11 ms·

My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love

• mumbi 13y ago
  You should make it look better, imo.
  • martey 13y ago
    How would that solve the issue of it not making money?
    • krapp 13y ago
      Depends on how he decides to monetize it I guess. But at the very least a better designed site gives the impression of professionalism and security, and users who trust you will also trust you with their money. Also a better organized (I think less noisy) site would make the ads easier to see and more relevant. Although for me, the bigger issue is finding what Twicsy offers that's worth paying for?
    • diorray 13y ago
      Twitter Bootstrap, a developer's greatest ally
    • logicallee 13y ago
      It might solve the "unfundable" and "piece of shit" adjectives in the title. pretty much the whole Internet is built on the idea that if you can get metrics like his up, and get funded, you can figure out monetization with the help of your expert investors.
  • naterator 13y ago
    That's not going to help his revenue problem, probably. The only thing I can think of is if he--in addition to making it look appealing--somehow places targeted ads based on user queries, in the midst of their search results. This is essentially the "killer" strategy a lot of companies like FB and Twitter have started using. Make ads a seamless part of the scenery. Not as annoying sidebar shit that no one ever looks at.
• cwe 13y ago
  Why does he say "really successful" in the title, if it doesn't even break even? EDIT: Must be the traffic, but these days that's not (that) impressive if there's no revenue model around it. That said, I'd love 6 million users/month. EDIT 2: downvotes? I guess funding = success still around here, huh?
  • jff 13y ago
    I'd hate to have 6 million visitors a month if they're viewing pictures (high bandwidth) and I'm not actually making any money from them.
    • jbrandon52 13y ago
      It appears the pictures are actually hosted on Twitter, so not that much traffic.
    • lsc 13y ago
      eh, I'd take it. Bandwidth is cheap... and I have the sort of ego that derives a lot of pleasure from creating something that other people find useful and use.
  • alistairSH 13y ago
    The ten years included several startups. And while it appears all eventually failed or were put in the back-burner, he did raise $2 million in angel funding along the way. So, at least in regards to keeping himself housed and fed, I guess it was successful.
  • dumbfounder 13y ago
    I actually meant to put successful in quotes but then forgot. The way I meant it is, if you had told me I would be seeing 6 million unique visitors per month when I first started out I would have definitely said that is a huge success. In some ways it is, but obviously not the most important way. I definitely agree that raising money is not success, and actually all of the money raised was prior to launching Twicsy.
• aresant 13y ago
  Sharing some of the analytics behind how you think people use the site would probably make for a much more interesting discussion around monetization. EG - I can't figure out how or why 6m uniques would show up here, or what they're doing. And that's not an insult, I am curious - are they looking for discovery / trends? Are they looking to see all the latest pics of a user? etc? Those are dramatically different user segments / values. You've got a bit of a 31-flavors UX where I can do a lot, but as a result wonder if you could massively pare this down, improve focus, and discover monetization through understanding what people actually use it for.
  • dumbfounder 13y ago
    SEO is the largest feeder of traffic for Twicsy. People get there by searching for a very long tail of things. But there are quite a few that return just to browse around it seems, or check out the top photos. Agreed, the UX/UI is terrible. One big problem is that I am a terrible web developer, I am really just a back end data guy that knows enough to be dangerous on the front end. But that's part of the reason why I think it has much more potential. The site gets a ton of traffic despite its obvious flaws. If I had the funds to do a redesign and even execute well on the basics who knows what could happen?
    • ashraful 13y ago
      I'd love to do a free redesign for Twicsy. Email me (inlith@gmail.com) if you're interested. My portfolio is at madebyargon.com
      • dumbfounder 13y ago
        Will do!
      • slewis 13y ago
        I'm curious. Why free? Portfolio juice?
        • 13y ago
• corporealshift 13y ago
  No ads if you sign in with twitter? Maybe that's the problem, since it's a search engine specifically for twitter... I'd be curious to see some information regarding the number of ad impressions/clicks too. The only ad on the homepage is way at the bottom (I think).
• reasonnotreason 13y ago
  I don't understand if it has 6 million unique visitors a month, how can he not monetize this? This seems to be more about how the revenue via advertising has dried up. Can barely pay for the servers !?
  • krapp 13y ago
    6 million unique visitors a month are seeing nothing they can't see for free on Twitter. The problem of how to make money on aggregated content is an interesting one (and relevant to more than a few struggling entrepreneurs)
• SandersAK 13y ago
  I get that people are trying to be helpful, and think that's great. But this blog post was awesome, raw, and captured something that so few of us can really relate to. Dude grinds for 10 years, keeps grinding, doesn't know where to go but will probably keep grinding. "Twicsy, you son of a bitch. You frustrate me so. I love you, but oh how I hate to love you." Shine on, buddy. Best of luck!
