That is the world wide web. You published it and anyone could save a copy of what you published (right-click, save as) at any time. This is no different surely?
Depression is not a barrier to doing a startup. Indeed, given that a large number of people (statistics vary widely as to the exact %) suffer from depression at some point in their lives, it is likely that there are far more happy outcomes of depressed people (or people prone to depression) doing startups than there are tragic cases where it has led to suicide.
There is some evidence that depressive spells can lead to more clarity - this is wrapped up in the debate as to why depression exists in the first place. Additionally, the severity of the depression is a major factor - I have seen people entirely incapacitated by it, whereas others are able to effectively manage it using therapy and/or meds.
Also relevant is the nature/cause of the depression - it is possible to suffer from symptoms of depression (i.e. scoring highly on, say, the Beck depression inventory) that are largely situational - i.e. they are brought on by a job you hate, a bad relationship, etc. In these cases, doing a startup might actually be something that enables you to focus your energy and actually reduce or eliminate the symptoms entirely.
Read the comment again dude. Never suggested that this (or similar) judgements are worth it. Also, I asked her, she didn't. Nor do the hundreds of thousands of other people who fall for these scams. Fact is though, unless the tech companies that are de facto facilitating these scams don't become better at preventing them, these judgements (and the sort of scary legislation that get proposed to deal with it) will become more common.
I liked the use of the "whack a mole" analogy. Here (for those who don't know) is how this industrial-scale counterfeiting scam works:
1. Set up OSCommerce or Magento site with design roughly copied from legit rights owner.
2. Get local 'middleman' to donate paypal account in return for small cut
3. Buy a bucket load of adwords
4. Run massive scale xrumer / scrapebox / etc 'SEO' campaign
5. Repeat thousands of times over
Getting domains de-indexed via the DMCA process on Google, never mind taking after-the-fact legal action, is just treating the symptoms.
Given that Paypal and Google are at the forefront of this issue, they are where the responsibility lies in terms of preventing the sites from transacting: by denying them a payment method and heaps of traffic respectively. I am sure that both companies are working hard on this issue, but having looked at the problem over the past couple of years, it hasn't always seemed to be that much of a priority.
Beyond that it is basically a question of international trade treaties and better local law enforcement in the territories where the offenders operate (predominately China) - i.e. NOT an easy fix.
You can understand the frustration of rights owners who are obviously going to take every opportunity to use legal action domestically. If they get a fairly tech illiterate decision in their favour that has potential dangerous consequences for the internet at large, then this is as much because they are just swinging at everything (back to those moles) than any great desire on their part to restrict legitimate rights and freedoms.
Finally, it is important to realise that this is not a victimless crime. What brought this home to me was a few years back when I overheard a nurse in the neonatal unit my son was being looked after in at the time excitedly talking about a pair of brand name boots she'd bought on the internet.
I realised that she had absolutely no clue they were fake because why should she? She had found the legitimate-looking site on the first page of Google and had paid with Paypal.
This was not a transaction carried out 'out the back of a van', where caveat emptor might more readily apply. A lot (majority?) of consumers don't realise that for all the brand loyality they might have in respect of Google and Paypal, etc^, they are services that are easily misused by unrelated third parties and so should not be taken as any sort of 'trust mark' in they way that shopping in large well-known department store does.
^Amazon and eBay deserve honourable mentions as being popular conduits for counterfeit scams too (although eBay in particular deserves a lot of credit for taking the subject more seriously than most).
Over a 2-3 year period I have observed (by dint of having a frequently outranked legitimate site) probably in excess of a hundred websites run by counterfeiters (of brand name products) reach top positions for a small set of related and highly competitive terms only using overt blackhat techniques like blog comment spam, injection of links into compromised joomla, wordpress, & image hosting scripts, negative margins on divs and marquees - even white text on white backgrounds (like it was 1997).
The sites are removed when either law enforcement agencies or the rights owner take action (for example page 1 of the results for one term is,right now, showing 12 DCMA complaint notices, and have been a couple of fairly large scale operations by UK police to get domains taken down when there is proof of criminal acitivity).
If it were a handful or even a score, then I'd believe that "Google is able to detect and disregard the vast majority of hacked links". However, my personal experience suggests that whatever is left after this "vast majority" still constitutes an awful lot of links.
Of course, I am not arguing that Google is not able to detect a meaningful percentage of hacked links, and indeed I have direct experience of this.
My own site was compromised a few years back, i.e. hacked to serve a bunch of links to the usual suspects - porn, drugs and Australian footwear (using a particularly nasty script that inserted the links only when the visitor was Googlebot otherwise it just returned an empty div - 100% my fault for being tardy in my patching schedule as it was using a widely available cms script) and this led to my site (as the 'victim' site) dropping dramatically in rank, only to recover once I had cleaned up the mess, patched the exploit and completed a re-inclusion request.
