mooders

The Economist - required reading for global economic news and opinion.

Prospect - Excellent array of current affairs articles, all of which are thought-provoking.

Private Eye - Long-standing satirical magazine aimed squarely at the UK establishment.

Wired - Seemed a good idea at the time, not sure how much value I get from it. Probably won't renew next year.

New Scientist - interesting read for an armchair science geek, but even I'm wondering if it is dumbing-down ever so slightly these days. 50/50 chance of renewing next year.

I also get regular access to Harvard Business Review as a business school alumnus, which is always worth a read, even if it is just a reminder as to why I took my MBA and said goodbye to corporate life :)

Two things - the design is, well, okay but extremely simple.. It just doesn't have that finished look about it.

And the app itself is incredibly simple, which makes me second guess myself as to whether it is too simplistic that users won't pay the few bucks I intend to charge for it. I keep telling myself that they pay for value, not the number of lines of code...

Back when text messaging capability was a rarity on mobile phones, which were themselves rare, I was testing an SMS-based weather forecast service that I had written on behalf of one of the mobile network operators.

The testing worked well on the emulator so I decided to test it over the public network to an actual handset. Only I forgot to advance a recordset through which I was looping, so the code never hit the end of recordset condition. It took me some time to notice there was a problem...

The fact that I crippled a national SMS network for a few hours was bad.

The fact that my company had to pay for each SMS, wiping out out profit for that month was worse.

The fact the handset was mine and on my first date with a girl later that evening (whom I later married) my handset kept beeping with incoming text messages (about 96,000 if I remember) was the ultimate.

The handset didn't have a silent-no vibrate function (either it beeped or it vibrated or it did both) and the SMS inbox filled up after 200 or so messages meant it took days for the inbox to fill up, me to clear it message by message, then fill up again ad nauseam.

Still, I laugh about it now...

What does the user care about? In your example, I guess they care about bandwidth usage and personal data. So in that light, I would inform them that a small amount of game-specific, non-personal info needs to be sent to the website (server is jargon, so should be avoided) to record the score.

My point is that as much info as the user cares about should be provided in a clear, accessible manner.

Where personal data and/or legal disclosure laws apply, then more transparency and info is better.

Unfortunately, it is not unnecessary to point out that all information of all types at all times should always be rigorously honest. If you're going to tell your users something, be truthful.

Could simplification be helpful? I'm thinking that in a conservative B2B industry, offering too much too quickly from an unknown probably gets your target's risk radar bleeping.

I spent a lot of time consulting for, managing projects in and selling into the wholesale banking industry - pretty conservative, slow to change and hard to break into. I found that simplifying both my offering and my message to focus on one or two major points of functionality and pain helped pique interest enough that I could get a decent conversation going, during which I could gently introduce other features and benefits.

In terms of long lead times I would suggest, if it's at all possible for your product or service, offering risk-free trials for a month or two. Manage the install, the maintenance, the training yourself, so the prospect has little or no reason to say no. Once they become users, and assuming your product or service is good, it will be easier to upgrade them to paying status.

A major feature of selling into the B2B space is to know who your buyer is. It is rarely an IT manager. It is rarely an HR manager. It is not always the Operations manager. It is very often, however, the Finance guy. This is not always true, of course, and many people have more or less influence over a given purchasing decision, but you need to know who those people are, what they care about and how to communicate with them in terms they each understand and care about.

To answer your question about how you decide whether to give up, I would advise you to do the above until you are 3-months from zero net worth. At that point, find a paying gig (consultancy, full-time job, whatever you need to do to keep your head above water), then use those three months to go all in on your startup - phone clients and push them hard, phone/email/meet with as many prospects as possible, and push, push, push. If it's going to fail, there is little harm in being harder-nosed / cheekier about the sales process. I would also, in that last 3-month period, look for a buyer for your technology, to at least get some return back on your investment. If, however, you land a contract or two during those three months, you can cancel the paying gig and continue with the startup.

Really good luck, whatever happens! Please do post an update - I think your story will be of interest to pretty much the whole of HN!

If it helps, I spend a reasonable amount of time helping people formulate business and marketing strategy. Happy to offer a specific opinion and ideas (gratis, of course) if you want to email me.

I really like the feel of the site. Agree with jjs - the sign-up form put me off. I want to get started now, and add info (eg Twitter, company name) later if I choose to do so.

A little more info around the jargon would be appreciated - what's a board, how does this influence project structure etc.

The pricing is confusing, as I don't really understand how you define a board, so I can't judge whether I need 1, 15, 50 or 32,767 boards.

I know you have a link to FMi, but a little info about you guys would go a long way. Make me feel like there are people like me behind this would help me trust you with my project data a little more.

I do like it though - keen to give it a try for my own projects!

Thanks for the correction, voltageek! And Smashing Mag is an excellent resource indeed.