  • sockgrant 13y ago
    Agreed. This was a fun read and I really hope things work out for him.
  • bashcoder 13y ago
    Absolutely - well said.
  • dumbfounder 13y ago
    Don't worry, you haven't seen the last of Twicsy!
  • krapp 13y ago
    I know... his failure has already been more successful than many people's successes.
  • KamiCrit 13y ago
    Spot on man! I gotta admit the website is meh (although what can I say, I've never published+hosted a website before) but that story is pretty amazing! Maybe OP should try to publish an ebook on his 10 year adventure?
  • n_coats 13y ago
    Well put! (and a bit unusual to see such kindness in an HN comment haha) Kudos to the author, best wishes for the future!
  • jaredsohn 13y ago
    >captured something that so few of us can really relate to. >Dude grinds for 10 years, keeps grinding, doesn't know where to go but will probably keep grinding. >"Twicsy, you son of a bitch. You frustrate me so. I love you, but oh how I hate to love you." Maybe not the ten years part, but I imagine that a decent number of people here can relate to this (i.e. working on a startup for awhile and having a love/hate relationship with it while it is not yet a financial success.)
• jsonne 13y ago
  Have you thought of doing in content ads when people search specific things? I.e. If I look up "party" maybe there's an alcohol ad or an ad for a local bar. I have so many ideas around this.
• diorray 13y ago
  Some monetization ideas: * Follow the 4chan's method. Add captcha to search and offer captcha bypass for $15~ per year * Make iOS / Android app, sell it for $1.99~ (you can make it with HTML/Javascript via PhoneGap) * Offer API for affordable price and please change current website design, make it simple and cleaner (Twitter Bootstrap is nice for that job and it's easy to learn)
• birken 13y ago
  A few comments from an initial glance: - Site could be improved a lot for mobile. If you get a lot of mobile traffic, which wouldn't surprise me, I'll bet it massively underperforms desktop traffic on site engagement and ad revenue. - You need to A/B test your ad locations a lot more. The locations do not look particularly good to me, but then again this does depend a lot on how most people interact with your site (which likely isn't starting at the homepage). - More ad networks isn't always better. Are these ad networks actually outperforming adsense? Are you banned from adsense? Edit: Ignore these two below, thanks jim-greer. Twitter is in fact hosting the images! - (ignore) You probably could compress the big images more to save bandwidth. I don't know how big of an expense your edgecast bill is, but I'll bet you could cut it down by a lot. - (ignore) Additionally, fix the cache headers on your images (change them from max-age: 0 to cache forever -- they look immutable). This will immediately lower your edgecast bill by a little bit and really help performance.
  • jim-greer 13y ago
    > You probably could compress the big images more to save bandwidth He's not hosting the images, Twitter is.
  • dumbfounder 13y ago
    Agreed with mobile optimization, I have over 35% mobile traffic and I am doing a terrible job of taking advantage of this. But I don't know the first thing about how to do this. I have done some research and experiments but honestly couldn't make sense of it. Yes, I am banned from Adsense, and just about every top tier ad network. There is a certain amount of porn on Twicsy (maybe 10% of overall traffic, nothing earth shattering) that makes it unsavory to many advertisers. Despite aggressive filtering in place to stop serving top tier ads on anything that might possibly be objectionable, and removing 10's of millions of pictures, it seems like every top provider has blacklisted Twicsy.
    • reasonnotreason 13y ago
      How much do these bannings hurt your profitability ? Any way to quantify it ?
• laurencei 13y ago
  I don't use twitter much. But recently there was a large tanker crash near where I live. The truck had exploded, and there were lots of people killed and hurt. I wanted to see some pictures, but one hour after the incident the story was not (yet) on the TV news. So I turned to twitter, and using the standard twitter search, I found a few ransoms photos of the incident. What I needed was a better way to search twitter for photos, with a specific tag or time frame posting, and perhaps even a geographical filter too (since the incident was at a specific place). I'm sure other people would find this useful, especially when large events unfold live (I.e boston bombings, plane crash etc etc)
  • jackweirdy 13y ago
    Time & Geographically based searches would be a moneymaker, no doubt about it. Could be something that Twitter would buy up themselves too
    • laurencei 13y ago
      Actually I just found this: http://nearbytweets.com/ http://nearbytweets.com/ - seems someone has already done it (for free). You can change the location to anywhere in the world (not just 'near' you)
  • dopamean 13y ago
    I actually do this on Instagram. It's not so effective for breaking news stories but it can be fun at music festivals and other entertainment type events.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• martinkallstrom 13y ago
  Make a Twicsy app, price it at a dollar, push it through the site and you're set.
