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HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

• edibleEnergy 11y ago
  Hey Jared and Trevor, BugReplay (http://www.bugreplay.com http://www.bugreplay.com) is a bug reporting tool in the form of a browser extension that captures a screencast of the user’s actions synced with network traffic, javascript errors and other browser data. What's the best way to grow your early user base? Ideally we'd like people who are going to use BugReplay at their jobs and open source endeavors, but we want to keep it relatively small until we feel like it's ready for the widest possible audience.
  • radicalbyte 11y ago
    What is your target market? Developers & QA, right? Not end customers? The copy on your site is technical + imho too long. I'm a tech lead so get it, but if I want to buy your product I'm going to have to convince a PHB that it's worth spending money on. They're going to run for the hills when the headline is "records screen usage javascript errors and network". As a potential customer: if this could be self-hosted and runs on Windows then it's a very interesting product. If I can deploy this, live, as part of my site, then it's more valuable for me. Again, it must be self-hosted (data protection!) - which is the reason I don't use the other tools. But giving my users the ability to record the process leading up to an error they see is fantastic.
    • edibleEnergy 11y ago
      Thanks for the feedback and for checking out our site. We are not targeting end customers directly but hope that at some point it would be a service that a B2C would offer to their customers. It’s really hard to describe our product without being technical but we will revisit it. Any ideas? We are exploring how to run this self hosted, it is entirely possible but we haven't gotten there yet. As for data protection it's an issue we take very seriously. All network data is stored encrypted, and all reports are private unless explicitly set to public. We are also working on ways to obfuscate the traffic before it’s ever uploaded.
      • radicalbyte 11y ago
        Problem: bug reports are crap. "why rely on obscure text reports when bugreply can show you the problem: live!" "bug reports for the youtube generation" "take the pain out of bug reports - bugreply lets your QA|consultants|users record the steps leading up to their problems" You really need to brainstorm this; first get the value prop clear for various target demographics, then iterate iterate iterate until you can get a few nice one-liners. Then test them on someone who is clean (a potential customer). Btw if you want any further feedback feel free to ping me on twitter; username is the same as my hn username. I'll DM you my gmail/hangouts address/linkedin.
        • edibleEnergy 11y ago
          I will definitely follow up with you- thank you for the ideas. I think in an effort to show how different we are from other screenshot and screencast tools we may have gotten too technical in our wording- but we definitely don't want to scare people off! Thanks again!
  • tlb 11y ago
    This kind of tool has the classic agent problem. There are two kinds of users: people filing bug reports and people receiving bug reports. The people receiving bug reports get the benefits, but the people filing the bug reports decide which tool to use and have to install something to use yours. My guess is that the developers will have to encourage or require bug reporters to use it. Their site will have to say “Here’s how to report a bug: Step 1: install BugReplay. Step 2: …” So find out whether they’re willing to do that, and how to make it as painless as possible. It’s reasonable to want to keep the initial user base small, but usually that happens by default. The important thing is to keep the initial user base smart, and on a path to the eventual large user base. Don’t make the mistake of pursuing users that aren't your eventual target market in order to keep things small at first. PS, if you're appealing to web devs, you need first-rate website design. It currently has formatting problems: https://www.dropbox.com/s/4hethogee0d7zgt/Screenshot%202016-02-26%2011.02.16.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/4hethogee0d7zgt/Screenshot%202016-...
    • edibleEnergy 11y ago
      The kind of user you’re describing isn’t our focus right now and I agree it would be hard to get a user of a website such as Facebook or Twitter to go through all those steps. We think potential users can be broken down into different groups. The first group would be people within the same organization (testers, design, other devs, marketing, support, etc). In that scenario, the company would subscribe to our service and everyone would use it internally, especially once they see how much easier it is. The second group would be people who have a vested interest in a website working properly. For example, my friend has a clothing company and they sell online through Shopify. If she encountered a bug on Shopify and they told her this is the tool she should use, she would do that. I do agree however that for a casual user on a website, it would take a lot to get them to use our service. That’s why we are not focusing on that. Thanks for pointing out that formatting problem. We use Instapage to make the marketing site (we’re bootstrapping) and it seems fine when I logged in- I’ll forward the screenshot to them to take a look. As for the small user base, even if they’re really into it, it’s the kind of tool that someone uses only when they need it. So even if we have a committed user base, unless they have tons of buggy sites, we can’t expect to see tons of activity. That’s why we aren’t sure how to handle it. Thanks for giving me an opportunity to clarify and for the feedback! It’s really appreciated.
  • nradov 11y ago
    Maybe you should target corporate software engineering and QA managers who lead the teams building their own commercial web applications. It should be fairly straightforward to target those people through conferences and online forums. Corporate QA groups waste a lot of time manually filling out bug report forms, and those often end up missing key data which prevents developers from reproducing the bug thus wasting even more time. If you can provide a tool that will accelerate QA cycle times and cut labor expenses through automation then corporate customers will be willing to pay for it, and go through the hassle of installing it on their testing computers.
    • edibleEnergy 11y ago
      Thanks for the feedback. We plan on targeting QA managers but haven’t figured out the best approach. I won’t pretend to be a QA expert but I think our service would be very valuable for exploratory/ad-hoc testing. We hope our service will save time for QA professionals when filling out bug reports so that they can spend that time providing value in other ways.
  • malyk 11y ago
    Have you looked a company like rainforest qa or any of the other crowdsourced testing companies? Your tool seems like an excellent fit to have their users use so bug submissions are better for developers. That's the "easier" play, but with your tool/tech you might be in a good position to create your own crowdsourced QA company. I'm not sure how the economics look for the other crowdsourced qa companies, but I know from looking at them that there prices seem to be too high. Basically I could hire a full time QA person with their prices...so why would I use them. If you could figure out a way to undercut those companies while providing on-demand crowdsourced qa using your tool...I bet you'd have a pretty nice business.
    • edibleEnergy 11y ago
      Thank you for the feedback. We have looked at Rainforest QA and could definitely see how our tool would work for them. I only know of a few crowdsourced testing companies but we should focus on researching that more. Your other idea of becoming a crowdsourced testing company is definitely interesting and one we never thought of. Our immediate goal is to get people using it regularly and we’ll take it from there. Thanks again!
• zeeshanm 11y ago
  I am founder and CEO of Exivest [http://exivest.com/ http://exivest.com/]. We help startup employees value their equity, help match them with direct buyers or arrange synthetic liquidity. We've talked to many startup employees and they all have given positive feedback. One concern that comes up is that startups are not OK with changing the cap table for tiny transactions. In that case, we have plans to offer synthetic liquidity solutions via derivative transactions. We'd like to hire your thoughts on the problem we are solving and our approach so far.
