Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?

news.ycombinator.com

161–169 of 169 posts

Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?

#161

Started writing a blog to document our startup experiences but no one visits it. Those that visit don't stay. Tried promotion through social media without success. Everyone said it will be easy to interact with those with similar interests. While not the aim to make a profit, currently no chance of making any traction, let alone profit from the blog. http://sparknlaunch.wordpress.com/

It's hard to diagnose, but as other says (and your stats point out), there is something giving a little amateur feel. From a blog point of view, you should definitely show your authors, to make a genuine, personal impression to readers. The part of the name of the blog that says 'Biz Startup Tech Blog', it may sound too generic, but also a bit pretentious, and it lacks originality (even if it works from a SEO point of view?). I'll also work on the tagline, to describe better what the blog is about. You could try things like "Personal insights of an entrepreneurial journey", maybe also A/B test it... Tell your visitors you are for real, before they leave. And last, but not the least, I think the images are not helping. Usually images help make everything a little more attractive, but here, it's not the case. They are giving an amateurish, cheap feel. Try something else on that front. You could avoid the images unless they really illustrate your point with some personal sources: a screenshot from your project, stats, etc. And please, tell us the results of the experiment!

Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?

#162

I launched a Spanish site http://agrupados.biz which is a search engine for clasified ads in Paraguay. I learned Scala und Apache Lucene this way, now I'm hoping to get it at least covering its hosting costs. The site is up aprox. 3 month now and I had almost no visitors before paying Google. 2 days ago I started a Google AdWords campaign so people may find the site, I spend $2.62 so far and got 95 visitors and even…

Right now I'm trying to use it and I'm getting a lot of errors. As far as I can see, you need to work on the SEO side: there's a lot that needs to be done on that front. Change your title tags structure, create unique descriptions for each page, build friendly urls, make it easy to be crawled, use a sitemap, add to your links the 'title' attribute. For a site like yours, you should not spend on adwords. You will lose money. I hope it helps!

Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?

#163
This year I built http://inflooenz.com It's a tool to explore music influences. I have around 100 visitors each day, but I'm a bit stacked with the site as a product. At the beginning I did some PR. I had some ideas for monetizing, but those are yet to be proved (analytics so far are not showing a good scenario). I had some really cool feedback for the music community, and a lot of ideas for features, but I don't want to start adding features without a clear reason and direction. Right now, I'm working on site engagement, because I think I'm not taking full profit from my already existent visitors. I wasn't hoping to be profitable in the short term, but I expected more feedback and real interest in the product (some to-be-developed features right now allow people to leave their email if they wish to hear from me, but that didn't happen often).

PS: Anyways, this was very good as a personal challenge!

Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?

#165
post #49

I updated my circa 2007 website design last week to a more modernized look based on twitter bootstrap and my sales plummeted. Does that count?

Sometimes simple and ugly triumph? We read some marketing experiences of ugly banner adverts getting more click conversions than modern ones. 1 it's an odd one. http://sparknlaunch.wordpress.com/2012/02/02/keep-it-simple-...

Case in point: the site we're looking at right now.

It's an opinion of course, but I personally find the hacker news design to be dreadfully ugly; yet it's one of the sites I visit and interact with the most frequently. It's simple and very usable. A flashy modern design might make it look better, but if not done well it might also impede functionality, and thus make me visit it less often. And the obvious lack of pretense is psychologically satisfying. Simple and ugly is fine if it's functional.

Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?

#166

We started http://www.fantasy5live.com – a real-time fantasy sports game for GAA, rugby and soccer. It's early days though.

One suggestion: Can you add the player details. May be on hover or on click. Also, I think site needs a bit more help in terms of what a user can do once he reaches the play page. May be a small tutorial or a help page might work. Out of curiosity, how do you keep track of the events? Do you have a live feed that you parse for certain phrases?

Yes, we are recording the performances for each player and we want to show those when users are making their selections.

We are also adding a small tutorial as you suggest -- a number of users were asking "what do I do next" ;-)

The events are recorded manually at the moment and pushed to the users using Pusher.com. There are automated feeds but they are expensive.

Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?

#167
post #145

We started http://www.fantasy5live.com – a real-time fantasy sports game for GAA, rugby and soccer. It's early days though.

How early is early days? Your about, faq and privacy links are blank pages.

It's very much a weekends-only project.

Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?

#169
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the suggestion. When I initially starting brainstorming on the idea, I had some Twitter integration included: auto-adding videos from your timeline (stolen from the Boxee folks) and hashtag "subscriptions"... but it started getting more convoluted to explain to people, so I thought I'd start more simply with just allowing folks to subscribe to "shows". Obviously my execution is not resonating with people (…

I understand what the leanback format is, but what is the placeshifting experience? Also: if you want to say thanks, just click the tiny triangle pointing up next to my name. That's how we give out happiness around here.

This is so old, you may not see this... but placeshifting -> start watching in one place (laptop/work), close window, pick up where you left off in the video later (Boxee Box/home).
Post reply on HN