  • dumbfounder 13y ago
    I agree this idea has potential, and I have thought about it, but I am a bad web developer, and an even worse app developer. I have been looking for a partner to possibly do it with a rev share and I have contacted numerous people, but no takers...
    • akngo 13y ago
      I'd love to help out with doing some of your web stuff if you are interested. Shoot me an email, anhkiet(at)gmail
    • 23andwalnut 13y ago
      Happy to help you with some of your web dev and design issues. Check out some of my work at http://www.duetapp.com http://www.duetapp.com, http://www.getsoloapp.com http://www.getsoloapp.com, http://www.23andwalnut.com http://www.23andwalnut.com. Shoot me an email at from any one of those sites if you're interested.
    • srid68 13y ago
      If you are interested, i can develop NATIVE android/ios mobile html/web based app (similar to phonegap with embedded socket server) based on Xamarin.Android/Xamarin.IOS for FREE (looking to publish a portfolio of case studies). If interested contact srid68 at gmail.
• programminggeek 13y ago
  The ad placement is basically terrible. You should place fewer ads, but put them nearer the content and above the fold. For example, get them out of the sidebar and make one banner in line with the content between the navigation and the pictures. Basically get rid of the rest. Also, have you considered selling ads on BuySellAds.com? With that amount of traffic you should make decent money on a CPM or monthly basis.
  • dumbfounder 13y ago
    I have very little ability to change the UI because I am a bad web developer and every change I make seems to make things worse. But thanks for the placement suggestion, maybe that is worth a try. I contacted BuySellAds a while back and they passed on the opportunity. They said their target audience doesn't line up well with Twicsy. Or some crap like that :)
    • chriogenix 13y ago
      @dumbfounder how can i get in touch regarding buying space on your site?
      • dumbfounder 13y ago
        There is an email at the bottom of every page on Twicsy. Unfortunately you need to jump through a hoop after that because I am trying to avoid spam, but there you go!
        • pedalpete 13y ago
          This comment thread in particular may provide more information about your challenge in finding monetary success than your entire wonderfully written blog post. Here, in quick succession you first suggest that you have very little ability to change the UI because you are a bad developer, then quickly follow that up with a confession to somebody who wants to give you money, that you've made it annoying to contact you because you don't want spam. I'm trying to be helpful here, not trying to be an a$$, and I understand that you're frustrated with your current situation with Twicsy and your generally long-challenging experiences making a mint with your startups. However, take a deep breath and realise you've done 3 times what so many have failed to do even once. You've launched 3 products which have seen some manner of success, two raised rounds of financing, and the other has a good volume of traffic. Give yourself a bit of credit on the positive. Now the negative. It is said time and time again, execution is everything. You should know that. I just took a look at Twicsy, and honestly the design isn't that bad, but it could use a touch up. If you aren't good at 'web development', get somebody to help you. I'm sure you can find a local developer who would like to have twicsy on their portfolio, or spend a few bucks and get it done. Secondly, make it easy for people to advertise on the site. If you are going through an ad network, you're not doing the work anyway or put up a contact form on the site, or even put your e-mail in your HN profile. You want to be a success, ABC/S/whatever. You're missing opportunities where people want to give you money, and if you're missing those opportunities, I assume you're also missing opportunities to sell. The 'build it and the money will come rolling in' days are long gone. Nobody is an overnight success, particularly those that make it look easiest. If you want success, you'll have to work for it. Or else, you'll have to settle for telling everybody about your 'almost successes'. As I said, I hope this isn't coming across poorly, as I'm truly trying to help you, this thread just made me make a bunch of assumptions about you, and if I'm right, hopefully it will help you or somebody else. You've struck a nerve with me here, which is why my writing may have a tinge of hostility, but maybe a small crack of the whip will wake you up to your current opportunities and how you can seize them. All the best.
• elorant 13y ago
  He could do something like the new Pinterest ads. You search for a pic on Twitter and inside the results is a picture with an ad with a relative theme.
  • dumbfounder 13y ago
    Pinterest is so hot right now. Twicsy is so not hot right now. That makes a huge difference when it comes to launching products like that. They also have much better engagement.
