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.
Thanks for your kind words!
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).
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.
Mainly, I was wondering if there is any sort of outreach by MS to any of these small companies. I know they have a presence in the Valley and have MS Ventures to nurture fledgling companies with start-up capital, but as far as strategizing to keep new companies in their ecosystem long-term, I was curious to see what sort of efforts they are putting forth to address this.
But the fact that they no longer have such a strong foothold in their home turf is a bit concerning for MS I'm sure. That's why I was curious to see whether there was any effort on MS's part to change their approach and invest more in grassroot business building that will establish those long lasting relationships with brands that will be both valuable and recognizable in the future.
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.
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.
Was MS never even in the running or could it possibly boil down to the cost issue I touched on or perhaps that founders or early engineers chose a different route due to past personal exposure (and would you feel that the financial barrier of entry is a factor in limiting these engineers to this MS software exposure)?
Would have a bit of incentives from MS like reduced license costs steered those early conversations in a different direction or is it simply that the software they offer isn't up to snuff with your particular use cases?
However, it should be noted that Macs make for amazing Windows machines.
Thanks again!
What would be really cool is a map that shows the location of these startups, so that I can easily find ones that are close to where I will be moving!
This is really awesome, thanks again!
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.
seattle.started.in/apply/
www.trakstar.com.
also, we're hiring! rails devs please apply: trakstar.com/jobs
