5 ms·

Ask HN: Am I on the right track?

7 points by jrussbowman 16y ago

I have reached a point in my project where my product is functional, and am starting to focus on the UI to make it usable. I've taken it slow the past couple months, as my wife was pregnant. I haven't registered a corporation or anything. My daughter was born last week, and now I'm looking at what the next steps should be after I get through the newborn induced sleep deprivation stage. I don't have a co-founder, not even sure how I'd look for one or if I really need one. I now have a wife and 2 kids and like many Americans am upside down in a house, so quitting the good paying day job isn't an option. The product is www.unscatter.com. The monetization plan is to get in on Bing's advertising platform once I have enough traffic and corporation registered, and also to start selling features on top of the hosted search solution. For example, domain hosting so the search page could be at search.yourdomain.com. Other ideas would be a monthly fee for letting users upload a logo, or to remove advertising. It seems like my plan should be polish the UI, register the business the identity, then start trying to get users while working on creating the features to sell. I'm avoiding looking for investors because while I'm convinced my plan which includes future search indexing and complete support for enterprise class customers is an obvious no way to fail scenario, I should probably at least prove I can get customers first. I'm avoiding looking for a cofounder because I know even less about finding one of those, and what I should look for in one. I think this post is just looking for others to validate I'm on the right track, and the nagging doubts on if I should start focusing on investors or co-founders can continue to be ignored.

pierrefar 16y ago
What does it do? Put up a tag line or a quick explanation on the home page.
- alttab 16y ago
  This. When I went there it looked like a search engine. Embedding search for sites? Google does that. Using Bing's advertising platform? Who uses Bing? Twitter / Facebook results? People are already using tools for this. Search Portals? Yahoo, iGoogle, Bing... etc. You seem convinced you have a great idea for a product but you were unable to convince me. In fact, I'm still not sure what it does or how today's tools don't do what you're trying to do already. It may have been because you are doing this part time, you were beat to the punch. You need to make people badly want something you are selling. I can't want something if I don't know what it does. And since your product is related to search and trends, you have a very very very steep uphill battle ahead of you. The main issue is your marketing. I noticed on your blog that you said, "Really, if I need to spend a lot of time writing about what the product is for people to understand it, then I’ve failed." This is so far from the truth. I know the technology is great. I know its interesting, but that's the how. Most, no -- all consumers don't give a damn about how, they care about what. Ask any marketing person worth their salt and they will tell you it takes 9 to 18 months for a story to catch on and echo within a community/industry. Unless you go viral, it will take longer in the search sector. The how becomes interesting if your primary market is technical. But even then you are throwing away non-technical leads that could make the same decision. My overall impression is that you've been cave-coding for too long without iterative feedback from other professionals, market analysts, or consultants. There may be situational factors that explain all of this but from a "give me money" perspective no one will care. From a pivot perspective, it seems like integrating this functionality into a platform or library for other hackers to use and integrate into their own platforms could be a possible avenue. You've used and created some cool technology - repackage it and evangelize your approach. Even if it doesn't make any money, it can help garner a reputation that may help you move out onto other opportunities that pay more.
  - jrussbowman 16y ago
    Ok, does sound like I do need get more information up about what it does. The product I'll be selling is the hosted search solution. The idea is that while you can get an embedded site search via Google or other search providers, I'll be offering my customers more than just a way to provide search results for their viewers. The concept is that these days businesses are publishing content not only to their websites, but also to Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and other sites. My solution allows them a way to unscatter all that content, putting it one place for their viewers. Combined with the RSS feed display, it also gives them an out of the box portal with all their content in one place. It also allows people to create topic based search solutions as well. I'll create and post links to examples of those when I make them later this week. One idea I'll be publishing is a Conservation Search, where search results will be provided from The Nature Conservancy, Greenpeace and WWF, while also showing their most recent content from Twitter, Facebook and Youtube. In the future I'll be adding more providers for customers to add to their portal, as well as eventually building my own crawler and search indexer, which for a fee will allow customers to really customize what gets indexed and how search results are displayed.
    - pedalpete 16y ago
      the unscattering of published content from multiple sources sounds like a great idea to start. I wouldn't get into the topic based searching right away as you are diluting your brand. Do one thing REALLY well to start, then move into other things. Since I suspect this is a product that would be used by businesses, rather than displaying an end-user type page where you have a search box, how about building a few examples of unscattered media. I'd suggest taking a few topics which will be in the news for a bit, such as the gulf oil spill (I wouldn't unscatter the BP stuff, but maybe the gov't action), maybe greenpeaces media, stuff like that, and show a demo of what the services can do for businesses. That's the best way to get people to get it. And if you build a demo for these publishers, maybe they'll install your widget on their page bringing you more customers. Don't talk about it if you can show it. Congrats on being a father, and best of luck with the new indeavor. Really an interesting and useful idea i think.
      - 16y ago
AmberShah 16y ago
Just my 2 cents, but I think you're underestimating the newborn sleeplessness phase if you're rearing to go with a 1-week old. I think you're right that you are going to need to polish the UI a lot. This seems like a perfect candidate for 99designs. Since you already have a base UI for them to work off of, and then you can start to take advantage of having lots of other people thinking about it and the usabliity of it. You absolutely positively need a tagline or something on the front page. You absolutely positively need a feedback button (try UserVoice for something free and easy). Hey - I noticed that you're on Rackspace Cloud. I was wondering if you wouldn't mind sharing how the cost has been for your traffic? Email's in my profile. Thx.
- jrussbowman 16y ago
  Email sent. Also, I've done the newborn thing, so I know what I'm getting into a little (of course you never really remember what it's like those first couple months). I'm not really rearing to go, I'm validating plans and still doing a little development each week. At this point I'm basically down to a couple hours on the weekend when my girls (I have a 2 year old too) are napping. I was thinking about 99designs actually, but I think I'm first going to take a stab at building the interface on my own. I'm comfortable enough with javascript and YUI I think I can knock something out, and I think with AlloyUI being released recently, using it can save me a lot of time.
imp 16y ago
Seems like an okay plan. I would put more importance on getting people to use your paid product. I've also has developed projects in limited hours per week, and the features I thought were important at the time really weren't after I put it in front of actual users. The faster you get feedback on your paid product the better.
- jrussbowman 16y ago
  Very true.. I spent months working on social network aggregation for end users, only to scrap it because it was a lot of resource consumption for something that I wasn't going to be able to monetize will bootstrapping myself.