• ye 13y ago
  A few random ideas in no particular order 1) Paywall. Even if 1 out of 10,000 people agrees to pay, you will have 600 paying customers per month. 2) Sell analytics / data on what's trending. 3) Offer to make prints of the images. 4) Branching out #3 - not just prints, but fridge magnets, tiles, mugs, whatever.
  • dclusin 13y ago
    I suspect #3 & #4 would incur legal liabilities that far exceed the revenue they generate. I'm thinking about copyright infringement.
  • dumbfounder 13y ago
    You may be right about #1, that was to be my next attempt at monetization. Right now you can only do keyword searches on the past month, I was going to offer a service to let people search the full index for maybe $10/month. But I am now involved with another startup that is taking all my time and I am not sure when I will get the chance to try this. I have talked to many people about #2 but was unable to figure out something compelling to sell. Tried #3 with Peecho for about a week, not one sale!
  • brador 13y ago
    Who can you sell analytics/trending data to?
• bacheson 13y ago
  Successful? No ... Potential? Yes
• badalyan 13y ago
  Find real problems first, then solve them by creating a Business™
• oddshocks 13y ago
  If you want some cricisim, the website style might be turning people away. http://twicsy.com/ http://twicsy.com/ The colours, contrast, and various sizes/spacing of things are somewhat unsettling.
  • woah 13y ago
    It could be a lot cleaner and calmer
  • alexcroox 13y ago
    Yep, his first hire should be/have been a designer. People only care about interfaces, they couldn't care less how great the backend is.
• lazyjones 13y ago
  It's full of (crappy - sorry) ads that probably don't pay much. Perhaps less is more? I'm not really a Google advocate, but how about switching to text-based ads only and focusing more on showing the user real content instead of large, annoying banners?
  • dumbfounder 13y ago
    I have tried at least 50 ad networks and what I am using now seems to work the best. But I am always willing to try something new...
• tn13 13y ago
  This happened with me as well. After spending lots of money and time building a complex tech I failed miserably. So on a boring day I wrote some crappy android app. I published it and went to sleep. A week passed and I realized that the app was in first 10 for a particular section in India. I put Admob ads and suddenly revenue started zooming. My app will not scale beyond a point. It is unfundable. It is really crappy technology (basically a static website put as a webview) but it gets hundreds of installs every day and touching "thank you emails" every day.
• WoodenChair 13y ago
  It was once told to me that after 2 years a startup is no longer a startup, it's just a failed business.
• dmead 13y ago
  someone's bad at being greedy
• notlisted 13y ago
  Where does the traffic come from? I think I may know. TRAFFIC A brief glance at alexa (I know, I know...) shows the source breakdown of his traffic: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/twicsy.com http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/twicsy.com USA (17.5%), India (13.4%), Indonesia (11.3%), Japan (4.1%) More interestingly, it lists some feeder pages, and there's one interesting one: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090722010355AA7qGC2 http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090722010355AA... Which contains this answer: "Bonus - This is an easy way to include pictures you have uploaded to Twitter in an easy and automated fashion. Go to http://twicsy.com http://twicsy.com and type in your twitter username. You will see all of the pictures you have uploaded through twitter. Now scroll to the right and click on the 'RSS' button. Now you can use this automatically updated link of your tiwtter pictures." RSS FEEDS So... since people can use twicsy to find all pictures on a certain hashtag topic ( http://twicsy.com/?search=%23cinderella http://twicsy.com/?search=%23cinderella ) or from a certain user ( http://twicsy.com/u/onedirection http://twicsy.com/u/onedirection ), they can include these in their own sites as RSS feeds, thus contributing to his overall server traffic, but perhaps not actual visitors. BANDWIDTH He does not actually seem to host (all/any?) pictures himself (i.e. little bandwidth), but wraps twimg.com files in his own RSS tags, adding links to his site. TRAFFIC 2 By the way, his assertion of 6MM visits a month is reflected in the quantcast numbers: https://www.quantcast.com/twicsy.com#!traffic https://www.quantcast.com/twicsy.com#!traffic DEMOGRAPHIC Also, pretty interesting affinity sites and demographic (younger males, no kids, not wealthy, college educated, more than avg african american and hispanic visitors) with a strong affinity for O'Reilly Automotive (perhaps not very similar to the audience of this site, hence virtually unknown) https://www.quantcast.com/twicsy.com#!demo https://www.quantcast.com/twicsy.com#!demo GEO Geo findings of Alexa seem to agree with Alexa, though strangely enough, India is missing from the top countries. Quantcast claims only 56k unique cookies from India. Perhaps someone one is using his site and responsible for a lot of the Alexa 13.5% ? https://www.quantcast.com/twicsy.com#!geo https://www.quantcast.com/twicsy.com#!geo MONEY MONEY MONEY If my theory of above average RSS traffic is right, only he can tell, think he could make more money if he inserted some adverts into his RSS feed. Not sure how well this would go over with Twitter, since he's not doing (most of?) the image hosting. I also get the feeling something is amiss. The Alexa and Quantcast numbers are significantly out of whack (13.4% of all traffic from India, yet only 56k unique visitors) strikes me as odd. He may be spending a bunch of money on servers whilst others save money on using them as a tool. On a personal level I find the design very unattractive and out-of-date, which may prevent the site from becoming much of a destination and could be linked to the 60+% bounce rate. If I were him I would figure out what competitors do ( like twitpic, which according to compete is an actual competitor: https://siteanalytics.compete.com/twicsy.com/ https://siteanalytics.compete.com/twicsy.com/ ) and take it from there. Access to actual analytics could provide more ideas for money-making (or -saving).