  • thinkdevcode 11y ago
    I click on the "Value Now" button under Equity Value Calculator and I go to Heroku Welcome page... Edit: all three buttons go to same page https://exivest.herokuapp.com/ https://exivest.herokuapp.com/
  • tlb 11y ago
    I think the key to this business is getting both employees and founders/board/investors to like you. In practice, the board will prefer some secondary markets and that will drive most of your business. Boards care about the stock not getting into the wrong hands, such as activist investors or hostile acquirers. So being able to offer the board "we'll give employees liquidity, hold your stock without voting it, and not sell till N months after the IPO" would make the difference.
• sharemywin 11y ago
  Hi Jared & Trevor, Do you think that marketplaces for services is too mature of a market? I'm working on a site called bid2mow.com to help new lawn care companies find work. It seems like everyone is focused on come to my app/website and I'll get you a price versus an ebay model. I know task rabbit had that model and went away from it. Ebay may not be amazon but it's no business to sneeze at either.
  • tlb 11y ago
    I don't think there's a general answer: different services are very different. The lawn industry is very different from other home services, and we've seen different things work in those two businesses. Usually, marketplaces get started around the margins. Today, eBay sells everything but at first it was obscure collectibles. For lawn care, weather and seasonality drive the short-term market dynamics. So when there's rain or drought, the supply-demand curve shifts rapidly and that's when lawn care providers might look for work to fill up their schedules. You should look into how your marketplace might work on different kinds of days, to see if will be a useful part of the ecosystem.
    • sharemywin 11y ago
      Thanks for doing this and answering, All this is assuming minimal outside funding.(as a solo founder I doubt I can get funding) I guess my plan is to play $50-$100 million game of "moneyball." Lawn care was the lowest hanging fruit to get 10k-50k/mo fees with in a year or two. Next was probably to try and go after cleaning and maybe even do a little cross selling. I'm also looking at launching www.bid2flyer.com which will help with a channel to feed businesses looking for marketing. The code is about the same for each of these and the marketing channel is what I have experience in. Obviously not a traditional way to do things.
• yurivish 11y ago
  Hi Trevor and Jared, http://weavesilk.com http://weavesilk.com is a side project of mine for many years. I put out a brand new version of the iOS app this month and am thinking about developing it further but find it very hard to decide what direction to go. The website is popular, and people love Silk, but for different reasons: some find it relaxing and meditative, others like that it closes the gap between their artistic ability and taste. It's been used as an inspirational sketching tool for artists (http://bit.ly/1Qlm1kA http://bit.ly/1Qlm1kA), to make album art, and has been on exhibit at the Children's Creativity Museum. Some teachers use it to teach kids about symmetry. I've made something compelling but don't know what to do next, or how to figure it out.
  • nightpool 11y ago
    Wow, closing the gap between artistic ability and taste is actually a really good way to describe how weavesilk feels to me. Thanks for making it!
  • snowmaker 11y ago
    I actually really think you have something here. I spent some time playing with it, and it's quite addictive. What I like best is that it allows someone with zero artistic ability (like me) to make a piece of artwork that they'd be proud of. That's quite a trick. What are some things you've thought about building on top of it? What have your users been asking for?
    • yurivish 11y ago
      Thanks, Jared! Some of the things I've thought about: - Expanding the expressive range. The new app has a "silk eraser" and I have ideas for at least one new type of brush. - Continuous undo (as if it's a movie), or at least more undo levels. - Making a better Alchemy: http://al.chemy.org/ http://al.chemy.org/ - Unifying the experience of the website (2013; JS/Canvas) and the new app (Swift/Metal) - The website lets you share replays of your drawings that play back on the site. What's the best way to do something similar with the app? - A gallery would be great but requires figuring out the previous two points to some extent. There's a lot of potential but it feels like a lot to navigate through. Long-term I'd love Silk to be a Bret Victor-inspired environment for visually exploring computation: Compute with color and time, explore the system, make your own brushes. You can think of a brush as a function from input history to pixels on the canvas. I think there's a lot of potential here. Some of the common things people ask for: - More colors. The new app has more palettes, which is a start. - More undo levels. - High-resolution export. This will be coming to the app, potentially inside a bundle of "pro" features. - Plugins for Photoshop and other professional design tools. - Prints. I've experimented with prints before but found that the art doesn't come out nearly as well in print. My bar for quality here is this piece made by a talented designer friend (Anand Sharma) many years ago: http://bit.ly/1TDS2sz http://bit.ly/1TDS2sz. Maybe the right answer here is something more ephemeral like greeting cards.
• ForrestN 11y ago
  I founded a small nonprofit (~$250k budget this year for underpaid staff of me+3 art types) that serves an annual audience of 1 million unique visitors for the last few years with hi-res documentation of contemporary art; we are nearly ubiquitous within our field, academics have hailed our project as transformative, but we suck at fundraising and are tiny. Problem: in the midst of running everything, I do all the coding slowly by myself, and the urgent coding todo list has exploded while some of our sites age. What should I do? Thank you!
  • gnat 11y ago
    (This is not one of the YC chaps) 1) Tell us the site, 2) Ask who makes money when your audience grows, 3) Ask who wants access to your audience, 4) Realise that "non-profit" only describes who has a claim on profits, not whether they must exist. Your org must still have income >= expenses
    • ForrestN 11y ago
      Our most famous project is called Contemporary Art Daily, but our most ambitious, new project is called Contemporary Art Quarterly. The organization is called Contemporary Art Group. We're generating $250k of income, a bit more than our present expenses, largely based on the value of our audience. Being a non-profit also, very importantly, speaks to our motives, which mostly are to fulfill a mission to make important art more accessible to the public, rather than to get bigger and enrich the people involved.
  • tlb 11y ago
    You need a great developer. You can't offer more salary than Google or Facebook, so you have to offer a mission that they believe in. I think your mission would be really exciting for the right person -- you just have to find them. Tip: if you're in the Bay Area, there'll be a lot of developer/artists here this weekend: http://grayarea.org/event/deepdream-the-art-of-neural-networks/ http://grayarea.org/event/deepdream-the-art-of-neural-networ...
    • ForrestN 11y ago
• bsims 11y ago
  Hi Trevor and Jared, we have been building financial predictions on data from marketplace lending platforms. Curious to talk to you about where you see the business models of prediction going, examples other YC companies who are selling prediction and ML as a service, pricing strategies etc.
  • snowmaker 11y ago
    We have some experience with companies like this. We worked with Framed Data (http://framed.io http://framed.io), which predicts churn, among others. I don't know that it's particularly useful to think about business models and pricing strategies disembodied from a specific business. What is it that you predict exactly? Who is the customer and what is the value you bring them?
• publicator 11y ago
  Hello Jared and Trevor, We're developing a publishing network. Individuals and groups can start magazines. Users can read on a timeline and interact like in a social network. What's new? Now anyone can get publishing infrastructure as good as a well funded online magazine. That means lots of unique publications in verticals that well-funded magazines & newspapers cannot do. What's the best strategy to lure in people to use the service? How do we make money?
