Not to be "that guy," but the font you're using everywhere for your headers (which is called "Gothic" in the CSS) appears to be "Knockout" from Hoefler & Frere-Jones. The license for that font — as well as all of their fonts for that matter — isn't currently web-embeddable[1]. So either I'm wrong and you've got an extremely good replica font (maybe a little too good), or you're using a font against its license.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.typography.com/ask/faq.php#Ft_10" rel="nofollow">http://www.typography.com/ask/faq.php#Ft_10</a> - choose #20
I like the idea, but I believe there are some issues.<p>PRICING
1) 1,25 $ is a lot of money for one (1) completed survey.
2) What prevents a company from doing this themselves (is your added value worth 0.25 $ per survey?)<p>SAMPLE
1) Charities are arguably not the best motivator for people.
2) In a world focused on the right metrics, your surveys automatically incorporate a bias into the results by only selecting those people who care about charity (to put it very blunt and stereotypical, you will only get tree hugging hippies). Same goes for prizes, but a prize is less about the core identity of your respondent (not a belief).<p>PITCH VIDEO
1) I felt a world-changing idea when you talked about "in person", was kind of disappointed when I realized it's still a survey with a different incentive
2) Half of the people a survey got mailed to don't respond. That's not a disadvantage, it's an awesome conversion rate.
3) I can't find any information except for that video (maybe a use case).
4) I don't really see a benefit for me as a user. Let's say deliverables: will you give me an SPSS database, a report, an analysis, can I import it in excel?, will it even have forms or is it just a way to give an incentive. Lot's of unanswered questions.<p>PERSONAL
1) Love the chat box and the 'I'm a real person and founder' part. Not sure how long you will keep it up :).
2) I like that you as a person are part of the brand, something very potent.
My feedback with some tough love:<p>1. evaluate.me or evaluate.it would be easier to remember.<p>2. I don't see why anyone would pay $1.25 per response. If I have 10,000 customers, you think I'm willing to potentially put up $10,000 for charity and give you $2,500 to have them fill out a short online form? I don't know...<p>3. This is way too much for something that should basically be free, since it's very trivial, there are tons of free services around, or it's not hard to whip up even for Joe's PHP loving cousin.<p>4. The fact that $1 of $1.25 goes to a charity is even more in my face annoying. It's sending the message that you don't really want all my money, instead you're giving my money away. Given that you're so small, it sends the message that you will go out of business soon.<p>5. You could say that the $1 is there to get people to fill out the survey. But wouldn't people just fill it out just to send the $1 to charity with junk answers, as you mention in your video wrt the iPad?<p>6. In the video you say that if I just do the survey per email for free myself, less than half will respond? In a pitch, I interpret "less than half" as "about half". That sounds pretty good, I wouldn't think more would respond anyway, and email is free! Anyway, I think you should change the text of the pitch.<p>Good luck!
Congrats on getting your MVP up and running. That's a big accomplishment.<p>However, you're at a point in your business's life where things might get dicey. I think you'll find that the business grows slower than you might hope, and no amount of coding will change that. For bootstrappers, it's just the way it goes. You're not going to spend $10,000 on ads, so you just have to do things the slow way (talking to bloggers, writing articles, posting on forums, etc, etc).<p>Your business will still require a lot of work from you, but at this stage it also requires time overall for people to hear about it, find it, leave, and come back later when they hear about it again. You have to give it time to grow and that means providing yourself with income. Maybe think about getting a job or doing freelancing. I know you said jobs require too much mental energy, but once the MVP is launched, you can dial back on the coding. You have to dial up the selling, but I've found this to be possible in parallel with a normal job, especially if selling doesn't involve phone calls and is just you emailing bloggers.<p>Anyways, I'm sure you'll find your way. Good luck!
Congrats on the getting the MVP out!<p>Criticism:
The problem you are trying to solve is the lack of quality in online surveys. The way to improve the quality of the surveys is by enabling users to chose a charity wich will receive 1$. This doesn't really make sense to me. Can you rpove there is any correlation between both of these two elements and how do you mesure quality?
First and foremost, congrats on shipping your mvp (even though it went a little late by your original timeline), I hope it sustains well. Like others have said, the video is great and design is consistent and appealing - great work and thanks for sharing your story.<p>A few thoughts I had while perusing eval.me:<p>1. There doesn't seem to be information about what charities you partnered with on the anonymous site pages. I suppose this could be contractual, but it was one of the first questions I had.<p>2. I was confused by the use of "Sign Up" and "Sign In" together; at first glance I thought there was an issue with your site and there were two Sign Up buttons. Maybe "Sign Up" and "Login" or "Register" and "Sign In"?<p>3. I haven't investigated thoroughly, but wouldn't a charitable incentive inherently skew your survey pool? Although upon consideration, a product-based incentive may do the same thing - just in a different direction.
