You could also consider the very long trial approach as WhatsApp. In that way, you will get a lot of users that will think that they have plenty of time to try your app and then look for another as good as yours, or switch before if they are dissatisfied. If yours is really that cool, they will rather pay three dollars at the end of the year, than look for another disappointing unknown app. Still have a lot of guinea pigs for the long haul to make yours the best out there.
PS: It seems that you need to update your homepage 'Buy Now' -> 'Get if for FREE now!'... (good place to make some marketing) you could A/B experiment with different phrasings like: 'Free for a limited time!' and others...
I find this interesting enough. I've been myself involved in those kind of ideas... but never got to anything.
As other said, there is a big expression space in the web, with room and options for everyone. But the fact is that, as you, many don't like the idea of starting a blog, or just want to be part of something bigger than what they are able to build. Anyways, figuring out exactly where in the map you will fit is very important.
Others forgot to mention old fashioned forums, that also allow people to post thing, open threads, etc. I imagine your product as something in between a forum + posterous easiness + blog network. What could help it a lot is thinking in a specific subject or niche, because that will make the sum of all posts something interesting to dive in (as HN is for some subjects and not others).
And of course, as michaelpinto said: go build a prototype as soon as you can.
As other say... you might be a jerk. But it is impossible to tell from here.
Putting that aside, it seems that you are in That point. You may consider going to the next level: get some capital, take more risk and pay a good developer. More capital is not necessary finding a VC or that stuff. Think about your friends, your relatives. But, if you go there, you will need to think seriously on your business model and your goals. You will have duties.
Or you should consider your possible exits: are there people interested in buying your project or financing it? Would it be less painful to shut it down fast or to let it die? Could you open it to the community, as others suggest?
But before all that, I think that you should be sure that you absolutely could not find another developer. I mean... why this post in HN and not a "Growing online game seeking for a developer" one?
As a musician and former gamer, I think this is a great idea and interesting discussion about pricing and business models. Have you thought about a commission/share model? I don't know the real market, but I think most musicians won't think about the games industry as a business, so you have probably less competition there. On the other hand, lately I've seen more and more indie games, so demand seems to be growing.
With such a low price, I'll have my concerns with the lack of exclusivity. Maybe you could add a premium price to remove the audio from further selling?
This year I built http://inflooenz.com It's a tool to explore music influences. I have around 100 visitors each day, but I'm a bit stacked with the site as a product. At the beginning I did some PR. I had some ideas for monetizing, but those are yet to be proved (analytics so far are not showing a good scenario). I had some really cool feedback for the music community, and a lot of ideas for features, but I don't want to start adding features without a clear reason and direction. Right now, I'm working on site engagement, because I think I'm not taking full profit from my already existent visitors.
I wasn't hoping to be profitable in the short term, but I expected more feedback and real interest in the product (some to-be-developed features right now allow people to leave their email if they wish to hear from me, but that didn't happen often).
PS: Anyways, this was very good as a personal challenge!
Right now I'm trying to use it and I'm getting a lot of errors.
As far as I can see, you need to work on the SEO side: there's a lot that needs to be done on that front. Change your title tags structure, create unique descriptions for each page, build friendly urls, make it easy to be crawled, use a sitemap, add to your links the 'title' attribute.
For a site like yours, you should not spend on adwords. You will lose money.
I hope it helps!
It's hard to diagnose, but as other says (and your stats point out), there is something giving a little amateur feel.
From a blog point of view, you should definitely show your authors, to make a genuine, personal impression to readers.
The part of the name of the blog that says 'Biz Startup Tech Blog', it may sound too generic, but also a bit pretentious, and it lacks originality (even if it works from a SEO point of view?). I'll also work on the tagline, to describe better what the blog is about. You could try things like "Personal insights of an entrepreneurial journey", maybe also A/B test it... Tell your visitors you are for real, before they leave.
And last, but not the least, I think the images are not helping. Usually images help make everything a little more attractive, but here, it's not the case. They are giving an amateurish, cheap feel. Try something else on that front. You could avoid the images unless they really illustrate your point with some personal sources: a screenshot from your project, stats, etc.
And please, tell us the results of the experiment!
If you are interested in front-end learning, I've found this useful for myself: http://www.codecademy.com They have sort of interactive tutorials to go through js, jQuery, html, etc.