• iblaine 13y ago
  I am unconvinced that traffic is all a site needs to be a real business. Sites like pinterest & snapchat convince us otherwise. And those business operate at a loss. Trying doing that as your side project...and you probably wont go very far unless you have VCs with some deep pockets...or publicity from sites like hacker news & tech crunch.
• austenallred 13y ago
  You should be making a lot more than you're making. With a few tweaks to your ad placement you should be making more than enough to live off of. I only say this because your current ad placement is kind of annoying and intrusive (especially on the content detail pages), yet they seem to be placed in some of the worst places to actually generate clicks. Of course, I don't have specific data or testing from your site to back that theory up, but if your site follows the trends I've seen in other sites this is certainly the case. Feel free to reach out to me at the email address in my HN profile and I'll help you get them placed right/help you test out placement to start generating some real revenue. 6 million uniques is nothing to turn your nose up at, and it should be enough for you to make a living off of quite easily.
• thenomad 13y ago
  Question: what CPM are you getting for your ads? Depending on how much you're getting, I may know some people who would be interested in beating that price.
  • dumbfounder 13y ago
    On average less than 10 cents.
    • thenomad 13y ago
      Hmm, interesting. I shall contact you by email!
    • aggronn 13y ago
      What CPMs are you getting in the US? If 17% of your traffic is US, even with one ad per page, you should be getting ~4,760,000 pageviews per month. have you ever tried to outsource your ad operations? that kind of inventory could be worth worth enough to live on comfortably.
• wavesounds 13y ago
  This is proof of Marc Andreessen's idea[1] that if you obtain good product market fit nothing else really matters. Despite ignoring this product for 4 years and having a totally outdated design the market is compelling this product to exist none the less. You've basically invented Instagram for Twitter here and don't seem to even realize it. Please do your users a favor and apply Twitter's Bootstrap to the site ASAP, its really not that hard, you've been at this for 10 years, might as well learn a little HTML CSS you've come this far. 1. "Personally, I’ll take the third position – I’ll assert that market is the most impor- tant factor in a startup’s success or failure. Why? In a great market – a market with lots of real potential customers – the market pulls product out of the startup. The market needs to be fulfilled and the market will be fulfilled, by the first viable product that comes along. The product doesn’t need to be great; it just has to basically work. And, the market doesn’t care how good the team is, as long as the team can produce that viable product."
  • chavesn 13y ago
    Well, not nothing else. As the author said, it makes next to no money. And it sounds like the traffic is almost entirely transient, which reduces its value greatly. The site averaged less than 2 visits per unique visitor. So, while I get your point that an interested audience propelled the site to great use without much work at all, that's not the whole equation, not even close.
• Axsuul 13y ago
  I can heavily relate to this with one of my early projects, Jellibug. It aggregated celebrity pictures from Instagram, Twitter, etc and at one point had 1M+ pictures and 250k+ visitors/month. Except it didn't make money and became a "piece of shit startup I hate to love". I stopped working on it about a year ago and finally shut it down last month. Almost all traffic to it was organic, just like Twicsy. And it was mostly teenagers using the site which is a very hard audience to monetize. I couldn't see it as a business anymore so why bother wasting time even thinking about it? Sometimes things fall apart so that better things can fall together. Since then, I've stopped chasing the sexy and cool ideas with no business plan. Today, I run 2 unsexy and boring startups that make money. My advice would be to ditch Twicsy and instead find a problem and solve it.
  • dumbfounder 13y ago
    I can't ditch the piece of shit I love!