  • snowmaker 11y ago
    So to start a new publishing network, you have to start with writers / content creators. You can't get readers before you have content. The thing to do is to get people who want to create a magazine to use your software. Have you started talking to users yet? Is the software usable?
• braderhart 11y ago
  Hello and thank you for taking the time to help other entrepreneurs. I am working on creating a new cross-platform premier Linux distribution that uses containers as the core init process. The goal is automatic cross-compilation between multiple targets and using the built-in kernel sandboxing for applications instead of what XDG App and others are trying to do. I'd like to also target a new window manager built on Wayland with eventual Vulkan support. Would love to get some feedback on how to handle the contention that already exists within this space and how to get the funding I need to make something like this successful.
  • tlb 11y ago
    That sounds like a lot of stuff to take on for a first product. Because existing players already have long feature lists, you can't compete at first by having a longer list. It'd be better to start with one single, simple, useful thing and expand from there. Cross-platform is interesting. Are there large installations that need to migrate between Intel and ARM boxes seamlessly? That's the sort of feature that might make someone switch distros.
• srikieonline 11y ago
  Hi Jared & Trevor, Thank you for giving us this opportunity to discuss our ideas with you. I am the founder of http://www.pnyxter.com http://www.pnyxter.com - a video (only) based debate and discussion app. My question is about product-market fit. A user can create topic and upload a video selfie talking on the topic or respond to other topics via video selfie. The app does not have provision of text comments at all - only video responses. I've invited several friends and family for private beta, and its been 10 days now and only 1 of my friend dared to create a video. I also shared the link on FB and linked in and got several views, but no one created a topic. I also did a FB ad for 2 days - no luck here too. Is this a clear indication of product - market misfit? Or is it too early to conclude? Or should I shift my focus only on professional and amateur debaters of various debate clubs in cities, universities, schools etc. I do understand the privacy issues of showing video selfie - but I've given provision of a good privacy control (or at least I think its good). Video based opinions are already being posted by users in Facebook and youtube - but do not have this consolidated grouping of all video discussions on a topic in one place. Youtube tried video response feature and closed it in 2013 due to low engagement - but of course youtube is a very generic video site - not all videos needs video responses/discusisons/debates. Thanks!!
  • huac 11y ago
    Your product makes me think immediately towards high school/college debate (https://youtu.be/HGyFBRu5F8o?t=1461 https://youtu.be/HGyFBRu5F8o?t=1461). Policy debate in particular has the added benefit of being untranscrible (listen for a couple minutes). Couple ideas: (1) Analysis tool like Krossover, by cutting out prep time from videos like the above, segmenting by speech, and allowing people to annotate, search by annotation, etc. (2) a response platform for people to practice debates outside of tournaments. Right now, if you want to practice, you either debate with a teammember, or email speech docs to others, which doesn't really capture the energy or spirit of a debate. I could see this being useful esp for debaters at small schools without large teams, or rural areas without nearby partner schools, etc...
    • srikieonline 11y ago
      Thank you for your advice! I've started reaching out to debate clubs in schools and colleges already on FB. Will keep working towards that. However, I have still not given up on general user segment. One advantage of video is (hopefully) reduce abuse. Twitter is plagued with the problem of anonymous abuse. However, its not easy to show your face in video and abuse!
• cddotdotslash 11y ago
  Hi, thank you both for doing this. I've been working on a project on and off for about two years now which I finally launched as a beta last year. It's called CloudSploit (https://cloudsploit.com https://cloudsploit.com) and is a service designed to allow users to continuously scan their AWS accounts for vulnerabilities (account-level risks that could lead to a compromise). AWS has some security products, and their are certainly competitors in the space, but we've heard from countless customers that our price point and features are ideal for them. My goal is to now move this out of beta and to actually advertise it. My question for you is: what challenges are there around marketing for security-focused products? Of course, trust is a key factor, but are there other things I should consider? I'm thinking of Twitter ads, but I'm sure there are better options between that and cold emailing. Thanks again!
  • tlb 11y ago
    Don't buy ads. Your product should spread by word of mouth, since developers know lots of other developers. The viral message (from current customer to potential customer) would be something like: "I got a scan from Cloudsploit and they found like 4 remote exploits in my AWS. You should have them check your infrastructure." Hearing that from a friend would be more powerful than any number of Twitter ads.
  • wfn 11y ago
    Nice product! OT: do you know of any other automated security scanning services (hosted/SaaS)? Have you considered expanding beyond AWS (though AWS customers are probably your target audience and entire focus)?
  • petervandijck 11y ago
    Your pricing is too cheap. Don't do an 8$/mo plan unless you're selling something to millions of consumers. Yours should be: Free Startup: 79$/m Businesses: 399$/mo Enterprise: call us You should market this to developers directly, no ads. Find developers at startups that use AWS (tons), email them directly and say something like: hey, I have a startup, it does this, I can walk you through a scan for free myself, would love your feedback and thoughts. Cold emailing is a good thing here. Keep it short, keep it real, offer something of value and ask advice (everyone loves giving advice).
• lpaone 11y ago
  Hi Jared and Trevor, http://www.stroomnews.com http://www.stroomnews.com is a bootstrapped breaking news and events focused sharing platform, that allows live-streaming and pre-captured video and image sharing through our mobile app and website. We are also working on an enterprise solution for the news industry that ties into our platform. Our B2C app was released this past Fall, but has shown little traction and we have had discussions with a major news media company about our enterprise product. We believe that signing up users for our enterprise solution will also help grow our B2C platform. We also have an idea in the area of video compression (both founders have experience in this industry) that we believe could be huge in the streaming video industry. Our initial tests have shown very promising results, but we have not had much time to work on this due to focusing on our platform and enterprise product. The success of this tech does not only provide a large advantage for our business, but opens us up to many other industries and opportunities. As our ability to bootstrap dwindles (due to amount of savings), do we continue along our path and try to get revenue as soon as we can by working on our enterprise product or do we spend time trying to raise money so we can focus on our tech, which may not produce anything product worthy for a much longer time (or ever as it is still in the research stage)? Thanks for your time!
  • snowmaker 11y ago
    What would the enterprise solution do? How long would it take to build the product to the part where it can generate revenue? For the video compression technology, it's hard to say without knowing more. What does it do, and who would want it? As cool as video compression tech is, trying to raise money for pure technology, without demonstrating market demand, is almost impossible. So if you go down the video compression route, you'll need to think hard about exactly what products people could build with it, and how you could show that people would buy them even before you can build them. Getting to revenue and selling the enterprise product is the safer path.
