It depends I think how much money, how often and in exchange for what. If you are paying out big amounts in exchange for "labor" (e.g. paying freelancers who do work for other users), checks, ACH, and wire are the only serious solutions unfortunately. For smaller amounts and gift/bonus type payments, you might be able to use electronic gift cards (e.g. Amazon)-- if I recall, you only need an email address and possibly name to send a "gift card" this way.
Address it early with people who need to know (direct team and people who work with this person frequently). Be honest without going into too much detail. If people press for details you can't or don't feel like sharing, tell them you can't share.
Don't make up a softer story to cushion it-- this can bite you big time. there have been companies that have been sued and lost because a manager used the "Tom left to spend more time with his family" white lie, because it masse jurors believe that Tom had been fired due to familial status (a no no).
The best blogging platform is the one you'll use. It sounds silly, but what it means is forget about any that take a bunch of time to set up or maintain.
I think fully hosted solutions are great because you can spend basically zero time setting up and maintaining backend. Wordpress hosting is good. Squarespace also has a pretty slick solution.
My best advice is to find sites you like with similar functionality to what you need and try to find out who did those. Often companies will share who they used. If it is an internal person then he or she might be willing to share inspirations or point to freelancers with similar approaches.
Note that this isn't really about the "look." Good designers are flexible enough to work in many styles and are always trying to solve your unique problem. What you are trying to spot is quality and familiarity with the technologies you need.
Basically, it is saying use the twitter model, not the email model. Let people choose what to receive and encourage them to publish everything globally (yes, with private messages if you really need it).
So many problems. If this is for geeks, why would I pay telegram to do what basically any static page cms does? If this is for normals why call it a cms? In either case, why the complex description of what it does? Why does it not tell me why I should want it? And the pricing scheme is clear as mud.
A) Use something off the shelf. Simple and cheap is best when starting out so that you can focus on finding business.
B) Explain exactly why the customer should fill in the email. I don't like bribing the customer with some other unrelated thing, like a white paper because people who want the whitepaper just want the white paper. They might not be your actual customers. Instead I would honestly say (example) "Do you want awesome deals on physics and astronomy instruments? Well we're going to find deals for you and send an email every month."
C - Niche products need niche sales strategy. Find out where your customers spend time and figure out how you can get in to meet people. Explain what you can do for them and ask for an email on the spot.
What the other posters said. I would add that if this is disruptive you could try using a visually hidden field with a special value. If the field gets tampered with, you can flag it as likely spam. This works because the bot just traverses the dom and fills in fields that look like comment boxes (textareas) with spam.
They seem to have some really generic games and a truly horrific site. Maybe the brogrammer thing helps them get much needed attention, but it doesn't interest me at all.
People tried it and didn't find a reason to stay. It isn't that it is bad, but there are a lot of sites that solve this problem, with established communities. In that situation you really need something to make your solution stand out.
This is probably going to be hard to hear, but the reason why people say nice things in private but don't promote you in public is that there is no risk or cost in saying nice things, but if they endorse you then their reputations are tied to yours. Or it might even be a level of effort thing (short encouraging messages are easy, promotion is harder).
Also, I assume we are hearing frustration in your post, but it comes across as entitlement and bad attitude. I hope you don't use this tone with the people you are asking to promote you.
Sorry, I know this is not a good situation for you. Good luck.
Never work for free. The reasons are many, including:
Clients not willing to pay for design will have no respect for you or design.
On the other hand, you could get skewed customer experience information.
You are undercutting other professionals and by the way, those other pros are where a big piece of your business will come from as a small shop.
You won't know how much to charge your first client. You'll probably charge too little.
This is the part that got me:
Written in PHP, so literally anyone can contribute, even if they have no idea how to program.
Even babies and dogs can contribute
This is in response to another blog post that was floating up hn recently. The title of that other post is the origin of the "fucking janitor" thing.
In my opinion it is not worth finding the original by the way. It was pretty shallow analysis and a little cliche. The language was obviously there solely to attract attention.
I think this (replying) author could have dropped it from the title but maybe there was a search strategy in keeping it.
Sure. Think about how this works outside of the internet. The fact that we have multiple grocery stores, clothing stores, hardware stores, etc means that someone is copying someone else's idea. There is this mythology in certain corners of the startup community around ideas-- all you need is a great idea, you should keep your idea secret, etc. The truth is every company is copied and most "new" ideas are just combinations of two or more existing ideas.
So go for it. The question is really whether your market intuition is right and customers are really looking for a cheaper, simpler execution of this idea.
"Evil" is overstating it I think. Murder is evil. Cutting into a business's margins for promotional reasons is just business. And it is totally voluntary for the restaurants-- no one forces them to promote with groupon.
This is link bait intended for all of the "I hate groupon" sites, so that grub with us gets some attention from restaurant owners.
Any smart company has legal counsel. They probably won't be offended if you also have legal representation, especially if you explain that you are trying to protect both sides of the arrangement from any potential future ugliness. If they are still against you having a lawyer review the contact, then you'll have to decide if it is worth the risk. Personally I would consider that to be a huge red flag.