I realize that the popup survey/newsletter box is the rage on literally every website (though I don't understand it as I find them annoying). It immediately turned me off to your website. I was watching your embeded youtube video and then all of the sudden your popup takes up my screen and interrupts my viewing of your about us video. Are you seeing a big engagement of this popup survey/newsletter? Are you keeping track of how many people immediately close it compared to filling it out?
If you are seeing a great amount of engagement from your visitors with the popup then please disregard me as I may be an outlier.
With that said, I think your website is a great idea and you executed well. I love the overall idea and the community is definitely there for this.
Firstly, once someone closes the window, they don't see the pop-up for at least another 2 months. We hope this cuts down on the annoyance factor.
We are seeing pretty good engagement and tracking the numbers. Our bounce rate for July 3rd (the day we hit HN front page) was <0.3%. I mention this day specifically for a couple reasons:
1. We had significant traffic and sample size for that day
2. 92+% of our traffic was from new users (the only ones who would see the pop-up)
We've only been using the box for a couple of weeks and will keep monitoring the numbers and the comments.
From my experience, working with any vendors from the pacific northwest, they're all MS shops. Is this trend changing considering the added expense of working with any MS Licensed software (where an OSS solution with little or no cost could suffice)? Does MS offer incentives to local startups to build their platform on existing licensed MS products? Or is it more of a Seattle Pride thing? I personally don't feel the MS Business model is one the works well for scrappy young start-ups, yet pretty much every company in the Pac Nor Dub I've worked is completely MS'd out.
I didn't even know there was a MS service called Lync until we did a training with Mercent (FYI, Lync doesn't work on Linux, I was shocked too).
I thought I would throw out a counter-example using my own startup. We're a 4 year old profitable company with a handful of full-time engineers and sales employees. We're located in Utah. We're based on .NET and host everything using Windows Azure. We leveraged the BizSpark program a few years ago which gave us access to a lot of free software and services.
It helps that we're a B2B company with decent and predictable revenue. I imagine it's a bit harder to afford things if your company is some new free photo sharing mobile app. I have no problems investing money in technology and tools if it accelerates our development and has a good ROI.
I think you may be generalizing from your experience. Just looking at some of the openings for these companies they are looking for MongoDB, HTML5, Rails, etc. I didn't see any mention C# or other MS specific things.
I've worked both in the Valley and in Seattle, and in my experience the startup mentalities have been pretty much the same. There may be a lot of former MS people working at the startup, but they don't seem to have any attachment to it. If iOS or Android are where the numbers are, that's where they go. I've also never met a startup in Seattle solely focused on developing something for MS, although there probably are some that exist. Whatever trend you saw in the northwest previously must have changed, from my limited perspective.
The "added expense of MS software" is largely a myth. Windows is about 30% more expensive on AWS than Linux, and most startup expenses are dominated by payroll, not hosting. Choosing a platform on price in this situation is counterproductive - you should chose whatever allows you to iterate faster until your product idea sticks with your customers. As a rule that's a platform you know the best, can find help for most readily, and can hire new team members the fastest. Hiring for Microsoft stack in Seattle is easier than in most other places.
I say "largely" because occasional startup will be maxing out their hardware trying to build next Google or next Netflix. If hosting can become comparable to payroll in your startup, then it becomes a factor in the platform choice.
If that wasn't enough, Microsoft has Bizspark program where the give you a ton of stuff for free for startups.
Blake, you're right that the vast majority of PNW _vendors_ (i.e. technology service providers) are MS shops. That's because almost all (at least 95%) of the vendor ecosystem here is supporting Microsoft or clients Microsoft directly connects vendors with. (We're primarily a non-Microsoft vendor - we'll do MS-based development if required, but we don't choose it for new projects, and 95%+ of our work is on Linux - but we are one of a very few exceptions at any scale.)
As noted by others, _startups_ - being created from scratch by people choosing their tools - absolutely use a wide variety of platforms. I expect that the numbers would bear out a higher percentage of Microsoft-based startups than in other locations (and there are a number of successful startups in the Seattle area with Microsoft-based platforms), but it's certainly not a significant majority.