    • lpaone 11y ago
      Thanks for the advice. The enterprise product provides a dashboard that allows a news room to manage past and present media content created through our platform. It allows live modification of stream quality (full bit stream quality control) and description, remote control of the camera, live communication with the reporter/camera person, and some other features we are working on that bring us closer to parity and beyond with other companies in this field. A huge benefit over our competitors is our significantly lower cost and no need to carry around expensive specialized hardware, as we do not require it. We are probably 2-3 months away from having a revenue generating product. Although we are in conversations with one major news organization, we have found it very difficult getting in the door with other companies. As for the compression tech, it provides an opportunity to delivery adaptive bit rate video in a single stream. It would significantly decrease bandwidth, storage and compression costs. Anyone who has large libraries of variable bitrate video and is streaming it (YouTube, Netflix, etc.) would be very interested in this.
• plehoux 11y ago
  Hi Jared and Trevor, I'm a co-founder at https://www.missiveapp.com https://www.missiveapp.com, a collaborative email client (Slack meets Gmail). We've launched our open beta last January and are actively recruiting beta users. We're a fully bootstrapped team of 4 working from Quebec city, Canada. We were able to bootstrap Missive with the $ we rake in from another project we launched three years ago called ConferenceBadge.com [1]. My question is, do you think it's a mistake to run two businesses in parallel? Right now 85% of our time is invested in Missive even though it's bringing $0 in revenue. Our philosophy is that if we were to look for funding, we would have to invest at least 15% of our time on fundraising and investor relationships. We also believe that looking for investment before market fit is a recipe for disaster (need not to forget that we are not from/in the valley). [1] https://medium.com/@plehoux/successfully-bootstrapped-a-product-then-what-b4483276fd14 https://medium.com/@plehoux/successfully-bootstrapped-a-prod...). [2] What are chat conversations doing in an email client? Here are few examples of cool possibilities they enable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcRQhGfT620 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcRQhGfT620
  • tlb 11y ago
    First some product advice: You're trying to replace various more specialized tools with a general purpose tool. For example, I use Slack, Front, and Lever in addition to gmail, for internal, external, and recruiting-related conversations respectively. You should explain clearly how your one tool will be better than a combination of the many special-purpose tools. If you can support yourselves with only 15% time on the old project, that's pretty good. You can probably get Missive off the ground with 85%. Once it's off the ground, it should be easy to get investment to focus on it full-time. I like to think that investors aren't just a time sink, but can give useful advice about the parts of the business that are common to the other businesses they work with, like customer acquisition, hiring, and managing teams.
    • rafBM 11y ago
      Co-founder here, we indeed thought of crafting our tagline in such a way: “With all these carefully thought collaborative features baked within an email client, Missive might very well replace your help desk, CRM, and messaging app.” We do think there is a cost to always switch between multiple apps, but as new kids in a crowd full of big players, we’ve been wondering whether we should expect / try to catch users by “playing well with others” or be bolder and encourage them to ditch other apps?
• BinaryResult 11y ago
  Hey Guys, I am one of the Co-founders of Disco Melee (https://beta.discomelee.com/hub https://beta.discomelee.com/hub). We are a live streaming social network designed around the needs of gamers. You could think of us like if Twitch and Facebook had a baby who liked to party and was eyeing up Reddit for a future fling. The gamers that find us tend to rave about our overall vision, low latency and other base features like IM system, streamer storefronts, and free donate/sub buttons for all. The problem however is that (except for our hardcore believers) they don't seem stick around very long due to the pull of network effects from the established players. What strategies could you recommend for overcoming network effects to the point where we can start generating our own? Thanks!
  • tlb 11y ago
    Social networks are all about network effects. It's nearly impossible to compete head-to-head with an established social network (which is why established social network companies are so valuable). Usually, the answer is to focus on a niche where you can do something special to be dramatically better than the incumbents, so you can dominate the niche. On your site I see Street Fighter V, which is pretty mainstream and works fine on Twitch. Is there some game you can support 10x better than Twitch?
• dcole2929 11y ago
  Hey Jared & Trevor I'm working on a few different projects all of which I think could become viable companies but having a hard time deciding which to focus on. I've already seen interest from relevant parties in each of the separate projects. I think the hardest one but also the one with the most growth potential would be a project I'm working on to provide management tools (similar to the stuff a ceo might use) to high level government officials. However, with the way that government contracts are handled I wonder if this is even a reasonable industry to target. Secondly I have two different projects that focus on College Students, where I would be selling solutions to the Colleges themselves. The first project is an art application that allows users to upload art in any medium and be seen by other students. This would allow them to easily build fan bases by taking advantage of pre-existing school connections. The other idea is similar but focuses on user generated events. It tackles the question of how does one find interesting things to do, in a new area, when you don't know anyone. And has certain measures in place to help alleviate the awkwardness of trying to join pre-existing groups. Thanks
  • tlb 11y ago
    College art students vs gov’t officials. It’s hard to think of two more different kinds of customers. Selling to gov’t is hard, because they have a slow and heavyweight purchasing process. Selling to colleges is hard for the same reasons, and also they have small budgets. Selling management tools is very hard, because you have to get people to change the way they work. It’s very very hard to get senior officials to change their process. If your business works, you’ll spend 1/3 of your waking hours for 10+ years talking to your customers. You can only sustain this if you sincerely like working with them. Whom would you rather spend that much time with?
    • sharemywin 11y ago
      The last one seems like a problem because I'm not sure someone would pay. but you could test that out. So, if your relying on advertisers you need to get really large users counts and minimal revenue coming in at first. my opinion only.
    • dcole2929 11y ago
• downandout 11y ago
  Hi Jared and Trevor, I am working on a marketplace through which publishers and journalists can sell the ability to be quoted and linked to in an article to the highest bidder. A realtor, for example, might be willing to pay to be quoted and linked to in an article about how a city's real estate market has been accelerating. My question is how to get started with marketing it. While the growth hacking crowd would say to simply spam a bunch of reporters to get inventory, I have found in other ventures that people absolutely hate receiving any form of unsolicited email with any kind of pitch.
  • snowmaker 11y ago
    One challenge with this business that you didn't mention is the difficulty getting to critical mass. Reporters, broadly, write such varied articles that if you have a handful of reporters and a handful of businesses on the platform, the chance that any of them actually match for a given article is miniscule. To solve that, I would consider starting in a very small vertical. You could pick one small town and their local businesses (geographical vertical), or pick one industry and go deep into that industry. If you start in a small vertical, the marketing becomes easier because you have a very targeted pitch that doesn't feel spammy. About your original question on marketing, though, there is no alternative to talking to users. Before you start pitching people, though, you could go talk to journalists and ask them for feedback on the idea. You can ask them if they would value this service, and what else they wish someone would build. Rather than just selling them, you should try to build a relationship so you can get feedback from them over time.
    • downandout 11y ago
      Thank you very much for responding. I definitely see your point about starting in a small vertical. I already have a couple of potential solutions in mind to solve the critical mass problem, but the fact that you saw it immediately as my number one issue makes me want to revisit them. Re: marketing, I will try the relationship building route rather than an outright pitch. Thanks again.