However, that so many sites using basic link spam approaches were able to rank so highly for such a sustained period suggests that the current capabilities are far from perfect - right now I can see a site in position 2 that only uses blog spam, is fairly new and is selling illegal counterfeit products. It simply should not be there (outranking the brand website), nor should the other 5 similar sites also on page 1.
Anyway, I obviously appreciate that Google faces an insanely difficult task in dealing with web spam, and the situation I refer to above is (despite the current spate) a lot better than it was 2 years ago, when it was crazily out of hand. Nevertheless, tens if not hundreds of millions of pounds have been lost by consumers to these sites in the same period (most of whom have such a high level of trust in Google as a brand that they rightly believe that anything showing up on page 1 is likely to be legit).
If you can teach yourself visual basic then I'd suggest that you teach yourself some programming. You are unlikely to acquire enough to do the heavy lifting on this venture, but every hour you spend learning how to manipulate your chosen technology stack will pay dividends.
After a while will be able to speak the language of potential co-founders, and you will even be able to look at their code and comment intelligently.
If you have any sort of eye for design, then learning (or improving your skills in) html, css and copy n' paste jquery will allow you to do the marketing site, email newsletters and the like whilst your technical co-founder builds the product.
Anyway, if you are out their pitching and getting feedback, then you are going to find someone sooner or later. There is a heap of advice on the web (like going to tech meetups and events) that you should be following if you are not already doing so.
And if you want to know how I do it? I've always just written a stand out job advert that is designed to speak to the 1% of people who might be interested and post it on the startup orientated job boards and Uni temporary work websites. It has worked 100% of the time for me. If you do have connections (i.e. the ex-agency) who are technical you can get them to help you interview if you are worried about not sounding credible - just introduce them as advisers or something.
Finally, on the subject of hiring contractors do build prototypes, my personal view (from experience) is proceed with massive caution in doing this. You might be better to conserve your cash to help tempt a proper co-founder, who if they are half decent will get something built 3-4x faster than hired help. You (almost certainly) aren't going to get funded with a contractor-built prototype that will be, in effect, a black box to you and your potential investors, so all you are really doing is dulling the pain that you should be focusing 100% on.
1. say what your idea is. Or at least the sector / problem you are addressing.
2. say what technology set you are using. You say you are currently getting a 'prototype website' built, so you have a stack - what is it.
3. as you aren't a technical founder, are you a domain expert (i.e. if the product is, say, financial services related, then presumably you have would have a track record in this sector). If so, then big up yourself.
4. Be positive. This whole post is (to me at least) far too negative. From "shotinthedark" and "slim to none", to your story about the web agency dropping you. Full marks for being honest, but presentation counts for a lot and again if you aren't the technical guy, you need to be the 'hustle' guy and that means everying (every email, chat, etc) needs to be +ve!
As for finding a technical co-founder it is definitely possible (I've done it a couple of times). Think of it as pre-qualifier for having a shot at further challenges (funding, getting customers, etc). If you can't convince one person to work on your idea, then something is seriously wrong. Especially if you have some funds (given that you are paying a developer and designer, you must have at least enough for covering someone's basic living costs).
If I were you I'd delete this post, and rewrite it as a compelling story about why someone should come work with you. You must think you are on to the opportunity of a lifetime - so "tell them about the dream" (to quote Mahalia Jackson).
You can (or could) buy 'aged' hotmail address for cents - these have never been used by real users. As for captchas a quick google search will offer up a heap of solving services, many even with APIs! The only way to protect a service against spammers or blackhatters is to stop it from being useful to them in the first place (i.e. don't allow links in profiles, etc. Harder for services like email which can't really be hobbled to prevent this sort of use without trashing the key function).
Either through automation software or (as you note) mturk style services, pretty much any anti-spam defence can be breached.
Presumably if the list of hotmail accounts was just for outbound spamming then one of the addresses on the list would have been used to send the original phishing email.
But this isn't a moderately large company, and while it is not possible to get the full story from just one account, if one is to accept the OP's account as fact, then it is fairly poor form being shown from those running the startup.
By not being honest (or blunt) enough they've basically left this poor guy in total limbo. If you are going to mess with someone's life the minimum required in return is 100% honesty and unambiguous communication. If not now, as soon as possible (in the event that funding has fallen through and they don't want anyone to know right now).
I am a complete apple fanboy, but I still think Bill Gates is a legend. Microsoft made mistakes, but they made the PC the device that it is today, and they forced others to redefine themselves to compete, which raised the bar. However, Bill Gates will only be part remembered for Microsoft - what he has done in terms of his industrial-scale philanthropy is, frankly, incredible.
Do these discount dresses come with the same rw social experience that tends to accompany bridal shopping? Glasses of champagne at (multiple) fittings, long lunches afterwards? Even where a bride doesn't have the budget for a designer dress, this experience can be replicated with off-the-peg versions.
