There is a psychological factor to this that is used by games as well. People get addicted to collecting things whether they be tweets, comments, etc. I highly recommend Amy Jo Kim's video where she shows examples of this across several social apps:
Agree completely. I think there is definitely high-churn on their subscriber base if things start to feel spammy. Basically yes something should be considered relevant after I express interest in it. But I find that meetup does a bad job of differentiating what the service sends out versus what I decided to get alerts on. Compare this to something like Quora where when I 'follow' a topic (another type of indication of interest) I get email alerts. But its simple for me to know as a user that I can stop following that topic and stop getting alerts. That doesn't mean I shut down all of Quora alerts at once. Compare this to Convore, where I unsubscribed immediately after I started getting all kinds of email from them that seemed completely irrelevant to what I had originally signed up for. I couldn't figure out what on the site was causing all the spam. So what did I do? I shut down the entire service. Bottom line you are playing with fire with email alerts -- make sure its clear to the user whats causing the alerts to happen and give them fine-grained tools to control them.
What is this 'wrong person to execute' nonsense? You're only limited by your imagination and ability work hard towards your goal. I'll take passion over expertise any day.
I guess it come from reading investor's startup blogs. I'm going to do the 37 signals thing and try to do as much as I can until it's not physically possible.
If I was raising investment (plan Z), I'd try to find a team member with ad sales experience (or maybe an advisor).
Hey -- neither of us is first to market on this one. I found out of others even as I was building it. I almost gave up but then figured I might as well go for it. I address this in the post -- the market it young and is ripe for plenty of products.
Thanks for the feedback. I debated heavily between paid and free when I released it. I went with free initially because I felt I wanted to get a simple version of the product out there. At some point I might go the freemium root and offer a paid version with some additional features.
- Emails are coming along with better formatting for desktop browsers
I wonder if you couldn't white-label the technology and sell it to those types of businesses. That way they could apply their own branding and incorporate it into their existing sites.