  • nradov 11y ago
    Mainstream publishers and journalists would consider it unethical for their sources to pay for placement in editorial content. That's a clear conflict of interest. You would be better off targeting bloggers.
• FraserGreenlee 11y ago
  Hi Trevor and Jared, I'm the founder of WebArcs (http://webarcs.com http://webarcs.com) an RSS aggregate for discovering and subscribing to websites. I'm just starting out and I want to see this be the way people surf the web in the future. I was wondering which demographics I ought to target too too help build a strong user base?
  • snowmaker 11y ago
    Thinking of demographics is kind of a big company way of looking at things; you're not ready for that. For now you should focus on finding any users that want to use it. The way to do that is to try to distill the value proposition. Why would people use WebArcs instead of going to an aggregator (Reddit, HN), another news reader (Pulse, flipboard), or content sites directly? Then, show it some people and get some feedback. See if you can get people to use it as their default way to surf the web. If you can get even one person to do that (other than yourself), you've made some progress.
    • FraserGreenlee 11y ago
      Thank you that really helps =D I'll try and find the value proposition and see if I can get that one user.
• workerdee 11y ago
  Hello, I have a little Etsy shop and was wondering how to get technical people’s attention. How do you find gifts for female family and friends (when they don’t already have something in mind)? As for the shop itself, the photographs need improvement – I set up a small lighted space on my kitchen counter and am working on this. Shop: http://zebbles.etsy.com http://zebbles.etsy.com
  • snowmaker 11y ago
    I never know what to get female family and friends! Particularly when it comes to things like jewelry, and I'm pretty sure many guys have the same problem. Maybe you could start a blog offering gift advice for clueless techies, or even become a gift concierge, offering to help individuals find the perfect gift for a small fee.
    • workerdee 11y ago
      Thanks! The blog and gift concierge suggestions are interesting. Most of the technical people I know don't like spending their time looking into sparkly, girly things.
• feedbackhotline 11y ago
  Jared and Trevor, Feedback Hotline (feedbackhotline.com) is the easiest way for businesses to collect feedback. We provide the hotline for free. We intend to make money through data. We think we need to prove three things to succeed: 1. Businesses/organizations will join 2. People will send a lot of feedback 3. We can monetize this feedback We are currently optimizing for 1, focusing on small businesses. We believe for i, everything before i needs to be true before i can be true. We want to speak about this framework for optimization. FBH
  • snowmaker 11y ago
    That's right. Your customers are the businesses who will adopt this. The people who send feedback are also important, but they're not your direct customers, and you have to start with businesses before you get them. I see some businesses on your site. Are these all actual customers? How are they using it, and what do they think of it so far?
    • deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
      • snowmaker 11y ago
        That's great. There was a YC company a few years ago called Talkbin which did something similar. They got acquired by Google. If the businesses really like it, can they refer you to other businesses? Local business owners tend to know each other. How exactly do you plan to make money from the data? Generally for this business I would think you would simply charge the businesses who are using it a small fee.
        • deleted 11y ago
          [deleted]
• spicavigo 11y ago
  Hi Jared and Trevor, I created https://codebunk.com https://codebunk.com. Its an Online Interviewing Tool for developers. Its the best tool out there. It provides code execution in 23 languages, collaborative editor, REPL shells, AV Text chat, Teams, Question banks and a lot more. Its cash flow positive and has some of the coolest clients. However, the rate at which it acquires new customers is pretty low (~3/month). I have exhausted (or nearly exhausted) avenues of generating buzz (PH, HN, Reddit, some tech publications). As a developer without any help, how do I promote CodeBunk further? What's the best way to reach my audience (Hiring Mangers, CTOs)?
  • snowmaker 11y ago
    It sounds like you've tried PR and social media, but haven't tried any other channels. If you've made something people want, and it sounds like you have, it's time to invest in getting customers. A good rule of thumb is that you should spend 50% of your time working on your product and 50% of your time getting customers. I have a feeling that's higher than what you're currently doing. There are a number of distribution channels you can try. Here are a few ideas: 1) It sounds like you have some great customers (pebble, flipboard). Do you know them personally? Get to know them, in person or over the phone ideally, and then ask them for referrals. CTOs / hiring managers all know each other. 2) You guys don't seem to have a blog. Content marketing is great for your space because engineers love to read posts about how much hiring sucks - there's practically a daily thread on this on HN. There is so much you could write about the best way to do technical interviews. Each time you get a post like that to go viral, you'll pick up some customers. 3) There are lots of recruiting conferences and events. Those are good places to meet customers. 4) It might be possible to negotiate distribution partnerships with other companies in the hiring space. ATS's, job boards, and new models like hiring networks (i.e., Hired) are all upstream of an online interviewing tool. Maybe they should integrate with one directly. 5) There are a bunch of standard techniques that rarely work amazingly well but usually work to a certain extent that you can start with: everything from adwords and facebook ads to email campaigns to hiring managers. Overall, you need to be very experimental to find good distribution channels. A good book to get your creative juices going is "Traction: how any startup can achieve explosive growth"
• nopinsight 11y ago
  Hi Trevor and Jared, My startup is developing technology for natural language understanding (in contrast to NLP). We believe we can approach human-level understanding for standard texts (email, blogs, online articles) in 2.5-4 years. We are currently self-funded and can comfortably do so for about a year--by the end of which, we believe we can develop a fairly advanced demo that surpasses existing techs in some, but not all, areas. What kind of demos do you think would impress best-in-class recruits/investors to join our team? The current options we have in mind are: 1) Solving a subset of Winograd schema (commonsense reasoning challenge) with a general approach (i.e., easily extensible with additional investment in knowledge acquisition/data sources). No systems known to public can currently solve all of them (or even a subset generally). http://commonsensereasoning.org/winograd.html http://commonsensereasoning.org/winograd.html 2) A conversational agent capable of conversing with humans at the level of a 4- or 5-year-old (without resorting to typical chatbot tricks). 3) Surpassing the state-of-the-art systems in a couple of standard AI conference tasks or on datasets released by leading companies (Google, Facebook, etc). 4) Other tasks we have not thought of... Because of resource and time limitations, we likely need to focus the initial efforts on one, or at most two, of the options above. (A mature system should be able to do all those and beyond, but this is only for about one year from now.) A couple extra questions if you have the time: - Given the startup's long-term timescale before monetization and its technical nature, what sorts of investors should we focus on talking with? - Are there chances of IP leaking and causing problems with patenting our tech later on? What should we do to prevent that? Sincerely appreciate your time to answer these questions. -- Ken Noppadon
  • tlb 11y ago
    What kind of demos do you think would impress best-in-class recruits/investors to join our team All the options you mention would be technically impressive (so good for recruiting hackers), but none of them are obviously on the path to building a huge business. You should lean towards the option where you can imagine having a near-monopoly in a huge market. There's a big danger of getting sucked into some application where better NLP isn't the differentiator. Most interactive agents have small enough domains (getting cable TV installed, parsing S-10s, triaging support emails, ...) that general reasoning isn't critical, and the companies that succeed in this space will be defined by other factors like sales and integration with the customer's IT stack. I wouldn't worry about IP leakage. I've seen a lot of companies, but none that failed because of IP leakage. They fail for a long list of other reasons: slow execution, bad product-market fit, founder breakups, etc.
