That sounds like a great deal. Assuming you make the same amount of money and it wasn't an aberration...
2months X 4 weeks X 4K per week = 32K.
Minus operating expenses for 2 months (Let's just use 500 per month here) = 31K
Minus taxes (assuming 25%) = 23.25K
$11625 to have a clean corp that grosses 208K a year. Sounds like a no brainer for me...
Pay him off, make him sign a final and complete settlement that previous poster suggested.
Ugg, don't do what we did. We basically turned on the PR waaaaaaaaaay to soon.
Get out your pen and paper, draw some screenshots, identify who your customers are. The thing here is that it may be more than one group.
i.e. do you need to sell to both bar owners and their customers? do you need to sell to the vendors? do you need to sell to the umbrella manufacturers guild? (also by selling I mean convince them to do something, not necessarily give you money for stuff)
Figure this business ecosystem out, put it down on a sheet of paper. Then for each of the groups identified, posit a sales pitch. Don't worry if it's terrible. It always is. The idea here is to get a starting point for these people to talk to you. Now go talk to these people.
If you're serious about testing the market, go get Steve Blank's book (whoa, do I sound like a broken record!!!) and go through the worksheets.
If you don't really want to do all the above, then go ahead and post your value prop here.
You said that you have only spent 30 Gbp so far in one of your comments. Spend another 30gbp and buy four steps to the epiphany by Steve Blank. Then I would go out and find some photographers and tell them about the proposition and ask them if they would use a site like that. If they all say, no I use corbis then I would drop it. If they all say that they use corbis but they hate it, then maybe you have something.
Seriously, figure out if there is a market before doing any work or spending any money. Just because things like istockphoto and cobras exists doesn't mean that there no opportunity. You just have to figure out why they suck ( if they do) and if anybody cares.
To the question on hand: I'm from Texas and I have no idea what you are talking about when you say footfalls (insert joke about Texans here)
I would consider your target audience. Most likely they are brick and mortars SMBs who's core competency doesn't involve things like: Tweets, Likes, Deals, Check-ins
I would instead ask something like:
As a successful business owner, you know that customer referrals and word of mouth marketing are the bread and butter of business. How do you make it easier for your enthusiasts in the age of Twitter let their friends know how awesome your business is?
Eyesandfeet facilitates word of mouth marketing for new Y Generation.
Absolutely! I'll try to capture that thought in fewer words - and yes, sacrifice 'sounding intriguing' for 'clearly communicating'. In retrospect, I did a pretty stupid thing. Someone asked me if footfalls were common parlance in the US. I googled it up (dumbest thing to do) and (obviously) found a few references!
"EyesAndFeet..Gen Y" - some good thoughts there. Thanks for helping out.
Basically to give you a flavour, imagine a utopian society where energy is basically free and run by super intelligent benevolent AIs. So basically the citizens have nothing to do but live a completely hedonistic life.
Whenever they encounter "primitive" societies, they try to make them more human and civilized. Basically the opposite of the "prime directive". The organization responsible for that is called Contact. Unfortunately, in order to make these societies more humane they sometimes have to resort to some dirty tricks (like assassinating evil dictators, instigating civil wars, etc etc). The organization responsible for that is called "Special Circumstances".
I think your app suffers from the same problem my startup app has, which is the empty canvas problem. So basically your app seems to allude to a lot of power and functionality, which is paradoxically a little intimidating for a new user. Basically, where do I start? You have a lot of choices in the "what do to next" section.
What happens a lot of the time is the user says:
Wow! what a cool application! Seems powerful! I'll deal with this when I can properly think about it!
...and then promptly never visits your site again.
Somebody from Skype told me that they had the same problem and their solution was to funnel all users into a 5 step program. I would suggest that you "onboard" your users by forcing them into a N-Step workflow where at the end of it, it doesn't look like an empty canvas but a starting point to contribute more.
Edit: Like step 1 should be "Invite your SO". Encourage them to collaborate and plan together :)
hi MqMouse, thanks for the feedback. Do you mind sharing your startup? I'd love to take a look and see how you solves this empty canvas problem.
I was thinking about building a wizard to force people into populating their settings, but on the other hand, I want to let users use Marrily at their own pace, instead of stopping them at a lengthy sign up/setup process. I ended up with just one screen to let users create a new default event at the beginning. I guess it's about balancing the flow so that users can feel that they are engaging and not being forced to do certain things to get started.
I wonder if there's title for a "web application director", or a "web site editor" like in film to direct how the app would feel like, not just the UI is working, but the whole site can work cohesively and have the right the flow to it. A UX person maybe?
Well I planned on posting a rate my startup question this weekend since we're just starting a hackathon tomorrow to squash some bugs, but the way we think we're going is a online interactive walkthrough of the site when a user first logs on to give them an idea of what to do next. We tried to use amberjack but it seemed a little limiting so instead we wrote our own utility using jquery and expose. I would post a link to the library but I'm on my stupid iPad right now so just search for jquery and expose and you'll find the library we use.
I don't know python at all but I'm assuming you know enough to do a fetch from a URL. If that's the case, why not use YQL?
http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/guide/two-minute-tutorial.htm...