can win iPod Nanos. Just tweet out #styleguidance and you can win one. You can find...
Results from our Alpha period.
I’ve been asked by a couple of people about our stats during the alpha test of http://styleguidance.com Which by the way, we are officially launching tomorrow!
So I figure, I might as well make it a blog post, so that I have the data for the future and maybe it’ll give others another data point to look at, when planning their alpha/beta/launch. BTW, these are stats based on Google...
Thank you alpha testers.
Thank you alpha testers.
Hey guys, since we added the blog, we figured the first thing we need to do, is to thank you, the alpha testers. You guys literally saved the site from being dead on arrival. I still shudder, every time I think of what the original design looked like.
First, we’d like to thank the 111 of you who bothered to ask/answer questions. THANK YOU! You guys tested the core...
Our new blog.
We’ll use this blog to post news and updates.
We decided not to host this on our servers/domain name, so that in the event our site goes down, you’ll have a place to go to, to get status updates. We are not expecting this to happen, but it never hurts to be prepared.