• sbashyal 11y ago
  Hi Trevor and Jared, thanks for doing this. We have been working on http://growthzilla.com http://growthzilla.com - a data driven growth solution for salons for a little more than a year now. We have paying customers since launch and have zero cancellations. Our customers love the product for 3 reasons (1) ease of use (2) effectiveness in driving growth and (3) customer service The problem: we are growing slower than we would want. Is there anything you'd like to suggest?
  • sharemywin 11y ago
    check out yardbook.com they gave away something similar to lawn care companies. have 11k users in less than a year. health and beauty trade shows? buy mailing list of new salons? Can you work out a deal with a franchise company to be their official software?
  • snowmaker 11y ago
    How are you growing right now? Specifically, how do users find out about Growthzilla? How many users do you have and how many did you add last month?
    • sbashyal 11y ago
      We started with selling to people in our network. Now we have some online ad campaigns, referral and just went to a trade show. We currently have 50 customers. Added 10 last month.
      • snowmaker 11y ago
        If you're growing 25% / month, you're not doing too badly. How well are online ads and referral working? How does the referral program work? It sounds like there are a bunch of channels you haven't tried yet. Here are a few ideas. Standard channels: 1) Sales. Yes, you call up the all the salons and ask them if they need Growthzilla. This is still the way most things are sold to local businesses like salons. You can try email, phone, even in person. 2) Content marketing. My guess is that there are a lot of salons, and not a whole lot people writing about how to run them. Maybe you can become the go-to place not just for software, but for the knowledge salon owners need to run their business well. 3) Improve your website. It looks like there's no way to just try the software, and there isn't much info about it on the site. Having something other than "request demo" may improve conversions. Wackier ideas: 1) There are lots of software options for salons that do something similar. It's not clear from your site what makes you unique. What is it? If there's nothing truly special, maybe you need to change the product. 2) Channel partnerships. Who are the big companies selling products to hair salons? Could you get them to resell Growthzilla and split the revenue? 3) Affiliate sales. Are there affiliate sales people who sell other products to salons (scissors, hair product, etc)? If so, can you have them sell Growthzilla too? 4) Organize free conferences / meetups for salon owners to learn about how they can tech-enable their business.
• alantrrs 11y ago
  Hi! I'm building a platform for scientists to run and share their experiments (anything computable) including their whole research environment. I want to make scientific research easily discoverable and replicable. First, what are your thoughts on this market? Also, some advice: I'm currently building the prototype based on my own experience as I'm my own user. That's the only thing I've been focusing on, I haven't looked for external feedback yet and haven't spent much time looking for people to join me. I figured both of those things will be much easier once I have the prototype ready. Am I on the right track or should I be doing everything at once?
  • snowmaker 11y ago
    I think that's a great market. The lack of reproducibility in scientific experiments is an elephant-in-the-room problem. I feel like I read a new story about it every week. Even though you are your own target user, it's dangerous to build a full prototype without talking to actual users. It's likely that you will find that what you thought people wanted does not match 100% with what they actually want. Do you have mockups or screenshots of the tool? I would recommend lining up some research scientists who can serve as product advisors. Tell them about your idea and ask them what they would want in this kind of tool. Try to get a commitment from them to use it after you build it - that will force clarity on their side. Not only will that prevent you from potentially throwing away code, it will get you started building the kind of deep advocates in the science community that you will need to get a movement like this started.
    • deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    • alantrrs 11y ago
      Jared, appreciate the feedback!. Any chance you could introduce me to some people in the Open AI team? I think this would be a great fit and I'm very interested in their thoughts.
  • danieltillett 11y ago
    As a former academic I will share my thoughts here. I agree that there is a great need for this, but not demand from those with the data. In science you are effectively discouraged from sharing data since doing so means you lose the ability to rehash the data and publish a new paper. The second problem is scientists as a general rule won't pay for software or any sort of saas. Can I suggest an idea for a related product; a platform to make collaboration between different areas easier. Right now if you have an area where you lack a skill or background it can be very time consuming finding the right people to collaborate with, especially internationally. Make it easier to create collaborations that result in publication and you will have a product with paying customers.
• zodiac 11y ago
  Hi Jared and Trevor, I'm building games and tools for language learning. While talking to users, I asked them what language learning tools they wished existed when they were studying in the past. A lot of them talked about a tool that lets them talk to native speakers of their target language online. I know I should build something users want, but there are plenty of tools that let you do this (including a YC company, cambly) and I don't want to build another one. So what do I do with their answer to my question?
  • snowmaker 11y ago
    If there are plenty of tools which do this (and you're right, I think there are), but there are still a lot of people who want them but aren't using them, then the existing companies are missing something. It could be that the existing products don't work in quite the right way; sometimes small differences are important. Or it could be that the companies haven't figured out the right way to reach customers. When users tell you this, do you show them the existing products you know of? If your hypothesis is right that the space is saturated, then they should start using them right away. But I suspect that they won't, which means that there's more left to be done.
• mariobyn 11y ago
  Hey, I want to present http://grobyk.com http://grobyk.com, a platform that wants to help teams to grow by engaging the team's members to find/create/share useful articles. In this way they will build a knowledge base and grow as a team. We want some feedback regarding the idea and how we can attract customers.
  • snowmaker 11y ago
    Is there a question here?
    • mariobyn 11y ago
      Sorry, let me try one. Do you think is still a good market to introduce another tool for teams? Our approach is a little bit different, i think, we saw a lack of distributing useful content between team members.
      • snowmaker 11y ago
        I think the market of "tools for teams" is virtually limitless. The question you should be asking is whether people want your tool in particular. I spent some time on your site and it took me a long time to understand what your tool does. You need to make it a lot clearer. Here's a good exercise for this. 1) Find someone you haven't told your idea to 2) Show them your home page. Let them read it for 30 seconds. 3) Close your laptop. Then, have them explain what Grobyk is in their own words. If they can't do that, you need to improve your home page.
        • mariobyn 11y ago
          We spoke with teams about the idea and they said that also they had this problem. We started from our problem and then we decided to make it a platform for teams. We will work on the first page, we know that is not so friendly but thank you for your advice, we will try to see the results. Another quick question is that if is a good approach to attract customers by searching developers/bloggers from different companies and direct email them with our idea or is it to forced? We are now focused only on technology/business/startups fields. We want to attract teams from these fields.
