Fame is Free!

We’ve made a few more tweaks to the site and we’re happy to announce that Fame is now Free. Free Famers will be put at the bottom of the page, but they will still have the opportunity to get themselves out of the Enquirer and up to A-Listers in People. Serious celebrities need not worry, these new celebs won’t encroach on your space unless they pay their way past you!

It’s exciting to offer so many people the opportunity for fame and we can’t wait to see the results. As always let us know if you have any suggestions or requests and we will try to meet your needs.

We still have some tricks up our sleeves!

Dragon Scales

Things have been hectic here are FameThrower. We have the site together and we are intensively testing our algorithms, render times and usability. We’re upgrading to better hosting, we’ve gone through a series of design revisions, and we may even have t-shirts ready for launch. The toughest challenge thus far has been getting the front page to render on-the-fly, taking in new input and immediately reformatting the page. We don’t want to give the whole shabang away, but know that the front page will be organized in a Dragon Scales format (and no, FameThrower has absolutely nothing to do with Dungeons and Dragons, unless you want it to). When FameThrower is up and running, it will be well worth the wait.

a little taste?

Slight Delays in a Good Way

We’re happy to report that progress is going better than expected, sadly this means that we may not be able to launch tomorrow morning. We are upgrading our servers to be prepared for more traffic and we’re working with lawyers to iron out some of our terms and conditions, because we don’t want to get sued!

This means that we won’t know when we are going to launch until right before it happens so make sure to stay tuned in to our progress. It will be this week, but it could literally anytime. On the up side, we’ll be launching with more features to enhance your FameThrower experience than we would had if we were to open to the public tomorrow morning. So bring out your dancing shoes and get ready for a good time.
It looks like we’ve decided which charity we’re going to give to but we’ll probably hold onto that tid bit of information until we go live!

Pay close attention, as we will be updating with more infomation soon!

Monday Morning L(a)unch?

So we’ve decided to use paypal as opposed to google checkout. We realized that more people probably already have paypal accounts, so it would be easier for the majority of site visitors to propel themselves to Fame! Things are moving along at a breakneck pace so I’m now going to make the call that we will have the site up and functional by Monday morning! I can’t tell you what time zone we’re operating in so stop asking!

Also, someone emailed us today asking what our ‘lunch’ plans are going to be for Monday. We’ll probably be grilling some burgers, but I should mention that we may not be ‘eating’ ‘lunch’ until around 4 or 5pm depending on how Sunday night goes.

We’re almost out of coffee!

Just kidding, we just pulled some strings and we’re getting a few skids of Colombia’s finest tomorrow, assuming this weather holds up. Testing has started on some portions of the site and so far we’re pretty happy with how things are moving along. Once the whole framework is in place and secure we’ll start ramping up on some of the design ideas that we’ve had. Think subtle Web 2.0 to the extreme, with a dash of old-school flare. It’s going to look something like this only with more of a kick to it.
We still need more suggestions for which charity we should give half of our profits to! If you have any send them to us at helpus@famethrower.com or post them in the comments. In any case, we plan on deciding by Saturday night, so we’ll probably put up a list of our current considerations tomorrow.

Smooth Sailing

Development is going faster today that it did yesterday. We now have all the features worked out and we’re just checking off the list as we go. We’ve also decided to use Google Checkout to keep payments as secure and reliable as possible. Now we can be certain that anyone can make a purchase with ease and confidence.

In other news, we still haven’t picked a charity but we’re getting closer. Ideally we’re looking for one where FameThrower can make an impressive impact. Maybe in the future we’ll let you pick which charity you’d like to give to, but for now, it will be easier to stick to one.

Gotta love it!

Taglines

We don’t want to ruin the ‘big’ surprise but we just couldn’t wait to give everyone a taste of what famethrower is going to be, so we thought we’d share some of the taglines we’ve come up thus far:

• Self-esteem… starting at $1!
• Fame yourself!
• Don’t be lame, get fame!
• …Because its easier than making a video blog!
• Don’t know what to get Dad for his birthday? Why not throw him some fame!

Don’t worry it will all become clear soon!

Splash Page Ready.

Alright.  It’s been 24 hours since we came up with this genius idea.  Here’s a quick recap of what we’ve gotten done:  logo, design, hosting, email, basic project in subversion repository, numerous brainstorming sessions, convincing a friend in California to cancel all his plans this weekend, and putting up a quick splash page.

Here’s what we need to get done: a ton of development, deciding what charity to give to (suggestions welcome!), and some sort of promotion (help welcome here too).

Here’s to gettin’ it done.  Email us letters of encouragement and we’ll love you forever.

Giving Back, Moving Forward

We know that our company is a little bit silly so we figured that we should probably put it to good use. After some careful thought we’ve decided that we are going to donate 50% of all of our profits to a charity.

We haven’t yet decided which charity we should give to, although we are adding that decision to the top of the “big board”. If you have any suggestions let us know!

That reminds me, if you have any questions or comments in general feel free to contact us and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.

Promotion at Mach Speed

We made it through that lightning storm, worked for a few hours and finally got some sleep.

We woke up with a flash of new ideas about ways to improve the site and we’re working our way through them currently. In a few hours we should have a splash site up at famethrower and we should hopefully have some of our organization algorithms taken care of by the end of the day. Then we just implement rinse and repeat.

We need to decide what the best form of promotion is going to be… we want things to ramp up quickly and we think that it’s possible if we can get our idea in front of the right people. Should we try to promote the blog, the splash site or should we wait for the whole thing to be done? Let us know what you think!

I’ll leave you with a question famethrower will answer: What would you do for fame?