  • AznHisoka 13y ago
    What are those 2 boring startups you run? Also, a sneaky, probably short-term idea for making money is to have sneaky affiliate links with misleading anchor text like "Click to see the image", and point the affiliate link to an Amazon product page or something. Probably an easy few thousand dollars per month.
  • billmalarky 13y ago
    I am feeling this so hard right now. Same situation except about double the traffic and yet still losing money. Definitely looking into SAAS as my next project.
• patio11 13y ago
  My general anti-B2C bias may be showing, but unless you've discovered a new core interaction for people (Instagrammy) I'm betting the 6 million visits a month is basically just a function of having a lot of content about Justin Bieber (and a zillion other topics) which is beating Twitter because Twitter has relatively poor SEO (for a reason). This sort of suggests that the momentary attention of 6 million people is worth what people are willing to pay for it. You're clearly smart and connected. You've built sites this successful before and probably will again. Why not make something which matters rather than aggregating hashtagged selfies? There's more money in things that matter and they are frequently more rewarding to work on.
  • dumbfounder 13y ago
    I will keep Twicsy going until it makes much less than no sense at all!!!!!!! But, I am already working on the next thing and we have generated more revenue in the last few months than Twicsy/Dumbfind/Searchles did in 10 years.
    • rattray 13y ago
      That's incredible, congratulations! Care to share what you're working on? Or at least what process led you to the new project?
      • dumbfounder 13y ago
        http://distillerylab.com http://distillerylab.com Sounds boring to most probably, but I love to play with data! And we have real clients!
        • wsieroci 13y ago
          I do not know what distillerylab.com does. On the site I found only general info about it. Could you say more, what you are doing there?
          • 13y ago
• shawnreilly 13y ago
  I can tell you're frustrated with this Project, but I still think you deserve some congrats. Good job! It's not easy to build something and get that much traffic. I think the frustration stems from the platform it's built on, and how hard it is to monetize on that platform. Since the content is basically given away for free, advertising is your only option. And since they advertise as well... it’s tough to pull it off. I can think of three basic options here (and I'm sure there are many many more): 1. Keep it running, keep it free, and use it as a "Bullet Point" project to increase your perceived value on other projects that have the potential to monetize more successfully 2. Go the complete opposite and just start charging money for it, and see what happens. Of course you risk losing traffic and/or the whole thing imploding, but you never know until you try 3. Just scrap it and re-use the Tech to build a different product that is focused on a niche market that you believe can monetize better. Perhaps News related businesses that would find value in an easy /easier way to find Images for the stories they write
• lazyeye 13y ago
  Its a cheesy video but if you can force yourself to watch to the end there might be a couple of points to make your time worthwhile. 6 Ways To Make Money Online http://www.shoemoney.com/6-ways-to-make-money-online http://www.shoemoney.com/6-ways-to-make-money-online (Yes I know its Shoemoney)
• cmac2992 13y ago
  Why would you need funding? Your product seems "finished" and you have a ton of users. You just need to monetize better than crappy ads
  • dumbfounder 13y ago
    Because I have 2 kids and I can't afford to work for no salary anymore! And the site needs a redesign.
    • Grokit 13y ago
      Just some honest constructive feedback here. Kinda just seems like an excuse to me...I don't have kids, so I can't empathize, however, it couldn't take THAT much time to work on monetization strategies. 6 million uniques on a consistent basis is pretty substantial attention, and attention = power, nowadays. Plus, why would an investor want to throw any more money at you when you've already somehow dropped well over a million bucks? I think if you just put some elbow grease in, you'd make it work.
      • dumbfounder 13y ago
        All that investment money went into previous products, only the underlying tech was taken to create Twicsy. Only about $30k was actually invested into Twicsy itself after that (just to pay my terrible salary). Since then I paid to keep Twicsy afloat out of my own pocket until this year when it finally started breaking even on raw costs (still can't afford to pay myself a salary).
    • cmac2992 13y ago
      I certainly understand needing to support your family. But I understand why investors are so leery. Additional $$$ in the business and a redesign would probably result in more users but probably not a substantial increase in revenue. Your monetization strategy is not working at 6 million(impressive btw) users then why would it work at 12 million users. There is a very small ROI with the current strategy. Properly monetizing 6 million users would result in alot more than just beer money. what you've done is awesome. With a few tweaks to the business model you could generate real revenue without needing to raise investment capital.
• photorized 13y ago
  Launch a contest, some folks would probably be willing to solve the monetization problem for a percentage of the revenue. I'd love to work with you on this, that kind of traffic isn't easy to build. I'd also spin off a separate product for marketers (based on the same engine, but without the global trend noise), make it useful (there are a few ways to do that).
