How do you make sure that people are only posting news from Chicago?
Thus far it's been security-via-obscurity plus aggressive moderation.
How much time do you spend on moderation? Seems like it would be a lot of work. Problems with spam?
My Startup (WindyCitizen) named one of Chicago's New Essentials
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Re: My Startup (WindyCitizen) named one of Chicago's New Essentials
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thus far it's been security-via-obscurity plus aggressive moderation.
How much time do you spend on moderation? Seems like it would be a lot of work. Problems with spam?
That's what interns and crowdsourcing is for. We've got a nifty "bury" feature that lets you hide stories you don't like just like on a lot of these sites.
Re: My Startup (WindyCitizen) named one of Chicago's New Essentials
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
How much time do you spend on moderation? Seems like it would be a lot of work. Problems with spam?
That's what interns and crowdsourcing is for. We've got a nifty "bury" feature that lets you hide stories you don't like just like on a lot of these sites.
Cool - Every major city should have one of these. Nice Job Man!
Re: My Startup (WindyCitizen) named one of Chicago's New Essentials
#34This is awesome, congrats.
What really stands out is the way you engage this community, seek advice, and give back with your honest response. Part of what makes HN great.
What can we help with? I have a dev team that might be able to spare some bandwidth. If there's anything we can do, please let me know (email in the profile). No strings attached.
Re: My Startup (WindyCitizen) named one of Chicago's New Essentials
#35This is awesome, congrats. What really stands out is the way you engage this community, seek advice, and give back with your honest response. Part of what makes HN great. What can we help with? I have a dev team that might be able to spare some bandwidth. If there's anything we can do, please let me know (email in the profile). No strings attached.
Thanks!
I'll drop you a line off HN.
Re: My Startup (WindyCitizen) named one of Chicago's New Essentials
#36Congrats! No obligation for you to answer, but have you raised any funding yet? Would you be able to spend a lot of money to scale more rapidly or is going more slowly a better strategy for you?
Great question. Someone asked me about funding last night at the HN Chicago meetup. In all honesty, I haven't thought a whole lot about it. I reached out to alumni entrepreneurs from my university when I was starting Windy Citizen to get advice. One of them, a guy who works in VC in the energy field, pointed out that I had no clue what I was doing, so: a) Evaluating a technical partner would be extremely difficult. b…
How is Drupal working out for you as a platform?
Re: My Startup (WindyCitizen) named one of Chicago's New Essentials
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great question. Someone asked me about funding last night at the HN Chicago meetup. In all honesty, I haven't thought a whole lot about it. I reached out to alumni entrepreneurs from my university when I was starting Windy Citizen to get advice. One of them, a guy who works in VC in the energy field, pointed out that I had no clue what I was doing, so: a) Evaluating a technical partner would be extremely difficult. b…
How is Drupal working out for you as a platform?
Lol. See comment above. Drupal's great at solving 80% of whatever problem you have. Unfortunately, consumers expect and deserve a finished product. So you either need to be a dev and hack your code yourself or hire someone else to do it for you. Very little "just works" out of the box in a way that consumers would recognize and take to.
Re: My Startup (WindyCitizen) named one of Chicago's New Essentials
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you elaborate on your experiences of building out an ad sales program/team? How much traffic did you have when you started selling ads? What type of CPM are you able to see? The reason I ask is that I run a niche community site that gets a decent amount of pageviews but I'm not sure how much I could make by selling ads against it.
I found my ad sales person by asking for help on HN. See my post further downthread for the link to that thread. I've interviewed maybe half a dozen sales people and worked with 2-3 who didn't work out. I have no advice other than to say it's really hard to find someone good. A great ad sales person is someone who wants to make a lot of money. Those people typically steer clear of early stage ventures because there m…
Thanks!
Do you mind sharing how much commission you pay your ad sales person?
Re: My Startup (WindyCitizen) named one of Chicago's New Essentials
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great question. Someone asked me about funding last night at the HN Chicago meetup. In all honesty, I haven't thought a whole lot about it. I reached out to alumni entrepreneurs from my university when I was starting Windy Citizen to get advice. One of them, a guy who works in VC in the energy field, pointed out that I had no clue what I was doing, so: a) Evaluating a technical partner would be extremely difficult. b…
Could you elaborate more on the process of getting the grant? That is an avenue of funding I would love to hear more about. Please don't give away any information that might hurt you or that you would be uncomfortable sharing.
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Re: My Startup (WindyCitizen) named one of Chicago's New Essentials
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you elaborate more on the process of getting the grant? That is an avenue of funding I would love to hear more about. Please don't give away any information that might hurt you or that you would be uncomfortable sharing.
I wish there was some magic to it. I've only applied for stuff that was aimed at supporting new news-related ideas. So far I've applied for 7 grants and won one of them. I have two applications in the hopper right now but both are longshots. For this grant in particular, the Chicago Community Trust announced it had $500,000 and wanted to give it to Chicago-based, Chicago-focused, news-oriented projects. About 70 peop…
How do you hear about these grants? Are there any sites that specifically focus on available grants?