I was expressly hired at my current gig (re-startup) in Pioneer Square to migrate from an existing .NET solution to JVM on AWS with a heavy Cassandra component (all on Linux). I started a company up here some years ago and we opted for the Windows platform due to the availability of talent. I think that has changed in recent years, and I feel like the Seattle startup scene these days has a really healthy balance of a lot of different technologies.
I'd love to see a page that just had the "What is $STARTUP_NAME" responses for all the startups. Some way to easily browse and discover. A grid of logos and names really doesn't allow me to anything other than jump around randomly.
The logos and names bit was pretty confusing for me too.
A good logo and name should, in some way, hint at what the product or service is. Not necessarily all that directly, but some correspondence should be there.
You are missing quite a few local startups such as Qumulo. How are you collecting your list of startups? You may want to consider extracting startups from Greekwire and FormD to build your list.
We profile startups that apply to be profiled. We reach out to others, but the majority are from our queue of applications. If you know anyone at Qumulo, we'd love for them to apply at seattle.started.in/apply/.
Also, our site is not meant to be a repository, but more of an in depth look at each startup. We only profile 1 startup each week, so you are seeing the work of only 13 months.
[+] [-] winslow|11 years ago|reply
If you are seeing a great amount of engagement from your visitors with the popup then please disregard me as I may be an outlier.
With that said, I think your website is a great idea and you executed well. I love the overall idea and the community is definitely there for this.
[+] [-] smedawar|11 years ago|reply
Firstly, once someone closes the window, they don't see the pop-up for at least another 2 months. We hope this cuts down on the annoyance factor.
We are seeing pretty good engagement and tracking the numbers. Our bounce rate for July 3rd (the day we hit HN front page) was <0.3%. I mention this day specifically for a couple reasons: 1. We had significant traffic and sample size for that day 2. 92+% of our traffic was from new users (the only ones who would see the pop-up)
We've only been using the box for a couple of weeks and will keep monitoring the numbers and the comments.
Thanks for your kind words!
[+] [-] BlakePetersen|11 years ago|reply
I didn't even know there was a MS service called Lync until we did a training with Mercent (FYI, Lync doesn't work on Linux, I was shocked too).
[+] [-] vyrotek|11 years ago|reply
It helps that we're a B2B company with decent and predictable revenue. I imagine it's a bit harder to afford things if your company is some new free photo sharing mobile app. I have no problems investing money in technology and tools if it accelerates our development and has a good ROI.
I also personally love the C# language.
[+] [-] kkamperschroer|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] koji|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DenisM|11 years ago|reply
I say "largely" because occasional startup will be maxing out their hardware trying to build next Google or next Netflix. If hosting can become comparable to payroll in your startup, then it becomes a factor in the platform choice.
If that wasn't enough, Microsoft has Bizspark program where the give you a ton of stuff for free for startups.
[+] [-] scottru|11 years ago|reply
As noted by others, _startups_ - being created from scratch by people choosing their tools - absolutely use a wide variety of platforms. I expect that the numbers would bear out a higher percentage of Microsoft-based startups than in other locations (and there are a number of successful startups in the Seattle area with Microsoft-based platforms), but it's certainly not a significant majority.
[+] [-] firemanx|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cnp|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gurgeous|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bcbrown|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zhte415|11 years ago|reply
A good logo and name should, in some way, hint at what the product or service is. Not necessarily all that directly, but some correspondence should be there.
[+] [-] smedawar|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] canadaj|11 years ago|reply
Thanks again!
[+] [-] smedawar|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gtani|11 years ago|reply
http://seattlehacks.com/
[+] [-] akg_67|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smedawar|11 years ago|reply
Also, our site is not meant to be a repository, but more of an in depth look at each startup. We only profile 1 startup each week, so you are seeing the work of only 13 months.
[+] [-] kkamperschroer|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smedawar|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smedawar|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] knykadar|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ladybro|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smedawar|11 years ago|reply
seattle.started.in/apply/
[+] [-] cmedawar|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smedawar|11 years ago|reply