secret service called him, couldn't help them took steps to protect anonymity users donated $1500.00 why did it work? - people like to talk about themselves - sex - voyeurism he know longer reads it anymore. gets lot of email from people saying it has improved there life. he gets email from psych professors, to priests. rants and raves, requests for addition of a suicide hotline number. two sites he's aware of that did something similar: notproud.com dailyconfessions.com they never got big, not sure why could be UI (less clicks) could be the kinda funny name etc he really doesn't know Branding has played a huge role in the success. He payss attention to UI, minimalism, etc. The banner is cool (tiles). Hire a designer! (or me) there's a lot of moderation, takes out things he doesnt like - filters and moderators combo since november, point system. - now all human moderated - he would cooperate with law enforcement - no ip stored - confession text, random number, date is all that's stored If you think your site will be hot, get your merch ready at least by week three. He used cafe press, but now says "Don't use them, it's a rip off". Make friends with a screen printer, just get your merch ready. He's working on a book. Thought about addding some of the features requested as premium featores. Micropayments, maybe ad supported. He'd love to monetize it but still struggling with the tradeoffs of money, selling out, ads. Google ad space rejected him seven times, "too racy" Did he pick .us because it could be read Grouphug Us? "I thought it was cute, but basically I got it because the domain was $4.95" He's probably going to look into a public moderation hotornot type of rating. But he wants to avoid "voting" He plans on releasing the sourcecode. about 1/3 of total submission make it onto the site Q: "Have you considered offering redemption?" A: Yes! I considered adding a forgive button and you could get a "700 people have forgiven you" or maybe a panel of spiritual leaders to comment, like loveline. Debian linux, apache, php, mysql, smarty template framework. Q: Have you done anything to shieldd yourselff legally, LLC, etc A: No. I feel like I'm safe, but not sure if there's any precedent. He's got a queue of 500 people dying to be moderators. Doesn't appear to be any copyright issues with publishing a book of confessions. (How would you prove you wrote something) Someone at Brkeley is using the data for research. There's an RSS feed, other sites are adding features via scraping (like adding comments, etc). Most frequent confession: I masturbate all the time. People are hung up on masturbation. After that, it's cheating on lover. sexual preferance seems split right down the middle. Q: Has anyone tried to buy it? A: Yeah, I think they just wanted to put ads on there. Q: Has this fed your freelance business? A: A little bit, nothing to lucrative yet. It made me a little more popular with the people I already knew Told moderators not to accept confessions avbout violoent crimes or sex crimes. They'll take other sorts of crimes though. He would always cooperate with law enforcement, but he's limited in how much he can give them.