Thank you for the advice :) It is deeply appreciated. As you guessed, I am just starting out. I felt out what I thought might be a good idea and trying to allow it to grow into its own. Actually a few people have already stated that they would like facebook login so I may need to rework my account model. I don't really have many users right now so this might be a good time to pivot.
As far as donations and sponsors, I agree with you on the donations but confused how I will be able to generate revenue at the start. I currently am a freelancer and funding would allow me to work on this full time but, again, this may be too early in the idea to think about so you may be right on both of those fronts.
I am currently looking into Appcelerator's Titanium for the mobile app at least for a prototype. As for co-founder, my brother has a stake in the idea and is a bit of a designer/illustrator and has presented quite a few good ideas that we coalesced into what the site is currently.
As for scalabilities sake, we were going to look at Node.js as a technology as we may have a lot of realtime features on the website but, again, I didn't want to work that far ahead as I knew there would be some pivoting of my strategy.
Definitely helps, thank you :) So maybe more than just sharing coffee pictures. Maybe links as well :) Possibly rendering/generating a screenshot of the website as the image itself would do.
Sweet! Yep more than just pics, I can see you positioning yourself as the world coffee hub, connecting coffee lovers globally. This then becomes an attractive proposition for advertisers of everything coffee (coffee bean brands, coffee machines, coffee making courses etc) :)
Definitely. I could watch the posting trends and build categories off of the postings. e.g. users post a lot of recipes thus I would create a recipe category.
Yeah that is why I said it is too early to tell that it is. As for going to a coffee shop and asking people, how do you think I should go about that. I wouldn't want to go sit down at a random table and be like "Hey you, what do you think of this idea". Maybe my head is in the wrong place as far as customer discovery is concerned :) Thank you for the advice.
Go to a highly trafficked coffee shop, grab a latte, and just start talking to people around you. You'll just have to get over the awkwardness of talking to strangers :)
Have a set of questions you can rotate through. Sometimes you can ask 1 or 2 questions before they get annoyed. Other times you can have hour long conversations. Use your judgement to see how engaged they are.
1. Check with the owners - ask if you can do a few customer surveys. Tell them you'll stop after X hours or if anyone complains.
2. Buy some gift cards from the shop and give them out - $5 gift card for... 10 minutes of their time. Have a survey of set questions, but go open-ended as well.