I know that lots of rw shopping experiences have translated very well online, but this one is so social (indeed it is pretty much a rite of passage) that I imagine it is going to be challenging to replicate online.
Also, forgive my stupidity, but $90k of product 'moved' (sold?) / 2803 = $32 means not just dresses and if so, is the name totally appropriate? Plus with weddings taking 12 months+ to arrange, what is the rush...
If you look at the numbers of a service like Dropbox (which I know is not a direct comparison, but is at least in an approximate neighbourhood), then you can see why an $1.8m investment in this sort of service would make sense - it can theoretically be useful to tens, if not hundreds, of millions of users.
Yes the odd terrible company gets funded, but if you cannot see where the value in a new service lies then it might be down to a number of other factors:
1. You are not being shown the complete product (i.e. you are seeing a v1 or even an MVP, but internally the company is demoing a killer app)
2. You are applying your own tastes/needs when evaluating a service. A famous ad exec once said (roughly): "We are not our target market". Don't assume a new product is being marketed toward you, try to think who it is really for and whether or not they might think differently.
3. Your ability to forecast user numbers / revenue for a new service might not be as good as you think.
Also, if you live and breathe the internet, it all is easy to forget that for a lot of people it only plays a minor role in their lives: Only 32% would "shop online where they could"...!?
Perhaps because one (an individual's fashion sense) is entirely subjective (and ultimately fairly trivial) and the other is not.
Anyway, my main point was that introducing the existence of another perceived injustice is completely irrelevant to whether a wrong was perpetuated in this case.
Or are you suggesting that the underlying premise of the initial comment was not: "man up love, you lot are just as bad"?
"I just can't see a young person rejecting a field because it's too sexist"
In the field of law (which is my original background) you can pretty much walk into any sizeable firm, look around for the female partners and know you have identified the family law or employment law team.
Is this because all women who become lawyers have a burning desire to handle divorces or employment tribunals?
Perhaps?
Or perhaps was it the case that historically law firms (then run exclusively by men) were most willing to admit females into the partnership in areas deemed "feminine" before they did likewise for macho stuff like construction or commercial litigation. Thereafter, a meaningful % of female trainees looked around on their first day and figured out where their most likely root to a partnership lay. And so the cycle perpetuated.
That this cycle is increasingly being broken in the legal sector is, I'd argue, as much because of the sheer weight of numbers (more than 50% of law grads are women), as it is down to a more enlightened approach by male partners.
In the abstract, I'd argue that it is not sexism that puts people off choosing a career path, but rather it is a combination of not wanting to fight against the current (not everyone fancies being a trailblazer) as well as the innate human desire to belong to a tribe that physically resembles themselves.
Or to put it another way, I greatly enjoy the company of women, but if I had walked into a lecture theatre and been the only guy present, I'd have felt very much that I was in the wrong room no matter how much I loved the subject (or the attention!)
(Edit: Despite what I wrote in the last paragraph, I must acknowledge that currently I am working in a 4 person startup, three of whom are female including the technical lead.)
Are you suggesting that slighting the intellect of women and doing likewise in respect of the fashion sense of a (minority/majority?) of men are equatable wrongs?
And if you are (p.s. they're not), then what relevance does it have to this topic?
Should the original author not have taken offence the 'joke' she heard during a work conference because at various points history an unspecified number of women laughed at the shirt you were wearing?
Or do you accept that the world has moved on from these sort of visuals in advertising, and thus it is not unreasonable to expect the same to apply to the telling of [____]ist jokes in professional/work settings?
Great response. Anyone using your site today and thinking that it is close to being the finished product... well, presumably they've never been in a startup office and looked at the massive roadmap of features, ideas, entire new sites, etc., scrawled on a big whiteboard.
I've had a play with codecademy and I think it is a promising start. As someone who fairly quickly falls asleep whenever I have to read or watch videos for extended periods of time, this sort of (guided) learning-by-doing definitely appeals.
Of course, education is fiendishly difficult to do well at scale, and you are definitely right to be focusing on what motivates people to learn... However, I don't envy you having to figure out what are the best bits to adopt from the sum of all the research done in this area!
I think the problem a lot of lawyers have is failing to acknowledge the realities of a BIG A v small b situation like the one in pud's example. Of course, it is not the lawyer's place to make decisions on behalf of his or her client as to how much risk they accept in return for a big pot of money. Entrepreneurs need to be aware that their lawyer will always see risk as something to be minimised to the lowest possible level, which is not always something that is possible because of market realities. Equally when instructing a lawyer it is easy to set them on an overtly combative route if you give off too many signs of being up for a fight, or don't give clear enough instructions to the contrary: "Hey, I realise this contract is going to be totally in the other side's favour, and to be honest I have no choice in this. I am doing this deal regardless, so just flag up anything that is totally non-standard or is going to get me in a whole heap of trouble".
