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The Story of My Startup.
After an incredible amount of complications and pushing the launch date back over a year, we've finally just made the site live.
This is blog post documenting the entire story. I'd love to get some feedback from the HN community.
- staunch 18y agoWhere's the business model?
- snitko 18y agoCouldn't see it either. Why those late nights and stress have been worth it?
- tdavis 18y agoIt's sort of depressing. A year of struggle and ultimate perseverance against the odds... to release something that doesn't make any money. I mean, kudos for sticking with it and refusing to give up, but... now what?
- j0ncc 18y agoGood question. I have a few ideas that I'm going to be pursuing. - Setup a deal with flipclips.com (or someone similar) and let people purchase a branded flickbook of a period of their lives. - Maybe potential for some kind of picwing.com affiliate deal / application. - Some kind of "pro" account with more features (more picture widget output options etc). - Display advertising (yeah, know). They're a few ideas I'm toying with.
- sho 18y agoThe pro account is the best idea. Stay away from advertising, IMO, it looks cheap and turns people off. Personally I absolutely hate advertising and won't use any site with it. And I doubt much would come from the book idea/affiliations. I would take it nice and slow. Wait until you have some serious users who have put a lot of time into the app. Obviously you and your friends have to catalyse that, looks like you already are which is good. Once you've got some nice multi-month videos to show, and perfecting all the little niggly bits about working with it (which YOU will be doing), try to get some publicity. It would be really helpful if you know some girls who will do it, your digg/reddit/etc-fu will be greatly increased if it's a girl. Anyway, then start introducing new options. Pro members can get better quality video out - free is just the flash video, pro gets a full on quicktime version. Free has one "stream", pro can have several - they might want to do their cat or family members or something. Free can embed the flash output on their blog, Pro can embed the picture taking app on their website and make a "my blog visitors" stream .. or something. Pro is $20 once off fee. Get a bit of press exposure and who knows, it could really take off. The Pro account taking pics of their families sounds like it could have real potential. Maybe a family package deal - $50 for a year of photos including a printed book? Anyway congratulations on the launch, many people don't know how hard it is to take a decently sized project from idea to fully realised implementation and release. It's fucking hard and even more so if you're running on nothing but your own internal motivation. Good shit and well done.
- ido 18y ago> Stay away from advertising, IMO, it looks cheap and turns people off. Personally I absolutely hate advertising and won't use any site with it. I don't like ads either, but we (who actually care enough to e.g. install ad block+) are a minority. You need money. Advertisement might help and it will only repulse a relatively small portion of the population. </devil's advocate>
- axod 18y agoI love ads. And the cash they make. I don't think they cheapen a website at all, and you'd be hard pressed to find that many websites without some form of advertising. Try them out, and see if they work, and see if your users find them useful, or horrible. Also do the maths - how many Pro accounts would you need to sell to make the same amount as sticking a couple of adverts up?
- davidw 18y ago> hate advertising and won't use any site with it. Wow, that excludes a pretty large portion of the internet. No Google, no Yahoo, no online newspapers, not many 'blogs'...
- petercooper 18y agoIn a year's time, you could make an absolute killing by selling a $49-$99 DVD service to users who actually kept taking photos. Their photos, turned into a DVD movie, in a nice case with their name on it, etc. (You could outsource this and make a killing on the difference.) People will buy these not just for their own safekeeping, but for grandmas, to keep for future generations, and so forth. Actually, mentioning such a product could even get slightly less netheady people to even use your service. You want the comfortably-off soccer moms, grandparents, and so forth, using this product. Can you imagine how awesome it'd be to have had a DVD of a year or two of your grandpa? Big selling factor in here.
- rustartup 18y agoKeep in mind that you don't have that much time. More than one RoR bastard will know about your website soon and frankly it takes only couple of weeks of fulltime developement to produce a service like yours.
- delano 18y agoCharge for private accounts.
- meridian 18y agoLook at twitter... how long was that around before any attempt at monetisation emerged?
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- fraXis 18y agoGreat read. Congrats on the launch.
- zenlinux 18y agoThanks for sharing and being open about all the problems you encountered. Launching an application is definitely not easy, nothing takes as long as you hope it will (even if you pad for unexpected problems) and it's really hard to declare something "done." Congrats on your launch.
- daveambrose 18y agoKudos on the launch. Looks really great. :) Is there anyone else doing this? Just curious.
