Sept 30 Update: After 2+ years of offering free site reviews, we have decided to end the lab.  It was a lot of fun and we had many, many great experiences with the small business owners we interacted with.  We had some super bright minds volunteering and to each and all of them, we are immensely grateful for their participation. Thank you.

Over the last six months, we received good submissions asking for help with website traffic and sales, but we had an order of magnitude more spammy requests and people who were not serious about growing a company. Many were repeat requests simply trying to get free publicity or asking us for free advice on slightly new “problems” they faced. While we were doing this service completely free and know that we helped a lot of small companies, the time it took to manage the tire kickers and spammers was diminishing the value.

We are setting up a similar process that is priced very low and will run under Sales Kickstart; it is only $19.95 and you can read more about that shortly via an upcoming post.  We continue to help startups and small biz, but only when they come in from trusted partners and referrals from people we know asking us to chip in for a good cause (and that doesn’t mean only not-for-profit). Most of the volunteer advisors are no longer involved although we reach out for help from time to time, as needed, to those in our network.  We are considering a new iteration of the SRT that may work out and are in discussions with a database team about it.  When it happens, you’ll hear about it!

Thanks again to everyone who participated, on both sides of the process.