  • dumbfounder 13y ago
    Then I would have 50 ideas that I don't have time or money to execute on :)
    • photorized 13y ago
      idea being you let them execute for rev share :)
• joshuaellinger 13y ago
  You are making me love my little enterprise startup. 10 years, no funding -> $750K/year. Of course, that one company is AT&T. We help send about 1/3% of all direct mail advertising in the U.S. (Sorry about that -- we are trying to get them to switch to digital but it's a hard sell to when that's what they do for a living.)
• username223 13y ago
  Note to "10x founders": both "twitsnbieber.com" and "titsnbieber.com" are still available.
• lazyeye 13y ago
  Could maybe time-delay search results for free users. Premium users (news companies etc) pay for more real-time service.
• msalazar 13y ago
  This is something that I have thought about a lot recently because I've been wanting to start my own company as well. I don't plan on making money from it right away. I would love to, but at the end of the day.. It comes down to what is reality, which in this case for me is that I will not be making any/much money off of my site. I've looked at alternatives to how I can change this and will continue to do so. Kudos to you for managing to keep your idea going for this long with little to no hope. Maybe I will have to be just like you and just keep at it only because of the love and passion you have for your own product. Best of luck to you on your new project(s)
• cyrilg 13y ago
  The idea seems like a good one but you are not solving any problem, it is just a cool way to discover photos on twitter. If you have 6 millions unique users, can you charge businesses to feature their photo on the home page and charge per follower you give them?
• rgonzalez 13y ago
  Best title ever.
• amerf1 13y ago
  Honestly speaking I've used the website a lot, but only recently I started thinking why doesn't the founder take it to the next level? It's an amazing website!
• ringe 13y ago
  The real problem here IMO is that the focus is on the investors and making a product that will attracted such. There's something fundamentally wrong with the approach when the major focus is on something else than earning money. I know, I've been there too. loop "Build something you can sell. Find a customer. Send a bill. Get money."
• rjurney 13y ago
  Just keep growing the traffic however you can while you break even and figure out how to turn it into something profitable long term.
• jjoe 13y ago
  Interesting... HN seems to be more responsive to stories of failed start ups than averagely successful businesses. Is this because most are reluctant to tell the world they've failed? Doesn't this go counter to the failure-is-good argument. It's as if one comes out more genuine iff bad news are shared rather than good news. FYI, I don't personally see OP's app/outcome as a failure in itself.
• realworldview 13y ago
  /bin/anothergreatidea < '$$$' > ~/Desktop/Trash 2> /dev/null
• WaterSponge 13y ago
  You ever think to ask your users with a survey to see why they came there in the first place? Do you have some analytics to see what they are doing on the site? I mean is 60% of it searching for popstar images and then browsing from then? Once you know this you can start to steer this firehose into a funnel.
• nate 13y ago
  I sent this to the blog author, but then felt maybe someone else might get something from reading it. My offer stands for everyone here. Most of us are going through or have gone through this same struggle eloquently written in this post. I'm here to help brainstorm or chew on any problems any of us are working through. Just need to email me. nate.kontny gmail -------------------------- I really enjoyed your blog post on Hacker News today about the trouble of running Twicsy. Here's just a few spelling/grammar corrections: https://draftin.com/documents/168810/changes_to_savepoint?share_edits_token=_62uFf4NYzF_EGvtSBbRrcQXEGpSg616YEqRPZIEAxhK0rkmWZI07TJH405Iwdbu3-lLJgiTKPdtR8ewVs3jt2Q https://draftin.com/documents/168810/changes_to_savepoint?sh... I definitely understand what you are going through. I had a successful attempt at starting a business with Inkling (http://inklingmarkets.com http://inklingmarkets.com, which still runs profitably today), but then wanted to try again. So we started a branded games company where companies could stick there own brand images into a bunch of games we made. For example, our version of Bejeweled but with pictures of the latest sweaters at the Gap. And we did some revenue making deals. But the deals were tough to get, and the investors didn't care. I didn't have the passion for this project like I did with Inkling to see it through. So I gave up relatively quickly. Took a break and worked on the Obama campaign. But then I started Draft (http://draftin.com http://draftin.com) about half a year ago, and that's been a considerably different project in terms of success. It's surprised me how much people enjoy it. One thing that's really helped me is Kathy Sierra's advice (http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/08/why_marketing_s.html http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/0...): to find something where I'm making people better at something. And let that guide all my decision making. For example, If I were trying to sell cameras, I'd wake up and just focus on helping people become better photographers. With Draft I focus on helping people "write better", and every feature or decision I make for the product has to have that as its mission. And it continues to serve me well. As I briefly look at Twicsy, I can't help feel there is something here about helping people get better at something. Maybe it too is about getting better at taking photos. You must have a lot of data (i.e OkCupid) about what types of photos get traffic. Maybe with that data, you could make companies better at sharing images of what they do to get more fans. You obviously have skill getting SEO traffic, and managing a large image site. Maybe there is a kernel there that you'd be excited to productize. Anyways, I know the feelings you are going through. I'm not going to say just keep going, because obviously you have. But I am confident, that eventually there is something you are exploring here that could be turned into something that can sustain itself. I'm here to brainstorm or chat if you need me. Happy to be of any kind of help. Please feel free to ask. No need to feel like you are toiling at this alone. -Nate -- http://twitter.com/natekontny http://twitter.com/natekontny http://ninjasandrobots.com http://ninjasandrobots.com
• normloman 13y ago
  Finally, a website that lets me search twitters massive database of stupid pictures people take of themselves. How are you not a billionaire?
