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My typical day running a startup
- pclark 17y agoI did not associate your comments with that of a founder of a fashion startup
- vaksel 17y agohehe I know, it kinda happened randomly. Was originally doing a car related site, but it just didn't work out.
- caffogene 17y agoboring
- mattwdelong 17y agoI don't mean to be hasty, but the background on that website almost gives me a seizure. I would seriously consider changing it. Am I the only one who had a hard time following text on this site?
- vaksel 17y agoEverything will be fixed in the redesign. The goal of the original design was to just get something out there as quickly as possible and to start building up the community/content. The sooner you start, the sooner you finish. You know the whole release early mantra. This way there is no rush, and I can build something nice, since I now know that the site is something people want to use.
- mseebach 17y ago> Everything will be fixed in the redesign. Famous last words :) Nice write-up, although in my eyes it has crash-and-burn written all over it, esp. the eating part. Also, doesn't it get lonely?
- vaksel 17y agohehe, yeah. Well the site is mostly built for SEO. So the traffic will keep coming no matter how it looks. To tell the truth I've always ate like that, since high school really. So it's not really affecting me physically. Doesn't get lonely part, I still talk to people through IM, twitter etc., and get out on the weekends. + there is always HN. Basically I just lose my weekday nights(compared to a regular job)
- wgj 17y agoIs this a Stack Exchange site, or just looks like one?
- vaksel 17y agoYeah SE...with about 4000 lines of css, javascript and jquery
- mattwdelong 17y ago4000 lines? I am curious as to what is different from the default SE install? What functionality did you add?
- vaksel 17y agoautomatic video embedding, affiliate link insertion, ask question box on the homepage, modification of related posts search results, social media submits, a new option for logging in + text to guide, a few presentation tools, a few text adds/deletes A lot of it is in the css though, since I had to pretty much customize every single field.
- mattwdelong 17y agoIt seems like it would almost be easier to clone the functionality of SE and make additions to it NOT using javascript. To me, it seems like that much JS would be a bitch to maintain, no? Sorry, I couldn't reply to the comment below. Guess PG doesn't want threads to continue off the page. ^^
- pkaler 17y agoThe font is too small, too.
- milkshakes 17y agocould you define "work" a bit more? i'd like it broken down into more fine grained parts, as i'm curious what types of work you're doing at what time.
- vaksel 17y agoMore or less all the time I focus on asking good questions(those with keywords that hit decent traffic #s and have little competition in the long tail), I also make sure that any organic question gets answered within 10 minutes. The others are more or less period wise...i.e. every 15 minutes check email, twitter, facebook. I also focus on SEO, which involves emailing smaller bloggers to see if they'll write a quick blurb with a link. I try to get at least 3 links a day. For the night coding period, it's mostly CSS, javascript and jquery. Basically the goal right now is to build up traffic to a point where I can show to the more mainstream Fashion related sites/magazines, that we have decent traffic, in order to get coverage.
- minouye 17y agoSince you seem to be a "dude", who are you relying on for domain/industry knowledge? Curious about this one since I'm also working on a fashion related project.
- vaksel 17y agoI started the site by hitting the female subreddit and getting a whole bunch of them to help out on the site. That's where I get the first couple of active users, who've stuck around and are answering most of the questions.
- fjabre 17y agoTime to get some help! No one should have to maintain that for very long.
- vaksel 17y agoYou always have to sacrifice early on. So I've pretty much written off this first year completely.(at least Monday-Friday part)
- thinkbohemian 17y agoWow, Try cutting back a little. The term "sleeping on it" didn't just come from no where. Most of my breakthrough ideas come when i'm out with friends or doing something else. In "Blink" Malcom Gladwell argues our subconscious is way better at solving problems than our conscious.
- vaksel 17y agoThe thing is, it's like different parts of your brain working. Most of my day activities, is just repetition, I just run through most of it on auto-pilot at this point. At night on the other hand, it's more thinking work. So it's two different parts of your brain working. I know what you mean about ideas. For that I just use mixergy. I hate to sound like a fanboy, but listening to those interviews(and asking questions) is a great way to stimulate the mind for me. A guest will say something interesting, and then I go see if I can adapt that concept into my own site.
- thinkbohemian 17y ago@vaksel - those are some pretty good numbers. Do you have tips for getting noticed? There's a good number of sites related to fashion, so to differentiate yourself is quite a feat!
- vaksel 17y agoIt's basically all SEO and promotions. Promotions are there to improve the SEO. My promotion budget is $200/week. It's a permanent giveaway, I figure $10K a year is a small price to pay to get hundreds of people to help grow the site. In my promotions I focus on 3 things: 1) building traffic - points for twittering/facebooking 2) link building - points for blogging about the site 3) building content - points for asking/answering questions. #1 - gets new people interested in promotions to come participate, and probably a few fashion people as well #2 - gets new links to the site, which increases our inbound links, which gets us better page rank, which gets us better search engine rankings #3 - creates new content, which can then be found through Google
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- vaksel 17y agoPage rank is homepage specific not term specific. I use a tool bar for that, but you can use: http://www.prchecker.info/ http://www.prchecker.info/
- nolman22 17y agolife's too short dude, get a girlfriend and enjoy life a little bit.
- vaksel 17y agoI'm actually trying to do both at the moment(try to go out at least once a week). Seems to work ok so far. The thing is that I'm prepared to make sacrifices to get what I want. To me right now building a successful startup is more important than women.
- Sukotto 17y agoEither that or get FU money... then find a gf and do a lot of F :-)
- pclark 17y agoyou don't really eat steak and/or eggs every day do you?
- vaksel 17y agoFor breakfast eggs I eat M,W,F, it's just the egg whites(just following the diet). And sandwiches are Tuesday and Thursday. For dinner, steak I usually eat 3 times a week. + 3 days of turkey patties. And 1 day of takeout.
- Sukotto 17y agoHow do you deal with the age of people's opinions? What's in fashion this year, might be totally out by this time next year.
- vaksel 17y agousers with lots of points get edit powers. So they can update things