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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

#101

Post by snowmaker »

mariobyn wrote: post #59
snowmaker wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a question here?

Sorry, let me try one. Do you think is still a good market to introduce another tool for teams? Our approach is a little bit different, i think, we saw a lack of distributing useful content between team members.

I think the market of "tools for teams" is virtually limitless. The question you should be asking is whether people want your tool in particular.

I spent some time on your site and it took me a long time to understand what your tool does. You need to make it a lot clearer. Here's a good exercise for this. 1) Find someone you haven't told your idea to 2) Show them your home page. Let them read it for 30 seconds. 3) Close your laptop. Then, have them explain what Grobyk is in their own words.

If they can't do that, you need to improve your home page.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#102

Post by justinlaing »

yurivish wrote: post #61
snowmaker wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Here's an idea: Pair it with something like brain.fm and market it as a relaxation/meditation technique.

Also +1 for the gallery idea, and not worrying about animations, just a gallery with voting and show off the ones that get the most votes.

Like: http://www.colourlovers.com/palettes

Another idea from that: take the palettes from colourlovers and add those as something people can choose from to do the drawings with.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#103

Post by tlb »

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.…

You definitely need to seed it with more content. Currently I see just 2 videos, both of them old, neither of which are topics that interest me.

One approach would be to set a topic every day, and persuade 3-4 of your friends to record something on the topic. Once you get a debate going, more people will join in.

You're competing with posting vlogs on Youtube. So you need to figure out what will make people much happier posting on your site, even though the audience is smaller at first.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#104

Post by dcole2929 »

tlb wrote: post #27
dcole2929 wrote: post #18

Hey Jared & Trevor I'm working on a few different projects all of which I think could become viable companies but having a hard time deciding which to focus on. I've already seen interest from relevant parties in each of the separate projects. I think the hardest one but also the one with the most growth potential would be a project I'm working on to provide management tools (similar to the stuff a ceo might use) to…

College art students vs gov’t officials. It’s hard to think of two more different kinds of customers. Selling to gov’t is hard, because they have a slow and heavyweight purchasing process. Selling to colleges is hard for the same reasons, and also they have small budgets. Selling management tools is very hard, because you have to get people to change the way they work. It’s very very hard to get senior officials to c…

These are very good points and kind of why I'm debating which way to go. I have a few ways to pivot out of the college market even if I start there so I may explore that some more. As far as management tools go, I'd largely be competing with Excel spreadsheets, and meetings. Anyway thanks, I appreciate the insights.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#105

Post by srikieonline »

tlb wrote: post #103
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.…

You definitely need to seed it with more content. Currently I see just 2 videos, both of them old, neither of which are topics that interest me. One approach would be to set a topic every day, and persuade 3-4 of your friends to record something on the topic. Once you get a debate going, more people will join in. You're competing with posting vlogs on Youtube. So you need to figure out what will make people much happ…

Thank you!! Would approaching debate clubs help?

Also, would you or Jared like to speak on some topic that interests you ?

I've also given an option of creating a private topic - which only selected invitees can view and participate - so that one can discuss and debate with only close friends/co-workers. Could this be a feature appealing for video bloggers who are concerned of privacy too?

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#106

Post by masudhossain »

Hey, Trevor and Jared. Thanks a lot for doing this!

WHAT WE DO: www.wiredhere.com

We integrate every social activity (university created or student created) happening within an university into a mobile app. The students can attend and provide feedback through the app; we than take the analytics that's created and provide it to universities so they can assess and compare themselves to other universities.

QUESTION:

Do you think it's more optimal approach this as a SAAS for the university since we provide them a brand new web platform to make event creation easier and so they can reach students in a faster way? OR be a non-saas and introduce this to the students first and let the universities catch on afterwards, and than work with the university so they can use our web platform and mobile app?

Also, what is your opinion on our concept?