anigbrowl 16y ago

(from your 'about' page) Your customers shouldn’t have to be a member on Twitter to get the most recent news you’re posting, or be a member on Youtube to find your videos. Use Unscatter to get those messages and media to all your customers, and get a hosted search as well. This is your value proposition. There are too many different content outlets, and it's not obvious which one will get traction for any given company or message. Setting up accounts and then trying to establish or foster fan communities on umpteen different websites is a major time suck. You obviously want to go where the eyeballs are, but since few outlets will tell you much about their demographics your identity is lost among the crowd of other brands with the same idea. two ideas (which you may already have...): One: help me deploy as well as aggregate. I make a cool 60 second video commercial I hope will go viral. I have fanbases or likely targets on YouTube, Vimeo, and Something.com: can you push my content out there for me? If the answer is yes, and if you can help me audit its popularity, then 'unscatter is my marketing department'. Two: users have the same problem - to keep up with everything I like, I have to wade through a ton of stuff that I don't, on various different sites. So I either have 20 different logins, or I am helplessly dependent on one feed reader, or social networking site, or whatever to help me aggregate and filter it. I hate signing up for new stuff because they want to update me via facebook, or email, or have me follow them on twitter or whatever...WTF? Let me decide which channels I want to use. Trivial stuff I'd like twitter updates on. Interesting stuff I'd like to see show up on my facebook wall. Important stuff should reach me via email. Critical relationships can make my phone ring. Maximize discoverability for outgoing communication. Maximize classifiability for incoming communication. Minimize brand alienation by being a discreet broker.

jrussbowman 16y ago
Idea one is definitely in the plans. In the future I'm going to offer validated accounts, which will basically require you to validate you own the domains you select to search (html file or dns check) and the social accounts you choose to aggregrate (oauth validation). With the social accounts validated then I can offer solutions such as you've suggested with the video, as well as compete in the area of companies like CoTweet and HootSuite. Idea two I think is currently out of the focus of what I want to do. Believe it or not I at one point had a functional Twitter and Facebook aggregator built into Unscatter.com. I actually wrote the engine in both python and javascript, python handling the initial load, then javascript handling the layout as the page progressed. I realized those there were companies doing this better (ie: Threadsy) and really I want to focus on support for businesses, not individuals. The internet search engine is what I want to provide to end user level customers, and that's primarily to spark interest in the search solution product.