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HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

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Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#31

Post by snowmaker »

downandout wrote: post #19

Hi Jared and Trevor, I am working on a marketplace through which publishers and journalists can sell the ability to be quoted and linked to in an article to the highest bidder. A realtor, for example, might be willing to pay to be quoted and linked to in an article about how a city's real estate market has been accelerating. My question is how to get started with marketing it. While the growth hacking crowd would say…

One challenge with this business that you didn't mention is the difficulty getting to critical mass. Reporters, broadly, write such varied articles that if you have a handful of reporters and a handful of businesses on the platform, the chance that any of them actually match for a given article is miniscule.

To solve that, I would consider starting in a very small vertical. You could pick one small town and their local businesses (geographical vertical), or pick one industry and go deep into that industry. If you start in a small vertical, the marketing becomes easier because you have a very targeted pitch that doesn't feel spammy.

About your original question on marketing, though, there is no alternative to talking to users. Before you start pitching people, though, you could go talk to journalists and ask them for feedback on the idea. You can ask them if they would value this service, and what else they wish someone would build. Rather than just selling them, you should try to build a relationship so you can get feedback from them over time.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#32

Post by huac »

srikieonline wrote: post #12

Hi Jared & Trevor, Thank you for giving us this opportunity to discuss our ideas with you. I am the founder of http://www.pnyxter.com - a video (only) based debate and discussion app. My question is about product-market fit. A user can create topic and upload a video selfie talking on the topic or respond to other topics via video selfie. The app does not have provision of text comments at all - only video responses.…

Your product makes me think immediately towards high school/college debate (https://youtu.be/HGyFBRu5F8o?t=1461). Policy debate in particular has the added benefit of being untranscrible (listen for a couple minutes).

Couple ideas: (1) Analysis tool like Krossover, by cutting out prep time from videos like the above, segmenting by speech, and allowing people to annotate, search by annotation, etc. (2) a response platform for people to practice debates outside of tournaments. Right now, if you want to practice, you either debate with a teammember, or email speech docs to others, which doesn't really capture the energy or spirit of a debate. I could see this being useful esp for debaters at small schools without large teams, or rural areas without nearby partner schools, etc...

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#33

Post by wfn »

cddotdotslash wrote: post #13

Hi, thank you both for doing this. I've been working on a project on and off for about two years now which I finally launched as a beta last year. It's called CloudSploit ( https://cloudsploit.com ) and is a service designed to allow users to continuously scan their AWS accounts for vulnerabilities (account-level risks that could lead to a compromise). AWS has some security products, and their are certainly competito…

Nice product! OT: do you know of any other automated security scanning services (hosted/SaaS)? Have you considered expanding beyond AWS (though AWS customers are probably your target audience and entire focus)?

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#34

Post by gnat »

ForrestN wrote: post #7

I founded a small nonprofit (~$250k budget this year for underpaid staff of me+3 art types) that serves an annual audience of 1 million unique visitors for the last few years with hi-res documentation of contemporary art; we are nearly ubiquitous within our field, academics have hailed our project as transformative, but we suck at fundraising and are tiny. Problem: in the midst of running everything, I do all the cod…

(This is not one of the YC chaps) 1) Tell us the site, 2) Ask who makes money when your audience grows, 3) Ask who wants access to your audience, 4) Realise that "non-profit" only describes who has a claim on profits, not whether they must exist. Your org must still have income >= expenses

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#35

Post by tlb »

plehoux wrote: post #16

Hi Jared and Trevor, I'm a co-founder at https://www.missiveapp.com , a collaborative email client (Slack meets Gmail). We've launched our open beta last January and are actively recruiting beta users. We're a fully bootstrapped team of 4 working from Quebec city, Canada. We were able to bootstrap Missive with the $ we rake in from another project we launched three years ago called ConferenceBadge.com [1]. My questio…

First some product advice: You're trying to replace various more specialized tools with a general purpose tool. For example, I use Slack, Front, and Lever in addition to gmail, for internal, external, and recruiting-related conversations respectively. You should explain clearly how your one tool will be better than a combination of the many special-purpose tools.

If you can support yourselves with only 15% time on the old project, that's pretty good. You can probably get Missive off the ground with 85%. Once it's off the ground, it should be easy to get investment to focus on it full-time.

I like to think that investors aren't just a time sink, but can give useful advice about the parts of the business that are common to the other businesses they work with, like customer acquisition, hiring, and managing teams.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#36

Post by sbashyal »

Hi Trevor and Jared, thanks for doing this.

We have been working on http://growthzilla.com - a data driven growth solution for salons for a little more than a year now. We have paying customers since launch and have zero cancellations. Our customers love the product for 3 reasons (1) ease of use (2) effectiveness in driving growth and (3) customer service

The problem: we are growing slower than we would want. Is there anything you'd like to suggest?

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#37

Post by srikieonline »

huac wrote: post #32
srikieonline wrote: post #12

Hi Jared & Trevor, Thank you for giving us this opportunity to discuss our ideas with you. I am the founder of http://www.pnyxter.com - a video (only) based debate and discussion app. My question is about product-market fit. A user can create topic and upload a video selfie talking on the topic or respond to other topics via video selfie. The app does not have provision of text comments at all - only video responses.…

Your product makes me think immediately towards high school/college debate ( https://youtu.be/HGyFBRu5F8o?t=1461 ). Policy debate in particular has the added benefit of being untranscrible (listen for a couple minutes). Couple ideas: (1) Analysis tool like Krossover, by cutting out prep time from videos like the above, segmenting by speech, and allowing people to annotate, search by annotation, etc. (2) a response pl…

Thank you for your advice! I've started reaching out to debate clubs in schools and colleges already on FB. Will keep working towards that. However, I have still not given up on general user segment.

One advantage of video is (hopefully) reduce abuse. Twitter is plagued with the problem of anonymous abuse. However, its not easy to show your face in video and abuse!

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#38

Post by sharemywin »

yurivish wrote: post #5

Hi Trevor and Jared, http://weavesilk.com is a side project of mine for many years. I put out a brand new version of the iOS app this month and am thinking about developing it further but find it very hard to decide what direction to go. The website is popular, and people love Silk, but for different reasons: some find it relaxing and meditative, others like that it closes the gap between their artistic ability and t…

dumb question but can you do different colors besides blue and white?

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#39

Post by alantrrs »

Hi! I'm building a platform for scientists to run and share their experiments (anything computable) including their whole research environment. I want to make scientific research easily discoverable and replicable.

First, what are your thoughts on this market?

Also, some advice: I'm currently building the prototype based on my own experience as I'm my own user. That's the only thing I've been focusing on, I haven't looked for external feedback yet and haven't spent much time looking for people to join me. I figured both of those things will be much easier once I have the prototype ready. Am I on the right track or should I be doing everything at once?

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#40

Post by zodiac »

Hi Jared and Trevor,

I'm building games and tools for language learning. While talking to users, I asked them what language learning tools they wished existed when they were studying in the past. A lot of them talked about a tool that lets them talk to native speakers of their target language online.

I know I should build something users want, but there are plenty of tools that let you do this (including a YC company, cambly) and I don't want to build another one. So what do I do with their answer to my question?

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