I'm really not liking the new feel. The dark background images make reading the content way too hard -- and I can only assume their goal is to replace the background with large ads for site takeovers once in a while.
This seems incredibly anecdotal. A box of thirty items from one store in one unknown city picked by an analyst trying to prove something, and all of a sudden Amazon is dead?
On top of that... they didn't factor in time, gas costs, convenience, etc
Definitely check out http://voicebunny.com -- it's amazing how much higher quality anything sounds with a professional voiceover. If you don't care about the specific voice (and just that it's professional-sounding), it's not too expensive and the turnaround is quick. They also have something called bunnycast.com, that turns your blog posts into audio for $19/each.
That being said, it's not exactly cost efficient for long how-to videos.
One side effect of this is people feeling like the have to work on a side project. People who otherwise would be happy working for their company find themselves spending hours and hours on something on the side.
This cuts into hours that could be used for work or family or fun, and probably won't succeed because their heart isn't actually in it.
Revenue divided by minutes a naïve way to look at it. They of course lose money, but not nearly as much as you'd think -- people simply just come back later.
You didn't mention much about the founder. Is he someone with a different background that just doesn't understand what's happening? Is he too busy with other things to see this? Does he actually think everything is going well, or does he just not know how to fix it? Or maybe he knows it's happening, but also knows money is tight?
This process is much easier if you're working with a "mentor". If there's someone there who knows the language already and can do code reviews, it's a much more realistic option.
Without a safety net, it's so easy to make horrible mistakes without noticing.
I just ordered Moo cards for my consulting business. Cheap prices, amazing experience and the packaging+presentation when I got them literally made me smile.
I'm sure their Moo for Business is just as good. Their online editor is great, and they have a ton of templates that can be modified in the browser. I'd be shocked if they didn't let businesses have a default template.