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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

#61

Post by yurivish »

snowmaker wrote: post #24
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…

I actually really think you have something here. I spent some time playing with it, and it's quite addictive. What I like best is that it allows someone with zero artistic ability (like me) to make a piece of artwork that they'd be proud of. That's quite a trick. What are some things you've thought about building on top of it? What have your users been asking for?

Thanks, Jared!

Some of the things I've thought about:

- Expanding the expressive range. The new app has a "silk eraser" and I have ideas for at least one new type of brush.

- Continuous undo (as if it's a movie), or at least more undo levels.

- Making a better Alchemy: http://al.chemy.org/

- Unifying the experience of the website (2013; JS/Canvas) and the new app (Swift/Metal)

- The website lets you share replays of your drawings that play back on the site. What's the best way to do something similar with the app?

- A gallery would be great but requires figuring out the previous two points to some extent. There's a lot of potential but it feels like a lot to navigate through.

Long-term I'd love Silk to be a Bret Victor-inspired environment for visually exploring computation: Compute with color and time, explore the system, make your own brushes. You can think of a brush as a function from input history to pixels on the canvas. I think there's a lot of potential here.

Some of the common things people ask for:

- More colors. The new app has more palettes, which is a start.

- More undo levels.

- High-resolution export. This will be coming to the app, potentially inside a bundle of "pro" features.

- Plugins for Photoshop and other professional design tools.

- Prints. I've experimented with prints before but found that the art doesn't come out nearly as well in print. My bar for quality here is this piece made by a talented designer friend (Anand Sharma) many years ago: http://bit.ly/1TDS2sz. Maybe the right answer here is something more ephemeral like greeting cards.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#62

Post by wootcamp »

Hi Jared and Trevor,

I'm cofounder of a start up within the beauty space. We have small but active group of users that love creating and consuming a unique type of content only available on our platform. The revenue stream is to eventually sell tangible products so we would like to make use of all this content to convert purchases.

Is there a way we can test out how well the conversion rate could work without shipping tangible products? We don't yet have capital to stockpile.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#63

Post by tedmiston »

chejazi wrote: post #49

Hi YC partners, We're a link shortener called Credhot and our business model is to syndicate (potentially sponsored) content on an interstitial page. We also rev-share with our users based on the number of visits. The biggest hurdle to this strategy has been building an interstitial people want to share with their friends. Here is an example of our latest attempt at that, leading to "coinmarketcap.com": https://crd.h…

I've seen another related type of service called Linkis (http://linkis.com/). I don't interact with it much myself because usually I'm just interested in getting to the content quickly without all the cruft. Perhaps that's something that can help guide your thinking.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#64

Post by tlb »

boxerab wrote: post #42

Hi Jared and Trevor, I have developed a high-speed image encoder that runs on off-the-shelf graphics cards: http://grokimagecompression.github.io/GrokImage/ I am working on my marketing strategy: need to decide whether to focus on selling to end-users, or licensing the software to other businesses. Second option requires more $$, and a sales team, but seems to have more potential for growing the business. Any advice…

For most image compression tasks, speed isn't the metric that users care about. Since compressing images parallelizes very well, they care about total system cost for a given throughput. So your value proposition is more like "Use 1 GPU box running our code instead of 10 CPU boxes".

Saving 9 boxes isn't worth an engineer spending much time hacking. You should target people with 1000 CPU boxes to switch to 100 GPU boxes (or whatever the ratio is.) Are enough customers like this to justify building a business around it?

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#65

Post by [deleted] »

snowmaker wrote: post #60
alantrrs wrote: post #39

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 l…

I think that's a great market. The lack of reproducibility in scientific experiments is an elephant-in-the-room problem. I feel like I read a new story about it every week. Even though you are your own target user, it's dangerous to build a full prototype without talking to actual users. It's likely that you will find that what you thought people wanted does not match 100% with what they actually want. Do you have mo…

[deleted]

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#66

Post by rafBM »

tlb wrote: post #35
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 th…

Co-founder here, we indeed thought of crafting our tagline in such a way:

“With all these carefully thought collaborative features baked within an email client, Missive might very well replace your help desk, CRM, and messaging app.”