  • DanBC 13y ago
    ... It also lets you search for things like LAX, which might have been handy the other day. A quick search for "thinspo" shows Twitter has a lot of work left to do if they want to stop people using twitter for pro-anorexia messaging.
• robomartin 13y ago
  And this, boys and girls, is what entrepreneurship looks like more often than not. The "over the weekend" stories are rare corner cases. In the vast majority of cases you have to be prepared to slog it out for an extended period of time before you start to see success. And that's one of the huge reasons for which most new businesses fail. Not everyone has the intestinal fortitude to, in the face of adversity, keep pushing forward. @dumbfounder First of all, I wish you had chosen a different handle on HN. You are not dumb at all. You are, in fact, a real asset to anyone who might want to launch a startup or get behind a difficult idea. I don't know if you project will ultimately succeed. Hard to tell. You, on the other hand, are an absolute success. I know that from your current perspective it might seem you wasted a decade in this journey. I simply don't see it that way. You've received plenty of design and functional advise on this thread with regards to twicsy. The first thing I thought about was something that came up in a discussion on HN a couple of days ago. Here's my short comment on that thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6647818 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6647818 In my view that still rings true for twicsy. In other words, you have to deliver value that is not found elsewhere and that people are willing to pay for. Im my post I speak of the fact that the vast majority of news websites are regurgitated versions of the news item source, whereas there are a very few who provide you with real incremental value by taking the time to research and give you perspective. If you are still interested in making twicsy a success perhaps you should start thinking laterally rather than vertically. In other words, don't stay on your current path. Explore other paths. I know that's easier said than done. For example: How might corporate marketing programs be able to use your service? Celebrities? Bloggers? How about a path to licensing some of these pictures? Not through you, through whoever owns the rights with you making a small percentage on the sale. Don't give up. Pivot.
• boonez123 13y ago
  More ads man! I had a site that had 1 million page views per day and we generated about $1500-$3000/day off the ads. Placement of the ad is imperative.
  • billmalarky 13y ago
    Can you email me? I've got a site that does high pageviews that I'm struggling to monetize.
• johnkim 13y ago
  Just wanted to say love your post. It was fun and educating. ;)
• dorfsmay 13y ago
  Thanks for this post, especially for all the details. Been building a site as a side project, mainly to get it out of my head and the incidental learnings. Reading about your strugle and the hardship of moneytisation was very enlightning.
• jameszol 13y ago
  You have an awesome opportunity with your startup. I'm sure you'll turn something around with the lively discussion you kicked off. Have you considered non-ad-network revenue sources? What about running affiliate offers? I used to make 4 to 10 times more as a publisher with affiliate offers than adsense or other ad network placements. I don't affiliate (or publish) enough now to know if that would still happen or not. A quick idea for an affiliate test, although you may have already tried this: Given 6MM+ uniques/mo, and a somewhat adult-oriented audience, you may have a decent opportunity to push native ads with affiliate offers toward dating sites, event-themed sites (costumes for halloween trends), and more. Native ads could be custom, animated banners you create and fill the first, second or x picture spot in your search or tag results. Does that make sense? Your banners would be 100px x 100px on your home page and fill a standard picture spot or two or five instead of the images that might ordinarily go in that space, 150x150 banner ads could fit in well in random places on your tag image pages, etc. Also, advertisers might like to participate in native advertising on your website if the opportunity were available. Good luck!