4 ms·

Ask HN: Please advise on my Twitter clone idea

2 points by zeynel1 17y ago

I have two questions to Hacker News. I'm not a programmer or an engineer but inspired by reading HN I want to start a simple web service. What can be simpler than a twitter clone! My idea is to change the question to What did you buy today? The business model is one time registration fee of $2. This will have two purposes: to make sure that the user is female, because the service will be limited to female shoppers who want to share their shopping experience; and to eliminate spam. What do you think about the idea? I found two twitter clone makers http://www.floopo.com/ and StatusNet (used to be Laconica) http://status.net/?source=laconica. Floopo appears to be simpler to set up. Which one would you choose? Top 250 twitter clone sites http://www.honeytechblog.com/top-250-list-of-twitter-clones-sites/ There is a blog called "What did you buy today?" http://www.obsessiveconsumption.typepad.com/ but I couldn't find a twitter clone answering to this question. Of course, Twitter is already used to share shopping news: http://twitter.com/#search?q=bought so there may be a use for a specialized status update for shopping. Thank you.

jasonlbaptiste 17y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfes_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfes_law
brk 17y ago
I don't mean to be harsh, but I think your idea is bad. You want to become the 251st clone of an unprofitable website with no clear revenue path? Your spin is that by asking a different question (and ignoring the fact that 98% of the posts on Twitter aren't exactly answering "What are you doing" anyway) you will somehow establish a worthwhile site? Then, let's say that you managed to obtain 1 Million active users, meaning you would have collected $2,000,000. You would quickly find that your overhead to scale and support such a site would probably take you about $8M US to get there (this is VERY rough guestimate on my part from some direct related experience). Ads aren't going to make up the other $6M. Again, not trying to bash you, but I don't see the "business" in your proposal. If, however, you want to get some experience with all the variables and moving parts in scaling a web business, this might be a worthwhile exercise to sink a few thousand dollars and a year of your time into.
jacquesm 17y ago
On the one hand I'm tempted to tell you to forget about it, it's a bad idea for many reasons. On the other hand it would help to have an object lesson in how not to do something like this, so if you do go ahead with it please keep a careful diary and do it online so that in the future if someone wants to do something like this we can point them to the guy that proved us all wrong or use it as a warning on how not to start a business. I know this sounds harsh, but if you simply run the numbers you have to admit that with the playing field so diluted that your chances of making yourself stand out above the rest of the players are very slim indeed. Oh, and a 1 time registration fee of $2 will bring you on the order of $1.25 or so after all transaction fees have been taken off. There is a reason why even trial subscriptions are $3.95, after all the costs and chargebacks and credits have been taken care of that about breaks even.
zeynel1 17y ago
Thank you. This is the type of advice I needed.

2 points by zeynel1 17y ago

jasonlbaptiste 17y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfes_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfes_law

brk 17y ago

I don't mean to be harsh, but I think your idea is bad. You want to become the 251st clone of an unprofitable website with no clear revenue path? Your spin is that by asking a different question (and ignoring the fact that 98% of the posts on Twitter aren't exactly answering "What are you doing" anyway) you will somehow establish a worthwhile site? Then, let's say that you managed to obtain 1 Million active users, meaning you would have collected $2,000,000. You would quickly find that your overhead to scale and support such a site would probably take you about $8M US to get there (this is VERY rough guestimate on my part from some direct related experience). Ads aren't going to make up the other $6M. Again, not trying to bash you, but I don't see the "business" in your proposal. If, however, you want to get some experience with all the variables and moving parts in scaling a web business, this might be a worthwhile exercise to sink a few thousand dollars and a year of your time into.

jacquesm 17y ago

On the one hand I'm tempted to tell you to forget about it, it's a bad idea for many reasons. On the other hand it would help to have an object lesson in how not to do something like this, so if you do go ahead with it please keep a careful diary and do it online so that in the future if someone wants to do something like this we can point them to the guy that proved us all wrong or use it as a warning on how not to start a business. I know this sounds harsh, but if you simply run the numbers you have to admit that with the playing field so diluted that your chances of making yourself stand out above the rest of the players are very slim indeed. Oh, and a 1 time registration fee of $2 will bring you on the order of $1.25 or so after all transaction fees have been taken off. There is a reason why even trial subscriptions are $3.95, after all the costs and chargebacks and credits have been taken care of that about breaks even.

zeynel1 17y ago

Thank you. This is the type of advice I needed.