Being a member of Lance's 50% Asian cofounder club, I was going to reply earlier, but my internet gave out. And thank goodness. From reading some of the comments, I think I must be living in another Atlanta. I'll stick with mine, thanks.
If you look at it as a new interface for a computer, then it might not be too interesting. But if you look at it as a new interface for a table or anything that has a surface (microwave, walls, fridges), then it becomes very interesting.
Anyone else find it funny that the site is using Flash, and not Silverlight?
I imagine people are just going to your front page and then leaving, so what I would do is experiment with the front page to see if you can get better engagement. Focus on getting users to make the next click. Add a 'Add a Location' textfield on the front page, so that I can add a restaurant right away. Defer registration until after they typed in the review. Make it easier to browse restaurants, it doesn't seem easy to explore anything beyond what was recently added.
Also, the content doesn't seem very localized -- I entered my city and state, but it seems to default to California every time.
btw, you have a bug when adding locations with a quote in the name (search for Rhea's or Provino's). I added a couple of locations for you, good luck. You should make a follow up post (after you fix that bug) asking everyone to post at least one location for you. Or maybe you can turk it (http://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome)?
I understand the legal point, but I don't think incorporating should be a barrier to building another application. I wouldn't be afraid of pursuing different web 2.0 apps under the same company, but would definitely consider a spin off if one became successful.
The key points are (a) when one interest starts to run in the red, you don't want it taking down your other interests; and (b) when your app takes off, you don't want to have to worry about app scaling and availability and converting from a sole proprietorship to a corporation or spinning off a company at the same time.
These formalities are ways to show your commitment to doing a startup. Granted, there are other ways to show commitment, but there's nothing like putting a little money down on it. For most of us, writing code is not a good way to show commitment because we do this all the time, and sometimes for little or no profit.
If you're considering whether or not to incorporate, you should definitely be asking yourself if the reason you don't want to do it is really because of fear of failure. When you fail and you haven't incorporated, it just means your side project failed. If you failed and you incorporated, it means your startup failed, and you failed. You can't run a startup with fear.
I think the keys to CMM are perfectly valid. However I don't think there's a direct correlation between CMM level and the success of the company. You can say that by looking at the companies with a high CMM level that there is a relation, but I could argue as to whether that it is the cause or the effect.
You shouldn't blindly implement features just because your users are telling you to do so. While it is important to listen and react to your user's concerns, it's also your responsibility to maintain the integrity/consistency of the application. Also, if you don't believe that the feature you're building is going to have any effect, then it's already heading towards failure because you're not going to be committed to its success.
I agree with jkush -- if you don't agree with the user, you should engage the user and see if you can get the feature to a common ground that you can agree with.
Also, if your feedback loop is just an email, maybe you should add a forum to make the loop more interactive.
"engage the user and see if you can get the feature to a common ground"
Yes, this is what I'm asking. In direct marketing for example, there are ways that success can be scientifically measured. I am wondering if any of you have used more methodical approaches to improving applications -- or if it's just guess and find out if it worked 2 months from now.
The reason for this is that I just don't always trust users to think deeply enough of the problem for them to know what they want.
Thanks; let me know if you use it and what you think: good, bad, or ugly (actually, especially if it's either of the latter two categories, because that's how we improve).
Thanks, too, for bringing up the point about the blog; there are probably ways of customizing the header to point to SeekSift.com but I got a little frustrated with Wordpress after I found out you can't change their favicon.