I shall say that I was a complete newbie to programming (though I knew a lot about HTML/CSS). Codeacademy is meant to teach from scratch, so it may be a little boring to you. Anyways, it can help if you want to catch up in some of the most renowned front-end practices.
By the way, «...and use stackoverflow when stuck», great advise from freshfey.
I really like the idea of your product, and it seems to do what you promise. I have not test it in depth, maybe some times I was kind of lost (for a short moment), I think it can be fine-tuned with a few tests with people. It's only a design/IA problem issue, as far as I can see.
In the quick tutorial, images are distorted (stretchet) and that gives an amateurish feeling, you should fix that.
And definitely I would like to see your blog about this journey. It seems that you really know how to tell things.
I'm really interested in this topic, and unfortunately it seems to be, as you say, a lack of interest there. As far as I know, the last effort to go towards a standard in semantic markup is http://schema.org/ Apparently, the major search engines are supporting this standard by now (read http://googleblog.blogspot.com.ar/ ). According to what I read in your reply to keefe, I think this is what you may be looking for. Example for movie: http://schema.org/Movie Wish it helps, I'm not always fully satisfied with how this ends up classifying the reality, but that is where we are by now.
This is a little off topic, but... As a matter of fact, Chrome is not the first browser to offer that mailto config. At least Opera and Firefox already had (a long time ago) a way to customize the mailto handler to open a given client / webmail client. However, that process was way to difficult and obscure for most users. So -and given they have a special interest in it- Chrome became the first ever browser to come up with a frictionless webmail setup (only for Gmail, obviously). Anyway, as others stated here, it is not so clear for users: I had my girlfriend asking me what that message meant, and I was thinking it twice before answering her.
Besides the excursus, as tikhonj said, if that idea becomes a trend, it could modify a bit the landscape. I feel comfortable when I can choose.
A problem I had with forms is that people may and will eventually mistype their address. And, from a customer relation management point of view, that is a very bad thing, as you will never be able to get back to the user (if you are not asking for another way to contact, and even in that case, you could not get back to them). On the other hand, an email has always a sender.
It's also a fact that an email could easily become unnoticed in the spam folder. That's why I've found myself wondering if there could be room for a service that would fill the gap between both solutions (and be convenient for the sender and the receiver).
It depends a bit on how your site works. A typical use of the GA script may already do the work. But sometimes, you need to set things to do the right tracking: the typical example is the usage of javascript. If you have a lot of JS you may want to track it. Maybe you want to know if some feature is being used or not, you should check those small things and have it clear, so that, when the traffic comes, you will be collecting valuable data about your product.
But also, ask your customers. Some human feedback may be much more rich than a bunch of data.
PS: By the way, I like the 'XX shops are currently using Printavo!'
PS 2: I'm still getting the error messages (now in the welcome screen).
This is a very interesting topic. It involves a crucial question about the impact of 'the company culture' in its success or failure. We usually hear that X company has X kind of culture, and the usual advise is something like 'setup the right culture or you will be dead'. However, when I hear 'monoculture' I cannot avoid imagining dystopic landscapes (as in Philip K. Dick's stories or Huxley's Brave New World). Because uniformity kills creativity and is counter-human. But usually, companies try to foster the right attitudes and key values towards work, what, I think, is radically different than a monoculture. In that aspect, the recruitment job is the main filter in order to avoid what you don't want in your company and set the 'right culture'. But also established processes, rules and etiquette set the company's 'culture', besides people's previous bagagge. In the worst scenario, you have no shared culture at all, which may impact in your performance, given the lack of tunning between different teams or within a team. That was my experience in one of the big names of the PC industry. The culture was some kind of random result of inherited practices, new hirings and a bit of wilderness due to the lack of real policies towards a positive culture. And I think this is in some way inherent to big companies, as it is very hard to reach every employee and it's also hard to find so many people that shares their core values (aside of their professional skills). So, in a few words, I just saw different subcultures struggling to make their point of view stand. Which sounds much like 'survival of the fittest'. Even though, I must say, I made there some really true and great friends.
As the others, it's hard to tell as I'm not in that business. The product looks professional and sleek, but the best advise I can give you is that you look for feedback from your real potential customers. You have to go find them and test their use, hear their needs, calibrate the pricing.
PS: It seems that you need to update your homepage 'Buy Now' -> 'Get if for FREE now!'... (good place to make some marketing) you could A/B experiment with different phrasings like: 'Free for a limited time!' and others...