We do think there is a cost to always switch between multiple apps, but as new kids in a crowd full of big players, we’ve been wondering whether we should expect / try to catch users by “playing well with others” or be bolder and encourage them to ditch other apps?

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#67

Post by tlb »

edibleEnergy wrote: post #54
tlb wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of tool has the classic agent problem. There are two kinds of users: people filing bug reports and people receiving bug reports. The people receiving bug reports get the benefits, but the people filing the bug reports decide which tool to use and have to install something to use yours. My guess is that the developers will have to encourage or require bug reporters to use it. Their site will have to say “Her…

The kind of user you’re describing isn’t our focus right now and I agree it would be hard to get a user of a website such as Facebook or Twitter to go through all those steps. We think potential users can be broken down into different groups. The first group would be people within the same organization (testers, design, other devs, marketing, support, etc). In that scenario, the company would subscribe to our service…

It'd be worth trying to sell to website testing/QA as a service companies, like https://www.usertesting.com/. If they saw value in offering your better bug reports to their customers, it'd get you a lot of business fast.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#68

Post by chejazi »

tedmiston wrote: post #63
chejazi wrote: post #49

Hi YC partners, We're a link shortener called Credhot and our business model is to syndicate (potentially sponsored) content on an interstitial page. We also rev-share with our users based on the number of visits. The biggest hurdle to this strategy has been building an interstitial people want to share with their friends. Here is an example of our latest attempt at that, leading to "coinmarketcap.com": https://crd.h…

I've seen another related type of service called Linkis ( http://linkis.com/ ). I don't interact with it much myself because usually I'm just interested in getting to the content quickly without all the cruft. Perhaps that's something that can help guide your thinking.

Thanks for the suggestion. We considered customizing the destination page, but we decided against it due to a big looming threat: an increasing number of sites can't be embedded. From a technical perspective, a site can block embedding by setting one HTTP response header (X-FRAME-OPTIONS) which is very easy to do.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#69

Post by tlb »

wootcamp wrote: post #62

Hi Jared and Trevor, I'm cofounder of a start up within the beauty space. We have small but active group of users that love creating and consuming a unique type of content only available on our platform. The revenue stream is to eventually sell tangible products so we would like to make use of all this content to convert purchases. Is there a way we can test out how well the conversion rate could work without shippin…

Why not start with affiliate links to Amazon? It's minimal effort on your part, and you can see what your users are interesting in purchasing.

Even when you eventually have your own inventory, it's worth throwing in affiliate links in case you discover that people watching your beauty content actually buy something else more often than your own products.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#70

Post by snowmaker »

sbashyal wrote: post #55
snowmaker wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you growing right now? Specifically, how do users find out about Growthzilla? How many users do you have and how many did you add last month?

We started with selling to people in our network. Now we have some online ad campaigns, referral and just went to a trade show. We currently have 50 customers. Added 10 last month.

If you're growing 25% / month, you're not doing too badly.

How well are online ads and referral working? How does the referral program work?

It sounds like there are a bunch of channels you haven't tried yet. Here are a few ideas.

Standard channels: 1) Sales. Yes, you call up the all the salons and ask them if they need Growthzilla. This is still the way most things are sold to local businesses like salons. You can try email, phone, even in person.

2) Content marketing. My guess is that there are a lot of salons, and not a whole lot people writing about how to run them. Maybe you can become the go-to place not just for software, but for the knowledge salon owners need to run their business well.

3) Improve your website. It looks like there's no way to just try the software, and there isn't much info about it on the site. Having something other than "request demo" may improve conversions.

Wackier ideas: 1) There are lots of software options for salons that do something similar. It's not clear from your site what makes you unique. What is it? If there's nothing truly special, maybe you need to change the product.

2) Channel partnerships. Who are the big companies selling products to hair salons? Could you get them to resell Growthzilla and split the revenue?

3) Affiliate sales. Are there affiliate sales people who sell other products to salons (scissors, hair product, etc)? If so, can you have them sell Growthzilla too?

4) Organize free conferences / meetups for salon owners to learn about how they can tech-enable their business.

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