Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 152 posts

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#81

Post by tlb »

braderhart wrote: post #10

Hello and thank you for taking the time to help other entrepreneurs. I am working on creating a new cross-platform premier Linux distribution that uses containers as the core init process. The goal is automatic cross-compilation between multiple targets and using the built-in kernel sandboxing for applications instead of what XDG App and others are trying to do. I'd like to also target a new window manager built on W…

That sounds like a lot of stuff to take on for a first product. Because existing players already have long feature lists, you can't compete at first by having a longer list. It'd be better to start with one single, simple, useful thing and expand from there.

Cross-platform is interesting. Are there large installations that need to migrate between Intel and ARM boxes seamlessly? That's the sort of feature that might make someone switch distros.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#82

Post by tedmiston »

chejazi wrote: post #68
tedmiston wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is one of the biggest problems for Genius.

Ex. http://genius.it/www.nytimes.com breaks vs. http://genius.it/www.wikipedia.org works fine.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#83

Post by wootcamp »

tlb wrote: post #69
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.

Hi Trevor, thanks for the reply.

We had that thought as well but we're from Southeast Asia with most of our traffic originating from here. Only some of the products related to our site actually ship here from Amazon and incurs international shipping costs so it might hinder orders. We'll still give it a shot since it can give us an idea of how the conversions do.

Would you happen to have any further insights on if affiliate marketing really works especially when it comes to visual content?

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#84

Post by tedmiston »

My app is a way for sneakerheads to follow, discover, and ultimately purchase new sneakers online from first announcement until they're available for purchase with minimal interaction. Today everyone does this by following blogs that make hundreds of posts per week with tons of repetition and very low signal to noise.

I've built a prototype for myself, but would like to now connect with the right industry people to help guide the product and be trusted early users. In another reply you mentioned finding users to serve as product advisors similarly (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11183572) . I'm having a hard time discovering who the "right" people are and reaching them in a compelling way. If I were further along [read: post private beta] I would reach out to someone like Phin Barnes @ First Round, but I feel at this stage it's too early for him to really give interest.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#85

Post by [deleted] »

snowmaker wrote: post #80
feedbackhotline wrote: post #23

Jared and Trevor, Feedback Hotline (feedbackhotline.com) is the easiest way for businesses to collect feedback. We provide the hotline for free. We intend to make money through data. We think we need to prove three things to succeed: 1. Businesses/organizations will join 2. People will send a lot of feedback 3. We can monetize this feedback We are currently optimizing for 1, focusing on small businesses. We believe f…

That's right. Your customers are the businesses who will adopt this. The people who send feedback are also important, but they're not your direct customers, and you have to start with businesses before you get them. I see some businesses on your site. Are these all actual customers? How are they using it, and what do they think of it so far?

[deleted]

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#86

Post by workerdee »

snowmaker wrote: post #79
workerdee wrote: post #22

Hello, I have a little Etsy shop and was wondering how to get technical people’s attention. How do you find gifts for female family and friends (when they don’t already have something in mind)? As for the shop itself, the photographs need improvement – I set up a small lighted space on my kitchen counter and am working on this. Shop: http://zebbles.etsy.com

I never know what to get female family and friends! Particularly when it comes to things like jewelry, and I'm pretty sure many guys have the same problem. Maybe you could start a blog offering gift advice for clueless techies, or even become a gift concierge, offering to help individuals find the perfect gift for a small fee.

Thanks! The blog and gift concierge suggestions are interesting. Most of the technical people I know don't like spending their time looking into sparkly, girly things.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#87

Post by tlb »

sharemywin wrote: post #4

Hi Jared & Trevor, Do you think that marketplaces for services is too mature of a market? I'm working on a site called bid2mow.com to help new lawn care companies find work. It seems like everyone is focused on come to my app/website and I'll get you a price versus an ebay model. I know task rabbit had that model and went away from it. Ebay may not be amazon but it's no business to sneeze at either.

I don't think there's a general answer: different services are very different. The lawn industry is very different from other home services, and we've seen different things work in those two businesses.

Usually, marketplaces get started around the margins. Today, eBay sells everything but at first it was obscure collectibles. For lawn care, weather and seasonality drive the short-term market dynamics. So when there's rain or drought, the supply-demand curve shifts rapidly and that's when lawn care providers might look for work to fill up their schedules. You should look into how your marketplace might work on different kinds of days, to see if will be a useful part of the ecosystem.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#88

Post by snowmaker »

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…

Why do people use this versus bit.ly or a non-paid link shortener? Are they actually interested in sharing the interstitial page's content, or is this primarily a way to make money?

What's the nature of the publisher deal you are thinking about? Generally, you should start talking to publishers when you can pay them a meaningful amount of revenue. How much is meaningful? Depends on the publisher. For a small blog, it might be a hundred dollars. For the New York Times, it's probably a million dollars.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#89

Post by snowmaker »

[deleted] wrote: post #85
snowmaker wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's right. Your customers are the businesses who will adopt this. The people who send feedback are also important, but they're not your direct customers, and you have to start with businesses before you get them. I see some businesses on your site. Are these all actual customers? How are they using it, and what do they think of it so far?

[deleted]

That's great. There was a YC company a few years ago called Talkbin which did something similar. They got acquired by Google.

If the businesses really like it, can they refer you to other businesses? Local business owners tend to know each other.

How exactly do you plan to make money from the data? Generally for this business I would think you would simply charge the businesses who are using it a small fee.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#90

Post by tlb »

zeeshanm wrote: post #3

I am founder and CEO of Exivest [ http://exivest.com/ ]. We help startup employees value their equity, help match them with direct buyers or arrange synthetic liquidity. We've talked to many startup employees and they all have given positive feedback. One concern that comes up is that startups are not OK with changing the cap table for tiny transactions. In that case, we have plans to offer synthetic liquidity soluti…

I think the key to this business is getting both employees and founders/board/investors to like you. In practice, the board will prefer some secondary markets and that will drive most of your business. Boards care about the stock not getting into the wrong hands, such as activist investors or hostile acquirers. So being able to offer the board "we'll give employees liquidity, hold your stock without voting it, and not sell till N months after the IPO" would make the difference.
Post reply on HN