I have not dealt with this situation so I can only offer my own opinion.
What's important is for you to figure out what you would like to do. As the founder of the company, you're the one who sets the direction of the company. As the sole founder, the company is you.
My recommendation is to try and take some time off, if possible, to figure out what it is you would like to do. Don't think of the company. Only yourself. If you discover what you want to do, then go and do it. If you don't, no worries. You can always get a job, and continue to think about what you would like to do on the side.
As for the company, you can choose to do with it as you please. You could turn it into a side business to keep it going. Hire someone full-time to help with the work. Or you could try and sell the company to someone. Or just shut it down. Later, when you discover something you really want to do and are ready to do it again, you could always start up another company.
Initial thought when browsing through the site was, "A mobile app would be handy." Looks like you guys got that covered.
Something that would be really nice is a demo of the app in some shape or form. Ideally, a demo account that would give me the option of following a tutorial to get a feel for how a typical workflow would be, or just play around on my own.
A demo video could show how it could be used as well, but ideally being able to play around with it would be nice. If anything, the demo video would get me intrigued enough to sign-up and try it out.
Unfortunately, it is pretty common. One school at the university I attended wanted to really hire someone, but his condition was that they hire his wife. They didn't think she "fit" their school so they asked around at other schools. Another school agreed to hire her since on the surface she seemed like she'd be a good addition. To this day, the dean looks back on that and regrets that decision.
That's unfortunate. For some reason that reminded me of high school. The AP English teacher was notorious for being considered almost crazy. Her son was a classmate of mine too and one time he decided to flip a compressed air can upside down during class and spray his own arm.
It was well-known that your performance on class work meant very little, and your only opportunity to get a good grade was to bet on the extra credit "opportunities" that arose towards the end of the year. Basically, it all depended on how much she liked you. One girl gave her a ride to the airport and her grade miraculously jumped to a 4.0 after nearly failing every assignment.
She also happened to be the chair of the AP committee, and tenured. It wasn't until well after I graduated that the school was finally able to do something about her, which amounted to having her teach non-AP courses and removing her from the committee.
Not necessarily a root cause problem, but it is still a problem that affects the quality of education and research.
Tenure was intended to allow for the things you're stating (i.e. academic freedom) without fear of backlash from donors. Unfortunately, as with all things there are downsides and one is having people who strive for tenure in order to ensure a stable job.
One thing that is a fundamental problem is how universities operate. There is inherent waste in everything that is typically done. Classes aren't designed so that the work you do amounts to anything beyond a grade for the class.
In a way, it relates to your point about perception. The perception of universities has changed because originally the university was for academics. College wasn't necessary to get a job. Now it's almost a necessity to find a decent job, but the way colleges operate aren't in a way that optimizes for that.
It is in need of disruption, and it's a wicked problem. There's no simple solution and no easy starting point. Perception is definitely something that needs to change, but unfortunately behavior is much harder to change.
Another aspect of the problem is tenure. It is (extremely) difficult to fire a tenured professor (or admin for that matter). When things get tough universities have a hard time downsizing if necessary.
A resulting, and somewhat funny, problem is what universities tend to do with tenured professors who just aren't good at what they do anymore. What do you do when a professor with tenure isn't good at teaching or research? You promote them.
As you've mentioned, admin doesn't deal with scheduling really since it's mostly automated and what they do aren't worthless things, necessarily. What does happen, however, is mostly repetitive and overlapping work.
“This is a $2.2 billion operation—you’ve got to have some people involved in administering it, managing it, running it, leading it,” he says. “We’re about as lean as we can afford to be.”
As Acting President Timothy Sands stated, they need people to manage things for the entire university. The university itself, however, is comprised of many different schools. Each of these have their own admin to function.
