I think the entire design leaves a lot to be desired. The color scheme is distracting. The green draws your eyes directly to a less-important item. The question should be the most important item. (Possibly followed by whether there are answers or not?)

The "answers" should be given at least thesame weight and importance as "votes",

"2 days ago" should probably be removed for the near future. Why would someone participate in a community that has such little activity? You could always put it back if things liven up.

The icons are completely unclear. You explained that the "tag" icon was a hand, but I still dont see it. And even so, not sure how that relates to "tags". And the word bubble is usually used to represent comments not answers.

1.) The point about green being distracting is a great point, something we hadn't thought of. We're working on implementing a gray-to-green bit that corresponds to points (similar to hn) and just stuck it at green for now. We'll be sure to make it to the eyes are drawn to the titles, and not the points.

And yes, the answers are equally important as the questions. Working on a redesign right now.

2.) Good point about the reference time. It's always there, so I somewhat assumed it should always be there, but it may serve as a deterrent to new people entering into the community. Removed until it's less depressing :D

3.) Icons. Got it. The tag icon was an open hand, just like "tagging" someone. We'll change it to something more traditional (being cute like that probably is a bad idea), and adjust the other icon as well - any suggestions?

The main goal of the site should be to get good content in the door and get it distributed to the users. Additionally, before you make any user interface changes from feedback such as the OP, definitely do a few ad-hoc user tests with friends or random people off the street as a sanity check. It's cheap and really helpful.

Part of getting good user content is removing friction.

It's just a matter of prioritizing and focusing your energy on the right area. That seems to be one of the key ingredients of success.

And if being responsive means tweaking this minor things, it's no big deal. We're working on ways to build up the content - because you're right, that's going to top everything in the end.

Thanks for the encouragement by the way! :D

Currently, when I visited, question #2 was how to start a brothel in Nevada. If you are not careful, you'll end up like Cambrian House, with projects like "congress is corrupt, help me get rid of congress". And then what?

Do not hesitate to moderate by yourself.

There were two choices - delete it, and it goes away, no harm done, but nothing gained. Or try to turn it to our advantage a bit. I decided to actually research it and come up with the best answer I could (having never considered anything brothel-related).

Turns out it is legal in Nevada, and there are a number of stipulations covering it similar to New Zealand. I had no idea before. And that'll come up if someone searches for prostitution :D

I think you're ultimately right, we really have to approach this in the right way to get the highest-content possible. Unfortunately, Cambrian House turned into vencorps before I had a chance to actually use them.

To that end, I'm searching for people who can seed the site with high-quality questions and answers - I hope this was a high quality answer, but I have to admit it wasn't a high quality question.

I'll have to take a more in-depth look at fairbusiness! Thanks for your advice.

That wasn't what killed Cambrian House. It was the idea of crowdsourced software development itself. It's as silly an idea as crowdsourced novel-writing. Even if it weren't, the overhead of co-ordinating participants would be an order of magnitude harder than just writing the system.

The other thing I noticed immediately was the way the green box didn't line up with the question title. Another minor gripe I know...

How're you planning to seed this? Stack Overflow (from memory) had a private beta seeding period with invited beta testers who made sure that when the general public hit it, they had a great first impression of the amount of content. At the moment you're probably losing a lot of people who drop in, see how little traffic there is, and don't bother posting a question.

If you're going to allow anonymous answers, you should probably have some community spam protection ("Flag this"). Also if you're not logged in, I would put in voting controls as a call to action and to try and get people to register.

Design gripe noted.

It's an interesting point about content, perhaps we should revert back to some "closed beta" system while we build up a reasonable amount of content?

And we'll work on getting the flag bits in, it was up next anyway. I had hidden the voting, but it's true it should be there as a call to action.

Thanks tons!

For the time being, we're cockroaches - living cheap until we can make it to ramen profitable.

2. Make the concept of the money pot more prominent. I think its the most important piece of information to display. Try to rework the layout to put it at the top, perhaps next to the logo.

3. Consider asking more questions with your account, then looking up the answer online and answering it. Consider it your personal notebook of business info. I haven't thought about this rigorously, but I would at least give it thought. It would make your site seem more accurate.

4. Users don't want to answer the same types of questions over and over. Consider making a startup 101 page that tries to lay out the very basics of startups that some people seem to be asking. Then users can just point people to that page.

Using a blog seems like a fair enough suggestion, but this should grow in a pretty unblog direction, so we're building it up right now.

We'll likely opensource this part in the near future as well.

Widen the text inputs on the sign up page, right now they're really narrow.

Changed from gray to black. How is that?

As spam becomes unmanageable, we'll implement captchas for anonymous accounts. They're ready to be flipped on with a switch!

The white space in the green box is for the voting arrows, but I think you're quite right. Everyone has mentioned those, so we'll have to work on them.

Also, I think the area that is used for questions needs to have more width to it.

Do you mean the content div should be wider?