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#107

Post by RyM21 »

Hi Trevor and Jared,

WordBrewery (http://wordbrewery.com) teaches languages by scraping real sentences from news sites around world, then processing each sentence with an algorithm that estimates (on the basis of word frequency and other variables) how likely the sentence is to be useful to learners at different levels.

We are now a member of 1776 and participating in Microsoft BizSpark, so we are on the right track. But I am new to the startup world, and I am funding the website entirely by myself at this point using money from my day-job paycheck. What is the best way to pursue seed funding at this early stage while we are developing core features? Do I need to organize it as an LLC or corporation to get funding?

Thank you, Ryan

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#108

Post by snowmaker »

thekonqueror wrote: post #52

Hi Jared and Trevor, http://nestify.io founder here. We're improving PHP CMS hosting (WordPress, Drupal) with better scaling, on-page optimizations, better security. We have paying customers and ~100 die-hard users that will be really sad / lose revenues if we shut down. Should we focus on building our brand while scaling or switch to whitelabel and API services and partner with hosting providers?

I remember reading your YC app :).

About your question on whitelabeling: I wouldn't be too dogmatic about this either way. It's easy to make it a question about your company's mission, but it's more of an ROI decision. If you're seeing strong demand from companies who will pay you well for a white-label version, and your software is written in a way that makes it easy to build one, you should do that. Otherwise, it may just be a distraction.

The other thing that jumps out to me about your business is that the economics don't seem to match with the usage. You're serving a lot of traffic but not making as much revenue as I would expect, especially considering that you have "die-hard users" that love the service. Perhaps you can find a way to get them to pay more money, or find other customers that can afford to pay more?

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#109

Post by FraserGreenlee »

snowmaker wrote: post #98
FraserGreenlee wrote: post #21

Hi Trevor and Jared, I'm the founder of WebArcs ( http://webarcs.com ) an RSS aggregate for discovering and subscribing to websites. I'm just starting out and I want to see this be the way people surf the web in the future. I was wondering which demographics I ought to target too too help build a strong user base?

Thinking of demographics is kind of a big company way of looking at things; you're not ready for that. For now you should focus on finding any users that want to use it. The way to do that is to try to distill the value proposition. Why would people use WebArcs instead of going to an aggregator (Reddit, HN), another news reader (Pulse, flipboard), or content sites directly? Then, show it some people and get some feed…

Thank you that really helps =D

I'll try and find the value proposition and see if I can get that one user.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#110

Post by lpaone »

snowmaker wrote: post #91
lpaone wrote: post #15

Hi Jared and Trevor, http://www.stroomnews.com is a bootstrapped breaking news and events focused sharing platform, that allows live-streaming and pre-captured video and image sharing through our mobile app and website. We are also working on an enterprise solution for the news industry that ties into our platform. Our B2C app was released this past Fall, but has shown little traction and we have had discussions with…

What would the enterprise solution do? How long would it take to build the product to the part where it can generate revenue? For the video compression technology, it's hard to say without knowing more. What does it do, and who would want it? As cool as video compression tech is, trying to raise money for pure technology, without demonstrating market demand, is almost impossible. So if you go down the video compressi…

Thanks for the advice.

The enterprise product provides a dashboard that allows a news room to manage past and present media content created through our platform. It allows live modification of stream quality (full bit stream quality control) and description, remote control of the camera, live communication with the reporter/camera person, and some other features we are working on that bring us closer to parity and beyond with other companies in this field. A huge benefit over our competitors is our significantly lower cost and no need to carry around expensive specialized hardware, as we do not require it.

We are probably 2-3 months away from having a revenue generating product. Although we are in conversations with one major news organization, we have found it very difficult getting in the door with other companies.

As for the compression tech, it provides an opportunity to delivery adaptive bit rate video in a single stream. It would significantly decrease bandwidth, storage and compression costs. Anyone who has large libraries of variable bitrate video and is streaming it (YouTube, Netflix, etc.) would be very interested in this.

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