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Ask HN: For 10 years I've been trying various projects, still clueless

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Re: Ask HN: For 10 years I've been trying various projects, still clueless

#31

Post by FriedRice123 »

superdario wrote: post #11
namanyayg wrote: post #3

What all have you tried and how did each of them fail?

Blitzer - hangout application, you put a pin on the map that is active for up to 1 hour and then you can meet people for anything. The problem was the geolocation, because it is hyper-geolocated so I would need to get many people in one small place, like one city. Mimic - if you know what TikTok has duets now, Mimic was supposed to be that before TikTok existed where you imitate a person, mimicking person. The proble…

Blitzer - Immediate thought comes to me, how are you going to make money. For example, a normal meetup app (with a very original name - Meetup.com) has massive problems on monetization and is basically sold around like a hot potato that nobody wants to have because it's just bleeding money with no idea how to turn the ship around. Your idea is to niche down even more. Are you going to be able to convince a group of 10 people meeting up on your app to each pay you a $ for your service? I highly doubt that. Also, you need to be more active when acquiring users. You said it's hyper-local, well you can start in your local area. You go to your country's subreddits, forums, facebook groups and just start advertising your app. If it gains traction, maybe, maybe you can scale it to other areas too, but again, monetization problems. You probably shouldn't even attempt this idea unless you have a VC person on your speed dial that is willing to burn money on scaling.

Mimic - not sure how would this app work when you are fighting for attention with behemoths like tiktok, youtube, instagram etc. Also no clear business model so the project is already set for failure.

xoxoSnap - unironically one of your strongest chances to succeed. You are making an app in an industry that already has established business model. There are paying customers! And you said you had models interested in your app! There can be more than one baker in town. Onlyfans takes 20%? Well we are only going to take 10%. They run skeleton support crew? Well, we will offer 24/7 support in multiple languages, etc. etc. Yea you won't print money like OnlyFans does, but if you give good enough offer to users (models) you might eat a piece of OnlyFans's pie, and the pie is BIG!

SMS schedule - this one actually sounds the most useful app out of all the ones you mentioned and to you it's the opposite LOL. I assume you are from Bosnia, based on what you wrote. Well, there is a startup from your neighbouring country called Infobip. What do they do? They are B2B company that help companies send bulk sms, scheduled SMS, etc etc. They are multi-billion company so clearly there is a market for SMS services. If you approach it from B2C way, you could have a similar service that you already described and you could expand it so much more. Example: send bulk sms to all your friends 1 hour before you are supposed to meet, as a reminder. Self-reminders, don't forget about X thing you have scheduled. I'm not super deep into SMS myself but I know that a lot of people prefer SMS over pretty much any other form of communication/apps so there is market out there 100% and it's quite unexplored in a world where every company is obsessed with capturing users into some kind of app.

Gay sex site - not really a tech problem, you need read some research on how modern relationships work and read couple of sociology books to tackle this problem. There is a whole science on this, not only on relationships/sex but also how people perceive their own actions and why sometimes we lie to ourselves to make ourselves feel better. Like saying, you are only dating app to get into a relationship but really you are just looking for sex. If you get a deep understanding on this you will also find ways on how to market your app to potential users and find where your competitors are lacking (Match Group).

JustBelievers - Not really sure what the obsession is with the OnlyFans (in the spirit of a pastor I will tell you that you maybe need some deep introspection on what attracts you so much to the OnlyFans and the sex industry). Drop the OnlyFans angle and you might have a good product, the priests and pastors are already figuring that they need to keep up with technology if they want to retain their followers. Have you talked to your local priest/pastor? Have you gave him an option to test it out? Because for example, our local priest is young and very much into social media. He posts daily on Facebook and Instagram. He probably makes more content on social media than person-to-person and do you know what? Religious people in our area actually love it.

Timechat - not really sure what the idea behind this is or what aspect of human psychology are you targeting with this, so I'm not really going to comment on it.

PhantomChat - good idea, but as you already figured out on your own, there is a ton of competition and the whole shebang with needing to get the ball rolling with users AND the whole idea on how to monetize besides selling your app to Facebook.

