goodwinb

I agree that knowing how to pull your own data is important. While you are doing the tedious work of pulling data your brain will often spot a good idea for a new experiment or see a new relationship in the data structure.

Quite well done. I think his tone and when he signals his strategy also helps how he plays the game.

26% of Oracle's expenses are sales and marketing. (Those strip club trips add up.) In all seriousness, is it just a necessary evil? If you could hold your nose and do it would it not be a barrier to entry for your competitors also? Could you do enterprise software without the sales army?

I'd like to hear more your experiences about breaking into the enterprise world and selling your knowledge management software.

You might have a list of top users that I could friend and get their tabs. Furthermore if I could search the users by tag and get a list of active users for that tag who I could friend, that would be beneficial. I.e. I might search for "delta blues" and see ten guys who have put up tabs using that tag. This also gives me something to do on the front page other than just registering. I like the icon. Good luck.

In testing a MVP I submitted to several of the startup websites (1). The quality of traffic was bad. Their audience were people who were interested in kicking the tires on startups and not people in the industry I was targeting who needed a solution.

Having people try the site and give feedback on Mechanical Turk also doesn't work.

I like the suggestion of others on this thread to post to a focused subreddit. Another good idea is to find a blog through AllTop for your industry. I've found most bloggers will accept a direct ad for less than $100 a week.

What worked the best for me was good old AdSense, monitoring, and a/b testing. It is pretty easy to get a $100 coupon for new AdSense accounts and you can find out much about your site for that amount. Good luck.

(1) Fyi traffic figures indexed to highest: KillerStartups 1. FeedMyApp 0.85. NetWebApp 0.10. Cloudomatic 0.04. GreatWebApps 0.01.

Can you HNers think of a way to separate the teaching aspect of university from the research aspect?

They seem to serve two different customers. Teaching is really for students to educate them and season them up for life. Research is for the government or business and makes the professor and university money.

I think we can all remember a hard core research professor who could not teach a class worth a damn. On the other hand having students proximal to research projects is good for both; students receive early job experience and research projects have access to cheap educated labor.

What business model in the future should universities follow?