The Imposter - maybe not inspiring but an amazing documentary.

Nobody else read this as a joke? I read it as a joke (and a slightly racist one at that).

Entitled SEOs tend to be more common than exceptional. While I didn't see anything so hamfisted that it had to be parody, but I can see what you mean.

From the topics on their default page and his other communications, it seems to be sincere.

https://twitter.com/rishil/status/299185628321566720

I read it as a joke by the end but, worryingly, didn't automatically recontextualise it as racist in light of that. Which, I think I agree with you, it is, if it's a joke and all the East Africa stuff is made up for "comedy value".

....? where did the idea of "The East Africa stuff" being made up come from?

Nowhere. It was speculation on my part extrapolated from the premise that the piece was written as a joke and nothing in it could be taken at face value. A little research on the guy suggests I was reading too much into it. Here he is http://www.linkedin.com/in/rishilakhani and his languages are listed as "Hindi, Swahili, Gujarati, Punjabi" - we don't need much more than that to connect the dots.

I thought he was genuinely from Kenya or Ethiopia or somewhere.

I am an Indian born in East Africa ;)

I assure you I am not racist, being an Indian raised in Kenya.

I second "Getting to Yes" - love that one.

Neat app! So this is specifically trying to measure a customer's satisfaction with your customer service (not their satisfaction with a specific product or the sales process for example)? If you were trying to measure those other things, I wonder how this tool would handle it? And how do you make sure the results are focused on the customer service (rather than the other stuff)? In my experience with measuring customer satisfaction, folks can be very happy with the quality of service they receive but absolutely loathe the product or the process they had to go through to purchase it and then ultimately give you a low score on "Would you recommend this company?"

We are trying to capture a customer's satisfaction within a few key areas an also overall. This is why customers are only surveyed every 3 months. We find this gets a much better idea of how happy they are with the service.

There are other tools for capturing feedback immediately after signup or a support incident, which would help identify signup or sales issues. This is an area we may look into in the future but for the moment the focus is on measuring change in their individual opinion over time. This lets us identity customers that still rate us well, but their opinion has dropped over time. (Or people who are rising advocates etc)

I think this is an OK list of tactics but figuring out what works for your market and your offering and your target customers is where the magic really happens.

What matters is who your prospects position you against. If they are evaluating your offering versus another you have to position against that. Unless your prospects are comparing you to another startup, why would you? And just because you are both in the same market space does NOT mean you should necessarily partner in my opinion.

This is an interesting story and I think the guys did a great job on PR but PR is not the end game here. How are you going to get women to sign up? And paying women to be "virtual girlfriends" doesn't count (or at least that's a different business).

It was just a weekend project.

If we were to start over again (and if it wasn't just a weekend thing), we would have make the site invitation only and keep the men to women ratio 50:50. Then grow the userbase slowly (with whichever way we could).

Overall, according to our user stats, women had no problem signing up. It's just that we launched in the tech circle with overwhelming numbers of men.

They offer free housing and food (plus the tax structure is totally different etc.) so it isn't a direct comparison (but still a big difference).

Even the most minimal benefit structure in the US has got to outstrip free housing and food at Chinese rates. FICA employer contributions, state disability insurance, etc.

I'm sure it does. However don't assume housing is worth nothing. Right now housing in Shenzhen is more expensive than Hong Kong.

The data above doesn't support that - there's only about a 2% difference.

Gender imbalances are more dramatic in the 20-60 population than 0-20 because children have less say in where they live. In other words a 32 year old male might decide to move based on a gender, but people rarely move based on the gender of their children.

Also, a high percentage of dating age people are in a relationship. If there is a 48:52 gender imbalance in 25-45 year old population. And 2/3 the women are in a relationship (ignoring the same sex relationships) the gender imbalance is more significant among the single population. 48 /3 vs 52 - (48*(2/3)) is 16:20 or 44.4:55.6

I think it depends on what market you're in. If you are selling to app developers, TechCrunch is a good place to focus your energy. If you are selling to businesses (or folks that aren't in the tech industry), I don't think it gets you much.

Certainly agree with this. Understanding where your customers are, what they're reading, and how to get in front of them is the most important factor.

But, after that, finding the most authoritative sources within those markets is crucial. So, when people say TechCrunch is irrelevant for mobile/tech startups, well, that's just wrong (at least for us).