CryptoAdults - Great idea. You mentioned that crypto is complicated for people like it is some kind negative thing. I would argue that is a positive thing. You need to do things that others (companies) don't want to do. Everybody wants to make the next big crypto exchange/pyramid scheme/scam coin etc., but so few actually want to work on onboarding people into crypto system. Learn how to efficiently teach users to crypto to pay you and you have a good business. I'm not in any shape or form a crypto fan but sex industry is probably one of the better areas to use it as a payment form. You have business giants like MindGeek and OnlyFans getting railed from behind by credit card processors. Using crypto is one of the ways to bypass that problem.

There is limited amount of information on you, but i'm going to guess that you focus way to much on the tech aspect of business. You need to find how you will bring value, how will you present that value to your users and how are you going to make money of your users. The tech might or might not fit in somewhere along that.

Also being a small market (compared to global) can be advantageous I will give you one example from my country. A guy solo made a competitor to UberEats/DoorDash for the home market. One guy vs 10000 engineers and his app was more successful. He said he was profitable since day 1 of launch and later sold the company for good money to one of the big guys in the deliver sector. You know what he mentioned as the hardest part of the company? The programming? The tech stack? The hosting/microservice/cloud computing/(insert latest fad)? Nope. It was onboarding the restaurants onto the ap. Literally the hardest part was getting off his ass, go to a restaurant, talk to the owner person-to-person and teach/convince him to get the restaurant added to his app so people could order online.

The way I see it. You need to rethink how you approach your projects. Sorry for the long post and if the whole thing came off as too preachy.

Re: Ask HN: For 10 years I've been trying various projects, still clueless

#32

Post by superdario »

ipaddr wrote: post #28
superdario wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is some niche in my market that I'm trying to tackle and it's fun for me, I'm enjoying it. I will definitely try that one, but the problem is that mentality of people in my country is that they are so unwilling to pay for something or try, most people are like: "Do I need to pay for this? If yes, then I'm not going to".

Then stop trying to sell a product and give one away.

Actually I did that, I made an app pro-bono, people are using it, but I get nothing out of it

Re: Ask HN: For 10 years I've been trying various projects, still clueless

#33

Post by superdario »

FriedRice123 wrote: post #31
superdario wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blitzer - hangout application, you put a pin on the map that is active for up to 1 hour and then you can meet people for anything. The problem was the geolocation, because it is hyper-geolocated so I would need to get many people in one small place, like one city. Mimic - if you know what TikTok has duets now, Mimic was supposed to be that before TikTok existed where you imitate a person, mimicking person. The proble…

Blitzer - Immediate thought comes to me, how are you going to make money. For example, a normal meetup app (with a very original name - Meetup.com) has massive problems on monetization and is basically sold around like a hot potato that nobody wants to have because it's just bleeding money with no idea how to turn the ship around. Your idea is to niche down even more. Are you going to be able to convince a group of 1…

Great feedback :D it was really great to read this even though I dropped those projects but maybe I can start a new one as a combination of those

Re: Ask HN: For 10 years I've been trying various projects, still clueless

#34

Post by DougN7 »

It sounds like you believe in “overnight success” which only exists via lottery tickets (with similar odds).

I spent 10 years of weekend and evenings before my product sales could support me comfortably full time. That was a single project.

When you’re small/starting out, your only competitive advantage is persistence and patience.

If you somehow MUST be the next tech billionaire, move to Silicon Valley and try there. Or buy lottery tickets.

Re: Ask HN: For 10 years I've been trying various projects, still clueless

#35

Post by DougN7 »

superdario wrote: post #15
js4ever wrote: post #4

Focus on B2B products, if you are able to convince 5 customers to pay 5k per month or 50 customers to pay 500/month it's enough for you as a solo entrepreneur. B2C is another beast and indeed needs tons of capital.

Isn't B2B even harder when you have to convince businesses to use your product instead of existing one, so they have to completely move to your product. Then of course attend the meetings with them and so on. I'm not a salesman and for me it would be mission impossible. I don't feel comfortable in that role and I'm bad at it

Businesses, especially big businesses, are just people with a problem. The nice thing is they’re not spending their personal money so they’re more flexible. If you want to take over their billing system, that is a huge project and will take lots of meetings and time and you’ll fight huge companies. So focus on a small problem those people have - keeping track of one single resource, updating printer drivers, a desktop pop-up notification when the printer is low on ink, etc, etc. A $1 million market is too small for big businesses to chase but can make you quite comfortable.