• boxerab 11y ago
  Hi Jared and Trevor, I have developed a high-speed image encoder that runs on off-the-shelf graphics cards: http://grokimagecompression.github.io/GrokImage/ http://grokimagecompression.github.io/GrokImage/ I am working on my marketing strategy: need to decide whether to focus on selling to end-users, or licensing the software to other businesses. Second option requires more $$, and a sales team, but seems to have more potential for growing the business. Any advice would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!
  • tlb 11y ago
    For most image compression tasks, speed isn't the metric that users care about. Since compressing images parallelizes very well, they care about total system cost for a given throughput. So your value proposition is more like "Use 1 GPU box running our code instead of 10 CPU boxes". Saving 9 boxes isn't worth an engineer spending much time hacking. You should target people with 1000 CPU boxes to switch to 100 GPU boxes (or whatever the ratio is.) Are enough customers like this to justify building a business around it?
    • boxerab 11y ago
      Thanks, Trevor, that makes a lot of sense. With the rise of streaming video, there are new players entering the broadcast market, so there is an opportunity to sell an inexpensive compression/decompression system for integration into these new systems. The time to develop a JPEG 2000 codec from scratch is quite large, so decreasing time to market is another part of my value proposition. On the server side, it looks like my focus should be on total cost. On the client side, for example digital cinema post-production, a user typically has only a single box, so speed is important in this case. Thanks again, I really appreciate your feedback. Aaron
• chejazi 11y ago
  Hi YC partners, We're a link shortener called Credhot and our business model is to syndicate (potentially sponsored) content on an interstitial page. We also rev-share with our users based on the number of visits. The biggest hurdle to this strategy has been building an interstitial people want to share with their friends. Here is an example of our latest attempt at that, leading to "coinmarketcap.com": https://crd.ht/H7TLMpn https://crd.ht/H7TLMpn. Our volume is low enough that we haven't tested syndicating sponsored content on that page. Right now we're mostly focused on "building a product that users love" but at some point we will need to strike a deal with a publisher. When should those conversations start happening? We're currently bootstrapping but will want to raise capital in the next few months as we're growing (we've doubled since the last HN office hours ~34 days ago). Should we wait until after securing funding?
  • tedmiston 11y ago
    I've seen another related type of service called Linkis (http://linkis.com/ http://linkis.com/). I don't interact with it much myself because usually I'm just interested in getting to the content quickly without all the cruft. Perhaps that's something that can help guide your thinking.
    • chejazi 11y ago
      Thanks for the suggestion. We considered customizing the destination page, but we decided against it due to a big looming threat: an increasing number of sites can't be embedded. From a technical perspective, a site can block embedding by setting one HTTP response header (X-FRAME-OPTIONS) which is very easy to do.
      • tedmiston 11y ago
        This is one of the biggest problems for Genius. Ex. http://genius.it/www.nytimes.com http://genius.it/www.nytimes.com breaks vs. http://genius.it/www.wikipedia.org http://genius.it/www.wikipedia.org works fine.
  • snowmaker 11y ago
• thekonqueror 11y ago
  Hi Jared and Trevor, http://nestify.io http://nestify.io founder here. We're improving PHP CMS hosting (WordPress, Drupal) with better scaling, on-page optimizations, better security. We have paying customers and ~100 die-hard users that will be really sad / lose revenues if we shut down. Should we focus on building our brand while scaling or switch to whitelabel and API services and partner with hosting providers?
  • snowmaker 11y ago
    I remember reading your YC app :). About your question on whitelabeling: I wouldn't be too dogmatic about this either way. It's easy to make it a question about your company's mission, but it's more of an ROI decision. If you're seeing strong demand from companies who will pay you well for a white-label version, and your software is written in a way that makes it easy to build one, you should do that. Otherwise, it may just be a distraction. The other thing that jumps out to me about your business is that the economics don't seem to match with the usage. You're serving a lot of traffic but not making as much revenue as I would expect, especially considering that you have "die-hard users" that love the service. Perhaps you can find a way to get them to pay more money, or find other customers that can afford to pay more?
    • thekonqueror 11y ago
      Thanks for your insights. Our early customers also mention that prices are too low. We are now adding tiered pricing plans and charging for based on usage. I'll make sure to add that in our current YC application too.
• wootcamp 11y ago
  Hi Jared and Trevor, I'm cofounder of a start up within the beauty space. We have small but active group of users that love creating and consuming a unique type of content only available on our platform. The revenue stream is to eventually sell tangible products so we would like to make use of all this content to convert purchases. Is there a way we can test out how well the conversion rate could work without shipping tangible products? We don't yet have capital to stockpile.
  • tlb 11y ago
    Why not start with affiliate links to Amazon? It's minimal effort on your part, and you can see what your users are interesting in purchasing. Even when you eventually have your own inventory, it's worth throwing in affiliate links in case you discover that people watching your beauty content actually buy something else more often than your own products.
    • wootcamp 11y ago
      Hi Trevor, thanks for the reply. We had that thought as well but we're from Southeast Asia with most of our traffic originating from here. Only some of the products related to our site actually ship here from Amazon and incurs international shipping costs so it might hinder orders. We'll still give it a shot since it can give us an idea of how the conversions do. Would you happen to have any further insights on if affiliate marketing really works especially when it comes to visual content?
      • tlb 11y ago
        Or instead of Amazon, whomever your customers currently buy from. The affiliate revenue isn't the most important thing: the important thing is to find out what your users will buy. Once you know that, you can invest in inventory. For beauty products, affiliate marketing works great. That is how the e-commerce world should work: you show users the results they can get with such-and-such product, and you get a percentage of sales.
        • 11y ago
• tedmiston 11y ago
  My app is a way for sneakerheads to follow, discover, and ultimately purchase new sneakers online from first announcement until they're available for purchase with minimal interaction. Today everyone does this by following blogs that make hundreds of posts per week with tons of repetition and very low signal to noise. I've built a prototype for myself, but would like to now connect with the right industry people to help guide the product and be trusted early users. In another reply you mentioned finding users to serve as product advisors similarly (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11183572 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11183572) . I'm having a hard time discovering who the "right" people are and reaching them in a compelling way. If I were further along [read: post private beta] I would reach out to someone like Phin Barnes @ First Round, but I feel at this stage it's too early for him to really give interest.
  • snowmaker 11y ago
    Sneakerheads are the right people! The good news is that you are going after a very well-defined segment. The ones online are easy to reach - the read the same blogs, hang out in the same online forums. What if you went to the bloggers who are writing these posts? They might find the app even more useful than normal consumers, and they have large audiences they could advertise it to. Phin Barnes might be a good investor someday, but he won't do the work for you, which is to get sneakerheads using the app. Once you've got passionate fans in the sneakerhead community, you should go talk to him.