Here are my thoughts from someone who has been in the market research industry for 10 years:<p>1. First off, congrats on quitting and going full-steam ahead on something you're clearly passionate about. That's a huge accomplishment on its own. The "having no regrets" part of it is especially important.<p>2. The charity element is a differentiator, but you're going to have to work hard to beat some existing initiatives in the industry (Op4g - www.op4g.com - is the one that comes to mind first). The MR industry has a bit of an "old boys club" feel to it, and there is a flood of DIY survey tools coming out each day that make it harder and harder to break through the noise.<p>3. I would spend some time on your site explaining why compelling people to participate through charities is better than direct cash incentives. There is a ton of great research on intrinsic motivation out there that supports this idea, with the book "Drive" by Dan Pink being one of the best summaries of why this concept works. However, your potential customers are not going to understand why that works to generate higher quality responses (as evidenced by some of the comments here on HN).<p>4. If you're truly in this for the long-haul, I would try hard to build your own panel of respondents underneath this. That is going to take you a lot of time to do, but it's going to be the only thing that separates you in the long-term from all the other DIY survey tools. Plus, if you ever try to sell the business the value of it will be substantially higher to a potential acquirer.<p>Just my two cents... You're off to a great start!
Why do you firmly believe that your first startup should be on your own dime? I have two issues with this. First, if you can't convince investors to give you money, it might be a sign that it will be hard to convince users to use your product. Also, it's a bad risk management strategy. You seem to be already investing over $10,000 of your time in this project, so if it fails, you will feel it regardless. An upside would be that you have more control and might worry less about dilution, but at this stage I would be more concerned about having the best resources to create a great product.
Very similar experience here.<p>> Finishing the MVP is Priority #1. At all times. Anything else is a distraction: hackernews, twitter, food, sleep, gmail, friends. Saying no is hard (...)<p>I quit my day job in 2010 to work on my first web startup and to help fellow startuppers (and would-be ones) overcoming procrastination:<p><on-topic-shameless-plug><p>asaclock, an anti-procrastination web community for startup single founders and people working on side projects.<p></on-topic-shameless-plug>
You should show people exactly what they can do with the money they raise.<p>- Answer this survey, feed a child for a week<p>- Answer this survey, a village can buy a goat<p>etc
Startups are about making difficult choices. Quitting your job is easy, especially if it's "soul-sucking". Be sure you're quitting because you need to build something that can't be built any other way. If you have a fantasy of walking out the door and hitting it big, this is a warning sign. If the idea doesn't keep you focused for more than a few hours a day, and doesn't keep you up past midnight, that's another warning sign.
The design of this blog reminds me why I rely so heavily on Instapaper to read blog posts. It's as though someone etched a blog post into the surface of an IKEA desk.<p>I'm sure that you put a lot of time into this post, so you shouldn't distract from the content by having a design that makes it harder to read.
I am going to pitch for you. Let me know if I can help in any manner. I will surely spread the word etc. But if anything extra is needed, feel free.<p>And if you are wondering why I am ready to help, I have a personal selfish motive, Learning, Working with smart ass guys like you. So we have a fair deal.
I am somewhat skeptical of charities so I use <a href="http://www.givewell.org" rel="nofollow">http://www.givewell.org</a> to find the one that most effectively uses the money. I would suggest you research thoroughly the charities you work with so the money is actually put to good use.
It's a nice idea, but it seems to already have been somewhat done: <a href="http://www.websurveysformoney.com/exchange-your-points-for-charity-donations/" rel="nofollow">http://www.websurveysformoney.com/exchange-your-points-for-c...</a>
Good UI. I'd say, however (from a business model standpoint), with prices out there in the in-between 'almost free' (see: Amazon's Mechanical Turk; <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/pricing/mturk/" rel="nofollow">http://aws.amazon.com/pricing/mturk/</a>) and the 'great value' range (see: Survey Monkey; <a href="http://www.surveymonkey.com/pricing/details" rel="nofollow">http://www.surveymonkey.com/pricing/details</a>), your per-customer costs might be a touch overly-ambitious.<p>The charity niche is pretty rad tho. You may increase your chances of capturing a piece of the market if you exploit that benefit.
I think most of the comments so far are missing the mark. This article is about leaving the working world and building something on your own.<p>It's quite impressive that the author has completed their first project in just 4 months. The article provides a good dose of motivation to anyone teetering on the edge of pursuing the start up life.<p>It's great to hear about these stories on HN, everyone started somewhere and it's great to see the process.
Interesting idea... I actually quite like the concept. I'm seeing this as more of an activist site than a sustainable business, though. What's to stop companies from just counting the respondents in their existing survey systems and just making their own donations?<p>I'm really glad you're propagating an idea that will raise a lot of money for charity, but I don't fully see how this can become a profit making business.
I visited the site and after a couple minutes Flaviu had started a little chart with me. I up voted because of this. Great way to show a product on a personal level which goes right along side his idea that surveys would have better results if the participants cared about the survey.
I, for one, think that your idea is great. Good luck!<p>Suddenly, an idea - what if you let charities request to be included in your service? Once a charity is on-board, they have a great incentive to tell people about you, link to you and so on.
If I pay you to donate, do I get to write off my taxes? Why not just pay you 25 cents per respondent with a commitment I'll donate to charity and let me decide if I want to do good or not.
> <i>What doesn’t make you stronger, kills you</i><p>Beer doesn't fit, sorry :)<p>Seriously, the expression is the other way around - <i>What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger</i>.