Re: Ask HN: For 10 years I've been trying various projects, still clueless

#36

Post by tudorw »

superdario wrote: post #7
tudorw wrote: post #5

'I have the feeling like I'm trying impossible', with no resources, network or prior successes, you pretty much are, this is not to put you off, but to acknowledge that what you experience is common to a lot of people. Having great ideas, being able to code, understanding markets, understanding promotions and advertising, knowing how to craft and ship a product to your market is all well and good, however, look at th…

There is some niche in my market that I'm trying to tackle and it's fun for me, I'm enjoying it. I will definitely try that one, but the problem is that mentality of people in my country is that they are so unwilling to pay for something or try, most people are like: "Do I need to pay for this? If yes, then I'm not going to".

This is common here too, perhaps everyone, money is hard to come by :) However, this is not insurmountable, remember, you are looking for a small number of VERY satisfied customers, let's look at how the bigger companies address this inertia; A free trial period, with enough proprietary lock in aspects that's it's non-trivial to migrate. A free tier with tight limits that means you rapidly need to decide whether it's worth paying for, therefore your service ends up with committed customers and doesn't burn too much cash supporting unpaid use. Discounts for signing up, money back guarantees that are just enough hassle to enact that 80%+ won't file. If your market is real, as in you've got 10 people who agree that if your product delivers what you promise they would pay X for it then keep going, in my experience the step from zero to 10 gets a lot of the hard work done, you can exit that stage with a clear plan including expectations and commitments that if completed correctly give you the best shot at success.

Re: Ask HN: For 10 years I've been trying various projects, still clueless

#37

Post by DougN7 »

superdario wrote: post #7
tudorw wrote: post #5

'I have the feeling like I'm trying impossible', with no resources, network or prior successes, you pretty much are, this is not to put you off, but to acknowledge that what you experience is common to a lot of people. Having great ideas, being able to code, understanding markets, understanding promotions and advertising, knowing how to craft and ship a product to your market is all well and good, however, look at th…

There is some niche in my market that I'm trying to tackle and it's fun for me, I'm enjoying it. I will definitely try that one, but the problem is that mentality of people in my country is that they are so unwilling to pay for something or try, most people are like: "Do I need to pay for this? If yes, then I'm not going to".

That seems like a sign that the problem you’re solving isn’t painful enough for the client. They pay for all kinds of things that are important to them. So either what you’re providing isn’t important enough to them, or it could be important but they don’t see it (they don’t understand how much they could benefit). You HAVE to be good at communicating to do this (or have a partner that can).

Re: Ask HN: For 10 years I've been trying various projects, still clueless

#38

Post by meiraleal »

superdario wrote: post #11
namanyayg wrote: post #3

What all have you tried and how did each of them fail?

Blitzer - hangout application, you put a pin on the map that is active for up to 1 hour and then you can meet people for anything. The problem was the geolocation, because it is hyper-geolocated so I would need to get many people in one small place, like one city. Mimic - if you know what TikTok has duets now, Mimic was supposed to be that before TikTok existed where you imitate a person, mimicking person. The proble…

Your ideas look quite bad, honestly. I can't see one that would be motivating to work long term, they all seem very meh. Maybe your problem is the lack of a catchy idea?

Re: Ask HN: For 10 years I've been trying various projects, still clueless

#39

Post by meiraleal »

FriedRice123 wrote: post #31
superdario wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blitzer - hangout application, you put a pin on the map that is active for up to 1 hour and then you can meet people for anything. The problem was the geolocation, because it is hyper-geolocated so I would need to get many people in one small place, like one city. Mimic - if you know what TikTok has duets now, Mimic was supposed to be that before TikTok existed where you imitate a person, mimicking person. The proble…

Blitzer - Immediate thought comes to me, how are you going to make money. For example, a normal meetup app (with a very original name - Meetup.com) has massive problems on monetization and is basically sold around like a hot potato that nobody wants to have because it's just bleeding money with no idea how to turn the ship around. Your idea is to niche down even more. Are you going to be able to convince a group of 1…

I'm absolutely impressed by the quality of your answer and the effort put to reply every non-interesting idea of this list.
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