We have built a SAAS product which eliminates the headache of building and maintaining database. Looking at your pain-points, it seems like our product may be the perfect fit for you. It also provides the analytics out of the box. As the demand increases, the product automatically scales up. Since it is in invite only private beta release, I don't want to disclose too much. If you are interested, we can have a discussion where I can go through the product and features. My email address is: ketan_bengali AT yahoo.com
I think the main page of the site has too much information. It is difficult to find out what is the main purpose of this site?
The site have stats and recent activities sections where only one user keeps reporting some values. These sections should be removed as it makes me think does this site has only user? Such sections make sense when site has enough activities to report, otherwise new users would think no one is using it so it is not worth signing up.
Basically the website looks more like old-styled corporate website than call-to-action website. You may have to hire professional website designer to get any mileage. Alternatively put only one thing which you do the best and remove everything else.
Just a thought, if you are learning to program anyway, why not try to solve FB puzzles. You may have the job by the time you are done learning.
I did worked at Singapore Airlines and was building Crew Management And Rostering System for pilots. To maintain international flying license, pilots have to fly each and every country once a year and they also have to get retrained in different emergency landing scenarios. As a Pilot, you may know so many problems pilots face due to such stressful environment. You may be able to build meaningful application which can help ease those problems.
It is a nice article but doesn't help understand what are the options available to people. For the discussion, let's assume , it is just a bad code and has nothing to do with what tools are used. In those cases where it is not easy to go back and fix the code, what are the options people are using?
What happens when site pickup and scaling issue becomes real. How would you deal with such situations? Do you rewrite the site or try to keep scaling up as much as possible.
You need to put down what all tasks this person can do without spoon feeding. How can he manage resources if he is not technical? What would he manage without any skills? He would have no clue about what is going on with the products and all technical challenges team is facing.
He doesn't seem like a right advisor/mentor. If was one then he would have advised you right away that he is not a right fit for this job.
If we look at sites like Facebook or Linked-in or any company building social websites/applications chances of finding number 2 is less. I haven't heard any Linked-In or Facebook competitor.
We do see number 2 like Bing, Yahoo etc because they are not startups. Bing is funded by Microsoft and Yahoo was number 1 sometime in the past and has enough money to self-sustain for a while. How long Yahoo will survive?
I attended a startup seminar where speakers were founders from highly successful startups. Their advice was: "First imitate and then innovate". It is a usual business practice to first copy what's working for others, then innovate to make it better and leave the competition behind. It makes sense specially in a web industry where it takes very little time to catchup with competition. Companies have to keep innovating to keep an edge over imitators. Web industry doesn't have number 2 concept. It is either number 1 or out of business. I think not having room for number 2 is what is forcing companies to copy others work and kill the competition.
Netflix succeeded because of having right values and great culture. The slides explains their values and culture in detail. It is so much easy to visualize why they are successful: http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664