- c3o 18y agoI seem to recall reading an interview with SkinnyCorp (Threadless.com) where Jake or Jeffrey said they had once built but then scrapped a similar project. While googling for that, I found http://www.flickaday.com http://www.flickaday.com
- trapper 18y agoCongrats on the launch. Most entrepreneurs know the feeling of missing deadlines badly ;) It's such a good concept, honestly, I would pay for a private one for my friends and family. The site didn't make it clear if privacy was possible.
- grag 18y agoI think this is a very promising idea. I think the idea of an embeddable widget that flips through all your photos (like the videos you describe that inspired the site) would be really cool. I think if a widget like this is done right you could get some good viral growth from MySpace. I'd think about capitalizing as much as possible on the timelapse concept and stray away from being just another photo sharing site. Right now, users profiles are just a feed of images, which doesn't seem that compelling..
- mikeyur 18y agoOne little issue I found. On the user pages if you click 'daily booth' you get sent to /dashboard (even though I have not created an account or logged in): http://ul.mikeyur.com/public/sk/Fullscreen-20090212-232617.png http://ul.mikeyur.com/public/sk/Fullscreen-20090212-232617.p... And when you get sent to /dashboard while not logged in you get a little error: http://ul.mikeyur.com/public/sk/Minefield-20090212-232757.png http://ul.mikeyur.com/public/sk/Minefield-20090212-232757.pn...
- tm 18y agoAwesome story, well done, and great execution. Site looks good. Don't listen to all the naysayers about monetization. It is important (the most important thing), but if you are living/breathing/eating your business, you will come up with proper revenue channels. I'm sure of it. Good luck.
- petercooper 18y agoThis is awesome. It's great to hear a story that isn't just "we did this, and bam, we launched and either a) lost all our money or b) we made $200m in the first day" :)
- pclark 18y agowhoa, it's the guy that made grabup -- love that application (amusingly I emailed them a few months ago asking to advertise (paid) on their site -- never got a reply) great story, will be sure to track his blog and progress. Great to see awesome projects from fellow brits :)
- danw 18y agoI like it. One thing: I can't find a way to delete my account in the settings panel.
- rustartup 18y agoGreat work, but ... looks like an example of completely missing the basics of the customer needs. Do we really need good design to start taking shots? Think about us already missing a year of pictures. Sorry for making it sound sharp.
- gstar 18y agoThanks for sharing, very candid and interesting.
- matthewking 18y agoGreat story Jon, I really enjoyed the read and found it quite inspirational. The launch video at the end with the music was classic, especially the 404 at launch and the music running out! Best of luck with the site, looks like a lot of hard work has gone into it.
- c3o 18y agoI'd suggest you put a sample animation of the type of result people would get on your site on the front page. I don't think the intro text "your life in pictures" explains it well enough, but if people see even just a 5 frame animation they'll immediately recognize the concept. In fact, I'd stick the picture taking app on the front page and allow them to take a first snapshot before even signing up. Having the first picture there would provide a great incentive to follow through with the sign-up. Also, if I may, and I know from experience it's harder than it sounds: It seems your concept got way more complex over time, when you really should have launched the simplest possible version as fast as possible and worried about widgets, following, minifeeds, comments, a proper logo etc. later on. Cool that you're online now though, good luck with everything!
- nopassrecover 18y agoHi I have to ask because this is the third startup I've seen recently like this - what do you do for the startup? What value do you add? I'm not meaning to be impolite but you hire a designer to design, a developer to develop, someone else is funding it... So you bring the idea, management and evangelising?
- nopassrecover 18y agoAlso, I like the earlier designs, especially the first a lot - they are clean and to the point. Your app went from the concept of 'save a photo of yourself every day' to "Not only that, get your own gorgeous widgets and fleet of social features - free." The complexity you have added has not only faded your differentiation but now you start to come across as a "me-too Facebook clone". If this was ever going to be part of your app it should have been something you integrated as you actually got a social network using your system - new users don't care about the social features and widgets. Finally, change your blog so your links are more search engine friendly, not ?p=7 etc.
- coglethorpe 18y agoWithout his initiative would the sight have ever launched? It looked like he was the driver of the whole thing. Sometimes software developers can be the drivers, sometimes they go off to tour Europe with their band instead. Neither is a bad choice, but if you want your product launched in this lifetime, someone has got to be the manager and evangelist.
- bisi 18y agoThats what Product Managers and Project Managers do ..
- nopassrecover 18y agoYeah, like I thought, middle management in a startup. I like the post, and sure I guess it's great to have someone pull it together but if that person could also be adding some value to the actual building as well that would be even better.
- atas 18y agothe date on your site is 13th February 2009+1900