bloggergirl

> Still: do consider a rebranding of your product. The best niche to start from ... it's a sign something is wrong.

Considering a rebranding is fine, agreed... but jumping to rebranding based on what a single niche (i.e., "top hackers") thinks is not.

To me, it sounds like the problem is NOT the branding; a lot of sites started out with ugly UIs (e.g., Amazon, Google, Facebook), and I happen to think the little duck is kinda charming. Unless you're 1-800-GOT-JUNK, it's highly unlikely that your name or logo will make or break your success.

It sounds like part of the problem is that GW hasn't targeted the right niche yet for DDG.

I don't think top hackers are the right people to target.

To say top hackers are the "knowledgeable power users" of search engines is to say top hackers are the KPUs of all web-based services: just because you can program it doesn't mean you're the market for it. Search power users could be SEO and PPC gurus, researchers, even admin assistants --- people who spend boatloads of time every day using search engines and getting frustrated, not thinking about how they're built or algorithms.

haha - sad but true. :)

"The customer is the product." - Don Draper :)

"people are most motivated to write reviews when they are outraged. ...your site runs the risk of becoming a soap box for ranting."

There's a great big gap between letting all your angry customers (which hopefully you don't have a lot of) leave rants and creating sockpuppets so you have nothing but great reviews. The space between is the basics of word-of-mouth marketing: ask your happiest customers to talk about you.

No one is stopping American Eagle Movers from asking their happy customers to head on over to Yelp and leave them a review. They just don't seem to have any happy customers. So they have to fake it. And then Yelp steps in with their [seemingly] shady selection practices. Hence Justin's disastrous experience.

That is excellent. Like everything Jon Stewart says.