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HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

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Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#191

Post by danieltillett »

spike021 wrote: post #184
danieltillett wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

James I think you are focusing on the wrong market. Your potential paying customers are not students, but their parents who have the money. One idea might be to allow parents to track what their little darlings are doing on the site. Another is to provide regular feedback (email, newsletter) to the parents about how their children are progressing.

Not sure how things are where OP is located, but some parents may not be able to afford something like this depending on their income. If this works well integrated with school activity maybe it could be payable through that?

The OP is in Australia like me and while there are lot of parents that can’t afford to pay, there are lots of that could. The key here is to build your business around the customers that can pay, not those that happen to use it.

One other idea might to try and partner with companies that are trying to lock in young people. The obvious one is banks which are always trying to target this age demographics. You could offer, for example, premium notes to those students that had an account with the sponsoring bank.

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#192

Post by samstave »

dvt wrote: post #172
akharris wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Got it. You might need to think about the size of the market that you're targeting. When I think about what makes a company or product interesting as a startup, I try to think about markets that will expand over time because of what the company does - and not what the market looks like today. That means that a market doesn't have to be large now, but it has to have the possibility of growing to be something significa…

I think so. With amazon buying Twitch for 1B a few years ago, I think the competitive gaming industry (which Twitch primarily caters to) is well into it's rising phase. A major gaming peripheral company reached out to me about Game:ref (they wanted to make sure the anti-cheat hardware is compatible with their mice) and a major game developer also reached out (asking about how the hardware would theoretically integrat…

Totally. Come up wit hthe marketing of "Powered by Game:Ref! -- Know your wins are legit!" type of thing to get them to sell and thereby secure more sponsors for the events as they know they wont be wasting money to cheating

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#193

Post by samstave »

kartikkumar wrote: post #90

Hi Michael, Aaron, I'm co-founder of satsearch ( https://satsearch.co ): B2B search for the space industry. Searching for parts to design a satellite is a real pain, especially with the rapid growth of the small-satellite sector. I've worked on designs for a few satellites and spent countless hours trying to Google specs: time that doesn't get spent on engineering. So to solve this problem, we're building parameteric…

Oktopart for space!

Sounds pretty cool.

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#194

Post by kartikkumar »

samstave wrote: post #193
kartikkumar wrote: post #90

Hi Michael, Aaron, I'm co-founder of satsearch ( https://satsearch.co ): B2B search for the space industry. Searching for parts to design a satellite is a real pain, especially with the rapid growth of the small-satellite sector. I've worked on designs for a few satellites and spent countless hours trying to Google specs: time that doesn't get spent on engineering. So to solve this problem, we're building parameteric…

Oktopart for space! Sounds pretty cool.

Exactly :) Well not entirely exactly, since it turns out that we're quite different because we're in a low-volume, high-value market. So deals are not really done (yet) by purchasing straight off an e-commerce site.

What I'd love to do is make systems engineering, procurement and market analysis in the small-satellite sector a lot more transparent.

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#195

Post by samstave »

kartikkumar wrote: post #194
samstave wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oktopart for space! Sounds pretty cool.

Exactly :) Well not entirely exactly, since it turns out that we're quite different because we're in a low-volume, high-value market. So deals are not really done (yet) by purchasing straight off an e-commerce site. What I'd love to do is make systems engineering, procurement and market analysis in the small-satellite sector a lot more transparent.

Dont forget to leverage what they released then... including:

http://apievangelist.com/2014/08/25/ocotoparts-open-source-g...

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#196

Post by fananta »

tkmcc wrote: post #183
fananta wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely, but would charging them for a (technically) trivial feature be self-limiting to our growth? Another question: Would be worthwhile to apply to YC with a product of this nature? This was super helpful. Thank you for taking the time Michael.

Addressing your first point, Heroku charges $20/mo for HTTPS support and plenty of people pay for it: https://elements.heroku.com/addons/ssl

You're right, that's a good example. Thanks!

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#197

Post by zbruhnke »

samstave wrote: post #189
karanbhangui wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We tried this at Daltic and I know Standard Treasury (YC) tried this as well. Buying a small bank with a healthy federal charter is definitely the way to go over trying to start a new charter (FDIC hasn't given out a new charter in years and even if they do, de novo status is very cumbersome). The real challenge is getting around the Bank Holding Company Act with respect to raising capital. Basically, if any entity h…

What about the following scenario: They buy this chartered bank. They make a mechanism for certain types of users to create accounts -- lets say only those with a valid HN account with a karma and age of over X + Y I create the account and get the account and routing number I then use this to direct deposit some portion of my pay into this account. I have no access to the account aside through their meta app. I give…

unfortunately there are regs about chartered banks doing non-banking activities ... we'll talk more over the weekend, but I can give you way more details

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#198

Post by standan »

Hi Michael and Aaron,

I am cofounder of AllThingsMine.com We have built the App and Site for a single place where you can store all the information about the things that you own/wish to own. It is a single point of access to specifications/warranties/manuals/recalls/reviews/videos of a product. You can also connect to friends to discuss about the products. We have tried to make it as easy as possible to add your product and are also working to make it easy to add from email/online receipts. We bring in news feed from various sources pertaining to products that you have in your lists. Curated list of popular and top products in different categories

We welcome feedback as to what other things users would like to see to be able to maintain their items with minimal effort. Our biggest hurdle is how do we increase adoption.

Thank you

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#199

Post by wjg »

samstave wrote: post #190
wjg wrote: post #5

Hi Michael and Aaron, I built Supertask ( http://supertask.co/ ) to make web automation easier and more accessible. Supertask allows users to write shareable, composable automations that make testing webapps and repeating complicated workflows a breeze. Automation scripts are written in a new intuitive language called Flytrap, and are interpreted by a library called Flytrap.js ( https://docs.flytrap.io/ ). Each autom…

Been looking for something like this! Does it basically replace the need for Selenium. Let me share this with my CI eng from my last co who was using a lot of selenium to test the webapp for QA. Thanks!

Thanks! That's exactly what I'm shooting for. It is meant to be a substitute for Selenium while making it easier to create and share them! I appreciate the reply and would love to hear your coworkers's feedback, good or bad!

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#200

Post by wjg »

sharemywin wrote: post #170
wjg wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just one: me. I've been in stealth mode and I basically "finished" building the website within the last week and have done no advertising (in fact this is the first time I've talked about it online). That leads to the obvious question of how to acquire more customers for a Saas product (which ties to my accelerator question). I'm hoping to gain some insight on the product's broad viability from this post and maybe a…

for early users you might want to see if people are searching for something your service offers. post an ad and get some users. probably expensive but I would count that as something might not scale just to get initial users.

Yep, a good idea and I'm currently looking at ad rates for the product. Just initial users who can give me some product feedback is my main goal for now. Thanks!
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