• masudhossain 11y ago
  Hey, Trevor and Jared. Thanks a lot for doing this! WHAT WE DO: www.wiredhere.com We integrate every social activity (university created or student created) happening within an university into a mobile app. The students can attend and provide feedback through the app; we than take the analytics that's created and provide it to universities so they can assess and compare themselves to other universities. QUESTION: Do you think it's more optimal approach this as a SAAS for the university since we provide them a brand new web platform to make event creation easier and so they can reach students in a faster way? OR be a non-saas and introduce this to the students first and let the universities catch on afterwards, and than work with the university so they can use our web platform and mobile app? Also, what is your opinion on our concept?
  • tlb 11y ago
    Definitely start by getting students to love it first, then sell something to the university. Universities take a long time to make decisions, and they don't have a budget item for "help students find parties to go to". But as Facebook showed, the right thing can spread through a campus in a couple weeks. There have been a lot of failures in this space. The big problem is getting quality listings. It's a fair bit of work for event organizers to post their event on multiple platforms, and they're probably already posting on Facebook and a campus mailing list, so it's a hard battle to make them list on yours too. And if you don't have most of the listings, users will just check Facebook instead of you.
• RyM21 11y ago
  Hi Trevor and Jared, WordBrewery (http://wordbrewery.com http://wordbrewery.com) teaches languages by scraping real sentences from news sites around world, then processing each sentence with an algorithm that estimates (on the basis of word frequency and other variables) how likely the sentence is to be useful to learners at different levels. We are now a member of 1776 and participating in Microsoft BizSpark, so we are on the right track. But I am new to the startup world, and I am funding the website entirely by myself at this point using money from my day-job paycheck. What is the best way to pursue seed funding at this early stage while we are developing core features? Do I need to organize it as an LLC or corporation to get funding? Thank you, Ryan
  • snowmaker 11y ago
    I like the idea for WordBrewery! That's a clever model for optimizing language learning. Yes, you will need to incorporate your company to raise seed funding. A really easy way is using Stripe Atlas: https://stripe.com/atlas https://stripe.com/atlas - they will do all the paperwork for you to get a company legal structure. You're probably at the stage where it makes sense to apply to accelerators. Any major accelerator program will help you with the legal structure as well as providing funding.
    • RyM21 11y ago
      Excellent, thank you! We will be adding many features in the next few months, but my favorite is individualized but automatically generated language courses. We will use the technology you see on the site's front page to present users with sentences on an individualized basis depending on what words they already know. If a user knows the 500 most common Spanish words, for example, we will show them an authentic sentence that uses one or more of those 500 words plus the 501st most common word. As the user demonstrates knowledge of more words, the set of possible sentences for that user will gradually increase. This will reinforce existing vocabulary while building new vocabulary as efficiently as possible.
• aarzee 11y ago
  Hi Trevor and Jared, I'm in the idea stages of creating a website, and I have no previous experience with startups or other business; I'm only a senior in high school. The idea is that there are people who would like to own the same game on multiple platforms, and so the website would offer a discount on a game that you already own, for another platform. So, for example, if you have the Xbox One version of Rocket League, the website would offer a discount on the Steam version. My question is: how should I gauge interest in such an idea? I don't have any real budget to speak of, and I don't know where I should go looking for people to ask.
  • tlb 11y ago
    Talk to your friends. The advantage you, as a young person, have over game studios with millions of dollars and hundreds of employees is that you and your friends are the customer for this sort of thing. So you should work on understanding what you and your friends want. Then, you have to figure out the common ground between what you want (every game free!) and what's possible. The particular idea you mention, discounts on games for other platforms, seems like it would require deals with the game studios, which might be hard to get. But https://www.humblebundle.com/ https://www.humblebundle.com/ built a good business around bundling several games together at a big discount, and there are probably more possibilities. The tricky part about asking your friends is that they'll tell you what they think you want to hear. The only way to find out if they'd really buy something is... sell it to them for real money. Like, actually go out and buy a PS4 and XBox copy of something, and find out what they'd pay for the two together. Or try some other combinations to see what works.
  • hanniabu 11y ago
    In addition to what Trevor said about is being difficult to getting deals with the game studio and referencing humblebundle, I think it would be interesting/slightly easier to spin off humblebundle and offer multiple copies of the same game. When my friends and I purchase a new game on Steam or PS4, everyone else usually buys the same game so we can all play together. If there was a platform where there's tiered 'bulk' buying so the buying 1 copy will be full price, 2 copies/5% discount, 3 copies/8% discount, 5 copies/10% discount, or something along those lines I think it'd be a solid platform. It'd probably be less difficult to create and also easier to strike a deal with game studios since you're argument would be that you're encouraging more sales rather than just offering a discount on one item, which they'll probably view as a loss. Another reason why this would appeal to them is that this buying in 'bulk' would increase the community outreach and pickup.
• abrie 11y ago
  Hello, I've developed a custom toolchain while writing an electronic book[0]. The toolchain automates the conversion of markdown and media into a scrollable "app-novel". Initially I'd hoped to earn income from the book itself, but the naiveness of that idea is quickly becoming apparent. As a pivot, I am developing a public interface for the toolchain, with the idea of permitting others to write books in the same style. Unfortunately it is not ready to be demonstrated. Nonetheless, this feels like a untapped industry to me, and I wonder what your opinions or suggestions might be. Thank you. [0]https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ca.goeiebook.montreal.preview https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ca.goeiebook.m...
• rsdce 11y ago
  Hi Jared/Trevor, my partner and I are working on developing an app for wardrobe cataloging, which to our surprise (or not ) has already has been implemented by lots of ppl in the apple android store. However the advanced features that we thought of aren't implemented yet. How should we decide the path to go : implement the app or just make the advanced features and license them to the existing apps?
  • petervandijck 11y ago
    Licensing them to the existing apps sounds like a tiny business. Could your R1 be significantly better than what's out there somehow?
• deleted 11y ago
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• parisi 11y ago
  Hey Trevor and Jared, I am in the midst of creating a new platform as a service product while working at a large tech company. I am not quite willing to reveal the platform to the world yet, but it is a new take on backend-as-a-service platforms that I think will be very intriguing to developers. My question is not specific to my product and instead pertains to the situation of trying to develop a startup while working full time at a large company. I have done 0 work on the product on my employers time and am not concerned with that aspect. I am more interested in your thoughts on when would be the ideal time to leave my current post to work full time on the startup? My biggest concern is leaving the financial stability of my current job when I have no capital lined up to support a startup. I have already launched a closed beta of the platform and am getting feedback from a small set of users and plan to open the beta up to the world in the coming months. In your experience have you ever seen VC's or Angel's be willing to make a deal with a startup founded by a full time employee of a different company. If I were able to secure funding, I would be absolutely be willing to move on and work full time on the startup but making that leap without funding would be a difficult decision. Any words of wisdom you can offer here would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!
• rosidisulamalis 11y ago
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