Beta testers needed

[macdaddy]

Some buddies and I have been working for the past 8 months on a new web service and we are about ready to launch.  Before we do, I need to recruit some beta testers who can spend a couple weeks on the system and give me some feedback on things like the design, usability, etc.  I thought this might be a good place to ask for volunteers, since a lot of you don't have anything else to do all day (just kidding).  The time requirements are flexible - from 30 mins to however much time you have.  There is no compensation set up yet, but it's likely that we will devise a system to compensate those who help out.  You will be able to make significant changes to what we hope will be a really successful web portal/platform.

The service has a bunch of aspects to it, which we are trying to iron out, and that's partly what we need help with.  I would really appreciate anyone willing to give a little bit of their time to this!  You can email me at k12credit@mit.edu if you're interested, and I'll get back to you ASAP with more details.

 

[Texas Proud]

Just a thought....

Maybe tell us what the site is for

If it is child porn... I am NOT in, but want to report you..

Some nice ladies... maybe....

A sales site, or some other site that wants to have me 'win' something if I do X or Y or whatever... not a chance.

 

[macdaddy]

Oops I should have included a more detailed description in the first post... In a nutshell, the site provides services to non-profits and other groups. Part of that is fundraising via online shopping, searching, etc., which is sort of like the model of upromise.com, schoolpop.com, igive.com (if you are familiar with those). I don't know if that is what you meant by sales site. If you want to buy flowers for your wife's birthday, you can shop via the site and it will earn 10% of your purchase for whatever charity (or internet site or blog or whatever) you have selected. (Or if you want to have the American Cancer Society earn 1 cent every time you search on Google or Yahoo, we facilitate that.) Based on that there is a social networking component, where you can see who else is shopping for the same charities, or buying from the same stores, or buying the same products... potentially you could meet some nice ladies that way... and you can cross reference message boards and blogs that you read... that sort of thing. Not every part of it is novel (the affiliate commission model is obviously not), but nonetheless a lot of work has been put into it, and it has some neat applications.

So if for instance the retire early message board was costing a lot of money to host, all of us as posters could shop at a portal site set up for it, and our commissions would go to help run the site... I'm not sure how much if any money is needed to host this site, so that might be a bad example. Just in case I sound like too much of a salesman, we aren't really trying to profit from this (100% of the commission rebate is sent to the charity, blog, whatever), which gives us an advantage over those other sites. We are able to do this because MIT has hosted us as a social development startup which means our development costs have been close to zero.

And if anybody knows of or is involved with local non profits who could benefit from this sort of thing then please email me too!