Showoff

I wrote: "Hmm, I also think you need a new name. 'Showoff' says exactly what it does, lets you 'showoff' your work. What's a pagekite? (reminds of the 'mint' vs that unpronouncablely named finance site naming issue)."

That is feedback from a potential customer that I, as the customer, don't get any sense of what your product is about from the name. I cite by inference a great postmortem written up about the 'Mint' startup, and had you searched for 'mint postmortem' you could have come up with the link [1] below. The alternative to Mint was a website called Wesabe. Both Mint and Wesabe did personal finance, Wesabe was in some ways technically 'superior' to Mint and yet Mint "won."

So you have this bit of feedback on how the name you've chosen isn't helping your product get any visibility and you respond like this:

"Regarding the name, I actually think PageKite is an excellent name and we are lucky to have it. It's googlable, we got the .com for cheap, it's a strong trademark. If I draw you a picture of your site flying like a kite in the clouds, connected by a string to your laptop, you'll find the name is a perfect fit... :-)"

You tell me, your potential customer, that I am wrong in thinking your name doesn't tell me what I need to know about your site. And you go on to tell me how all it would take would be some graphic, which you don't have time to draw right now, of a kite made out of a web page flying in some clouds attached to your laptop to make it obvious.

Your name is a 'visual pun' which you no doubt find exceptionally clever, you know "in the cloud", "easy as flying a kite". Except that nobody types into a search engine "How can I make my web site look like a kite?" but they just might type in "How can I show off my web site?" Search engines are stupid, they will give lots of positive ranking love to the word 'showoff' is in the URL to showoff.io and zero ranking love to a site named 'pagekite'.

You added "we got the .com for cheap" which should be a clue. If you read the Mint postmortem Kagan says, "The site was originally called mymint.com. I was initially against buying Mint.com but Aaron / Anton spent months acquiring the domain. This may seem inconsequential, but would you feel more comfortable entering your bank details on Wesabe.com or Mint.com?"

Do you see the difference in thinking there? One person thinking 'well we already have the domain, so we'll go with that' and the other saying "I'm going to ask my customer to come to this site, what would they be more comfortable with?"

When I look back at your responses in this thread it is clear you are passionate about this project of yours and that is great. There have been a number of comments offering you feedback on both your product and your presentation. In nearly every case your response to that feedback is a combination of "thank you for sharing, this is what you (the commenter) missed about that particular feature and why ours is better."

When you responded as you did about the name I just thought to myself, "Here is a brilliant guy who is going to be frustrated at how little traction his project gets until he can move himself mentally to a place where he can internalize the feedback and act on it."

Its only an observation, I probably should have kept it to myself, and I have no doubt created more problems than good at this point. I'll go back to reading now.

[1] http://okdork.com/2010/10/14/how-mint-beat-wesabe/

The only tough part is getting it to find your ssh-keys. I did this by running it inside git bash, which as a Windows user you might have anyway if you've installed msysgit. Of course cygwin would also probably work. ssh-keygen to make your keys, and then run your server and then show.

I couldn't figure out how to get the -i command to work properly so it found your ssh keys, maybe I should try that again and see if you can do everything with PuTTYgen for a 'true' windows solution.