Do you feel the same way about learning to speak foreign languages and play musical instruments? Is it obnoxious for a person to teach introductory French night classes, when fluency will take years and may never be possible for the students given their other commitments? What if it is not even likely that they will ever have French-language conversations "of value"? Does the very act of proposing learning this new skill insult French speakers everywhere?
I keep encountering this attitude among programmers, that the idea of "learning" is something that is the completion of a journey of worthiness. It's extremely disappointing.
I've got a better idea. You give me the $4k and I'll fly to San Diego and beat you with a stick any time you stop working.
Seriously though, this is a really weird plan. It's a huge amount of money to spend for something that almost certainly won't have the effect you want. Unless you want burnout and a serious case of "maybe we should have budgeted more time to take a look around Hong Kong, which is actually pretty cool".
Take a working vacation if you want, but it's not the place you're in that's causing you trouble.
It's impossible to answer this properly without seeing your site. With that in mind, here are a few thoughts:
1. Features don't matter in the abstract. You can succeed with fewer features by being, for example, simpler. That's the 37signals "do less" line. You say features are crucial for your white-label solution. Are you so sure? Why do you think this is? How do you know this is why you are losing customers? ("Clearly" is a dangerous word). Who do you think your customers are? What if your customers were somebody else? (See point 3).
2. "...even though their price point is higher..." - this suggests you don't know that high price is often precisely why customers choose things. High prices suggest high quality, and in the absence of other ways of distinguishing between products, it's a very easy one for people to follow. Perhaps you charge so little that you give the impression of not being serious? And, relatedly, perhaps if you charged more you would be able to spend more to acquire users?
3. Pick a niche and own it. If your site works for user types X, Y and Z, just pick some subset of X to go after. Your product will be more targeted to them, which makes it easier for them to see it as something they could use, and it also should make it easier for you to market. See, for example, the many sites that offer build-your-own-websites for photographers, as opposed to simply just build-your-own-websites for everybody.
4. Win on design, on copywriting, on user experience, on humour, on speed, on sociality, on security, on reliability, on locality, on trust, on friendliness. Win on anything that's not what you can't win on. On the internet, there's room for more than one winner.
But, like I said, if we could see your site you'll get better answers.
Say you have doubts, and that you want to discuss them. Then discuss them, in an orderly and dispassionate way. Keep in mind the possibility that you are the one who's wrong, and you'll be fine. Be calm, rational and modest.
Also: creativity does not mean not rejecting ideas. Creativity involves rejecting vast quantities of ideas. It just also involves creating more ideas than you reject. So one important phase of being creative is uncritically spawning vast numbers of ideas. Another important phase is critically evaluating them. Hemingway (apparently - this is potentially apocryphal) said "I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to throw the shit in the wastebasket."
Okay, that wasn't clear to me, but it's a good point.
You could write up some advice to other non-programmers / "business guys" unsure of how to start: "writing a spec" is indeed a good way to start building.
Why are you wondering whether you have an idea or 'something more'? Just build it, or hire somebody to build it for you, or talk it over with some people. Anything that moves you forward. Wondering what you have isn't going to help you at all.
The email is badly formatted. There are many unnecessary paragraphs / line breaks in the middle of sentences. It looks unprofessional, and does not reflect well on the sender's technical abilities.
There are a number of other problems with the email, such as the ALL CAPS SUBJECT (which people hate) the fact that the sender has started an email with "Dear Sir/Madam" when they know the recipient's name (sir/madam is used when you don't know their name), and the coupling of Dear Sir/Madam with the signoff "Thanks", which is also incorrect. Also, why is the word "very" capitalised? And other such bizarre mistakes.
I don't understand this at all. What is it you want from the New York Times, exactly? A more restrictive paywall so that you can't view things you find on twitter? Or just no paywall at all, and a pony?
Looks pretty good to me, but if I limit the search to Heathrow and just a few months in the middle of the year, nothing comes up. Where are you getting your data from?
Good looking site and a sensible product idea. A few thoughts:
1. "GIFT CERTIFICATE TEMPLATES FOR YOUR BUSINESS" is not the best tagline, I think. "Template? What's a template?" Perhaps better is something like "Sell gift certificates for your business". The fact that you're actually selling 'templates' isn't really important to them. What they get is the ability to sell gift certificates.
2. Below the "sign up to the mailing list" on the front page the information is a bit messy, and there may just be too much of it. What's the difference between the "features" and "about product" tabs? (I don't want you to tell me the answer - I'm just saying it's unclear). Perhaps just grab the most important points and say them as clearly as possible, without requiring clicks onto tabs or anything. Things like "add the name of your company" are probably redundant - I would expect that I would be able to add the name of my company at the very least! I would probably just junk a lot of that stuff and fold it all into a "How it works" page. Then on the front page you just have "Start Printing Gift Certificates" [not 'templates'!] or "How it works"
Various other of your pages could do with cleaning up a bit like that, but overall I think the idea's probably a good one.
One final thought though: is there any fraud prevention involved? What's to stop somebody just making a really good colour photocopy of their gift certificate? You don't have any ID numbers or anything on the certificates, do you?
It would be to allow you to concentrate on your core functionality without worrying about whether you are complying with spam laws, getting delivered, what your delivery rates are etc., running the mailserver. It's just paying for all that to be made a lot easier for you. There's lots of services in this area though: mailchimp, campaignmonitor, sendgrid, and Amazon have one now too.
1. Work out what material you need to cover on your required studies.
2. Break it down into shorter, manageable bits. A chapter per week, perhaps.
3. Make completion of these bits concrete, so you know you are progressing (and not just reading). Completing the exercises, perhaps.
4. Break down the bits even further, so you can plan them across days.
5. Every day at the same time, start working on these bits.
6. When you finish your bits for a day, stop working. Your reward is the rest of the day to learn about whatever you feel like, guilt-free.