Some schools, however, overlap in what they teach and do. Other schools don't have the same demand as they used to. Others have difficulty in being self-sufficient (i.e. difficulty fundraising) and rely entirely on state funding. The same goes for departments within schools, which also tend to have their own admin. For all of these cases, it makes much more sense to consolidate in order to reduce reptition and overlapping work as well as costs. So why hasn't this been done? It does happen, but, as you can probably guess, bureaucracy tends to get in the way. Each school/department formed for a reason, and they don't want to be "acquired" in a sense, especially the admin because their jobs will be at risk.
I remember being told about a discussion between several deans and an alumni of the university who went on to become a billionaire. They were discussing several things with one of the topics being the budget and the university's future. The alumni suggested a plan to form a new school by consolidating a few of the schools and departments since what they did was overlapping or complimentary. No one agreed to it.
Definitely. What defines "failed" depends on the person.
I've been working on mine for some time as well. Considered it "failed" after cofounder issues led to nothing getting done (no product/MVP). Ex-cofounders just enjoyed talking about building something, and had unrealistic expectations of startups (e.g. $160k+ salary, $8 mil seed rounds, etc).
I've come to believe it's a "failed" venture once I reach a point where I've exhausted all of my ability and options. I haven't reached that point because I can just learn to code to build it. I was relying too much on finding technical cofounders because I didn't consider myself technical at the time.
Quite frankly, we were wantrepreneurs. Coming to terms with myself over that really helped in moving forward.
I've been building ever since and have someone willing to pay once it's done. Best thing is - I've realized that I enjoy building :).
Not sure if you're looking for feedback, but I'll share some since I looked at the site.
1) Unless having an account is a necessity for it to function, having a default account to log into would be nice so I can get an idea of what it is without having to sign-up (I'm guilty of not doing this before). I prefer to play around with the product to get an idea of what it is. Doesn't matter if it's unpolished, buggy, etc.
2) Check for spelling and grammar.
"Workz makes landing jobs easier for you by helping our costumers putting themselves out there to be heard with a beautiful and elegant profile that describes who they are!"
Personally, I have a hard time trusting anything with errors in spelling/grammar. Related to the first point: I would like to see an example of what a "beautiful and elegant profile" could look like.
3) Possible security issue. When I used the final link you provided, (workzstation.com/musiic) I saw what seemed to be the dashboard for a brief moment before being redirected to the login page.
I'm not much of a movie person, but I agree with what was said earlier about it not being clear how everything works.
For example, I click on rankings and have no clue how the rankings are determined. I click on a movie and I'm not sure what the additional features of OnLify are, so I'm not compelled to sign-up.
For something like this, I think integrating Facebook/Twitter is a good way of sharing because people can share their recommendations for movies via their own personal networks. However, be careful not to spam people.
Making it clear what OnLify does and how it does it would help a lot. Hope this helps!
Sorry about that. I made the app so that you can organize your todos into projects (so more of a pm app), and invite others to work with you on projects. What I could try and do is just set it up so you're logged into a test account by default to poke around.
I'll let you know when I've taken care of that. Thanks for showing interest!
Small suggestion: On the "Pricing & Sign-Up" page maybe emphasize free by making it all caps of bold.
>Forever free
For some reason this feels weird to me. Maybe switch it up to make it "FREE Forever".
It's really encouraging to see someone ship something despite all the doubts. I agree with parent and find this really encouraging.
I've built a similar prototype as well, but just kept it locked up because honestly I was afraid to really put it out there since I shared the same doubts.
What's important is for you to figure out what you would like to do. As the founder of the company, you're the one who sets the direction of the company. As the sole founder, the company is you.
My recommendation is to try and take some time off, if possible, to figure out what it is you would like to do. Don't think of the company. Only yourself. If you discover what you want to do, then go and do it. If you don't, no worries. You can always get a job, and continue to think about what you would like to do on the side.
As for the company, you can choose to do with it as you please. You could turn it into a side business to keep it going. Hire someone full-time to help with the work. Or you could try and sell the company to someone. Or just shut it down. Later, when you discover something you really want to do and are ready to do it again, you could always start up another company.
Hope this helps a little.