Hey, I want to present http://grobyk.com , a platform that wants to help teams to grow by engaging the team's members to find/create/share useful articles. In this way they will build a knowledge base and grow as a team. We want some feedback regarding the idea and how we can attract customers.
Is there a question here?
HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell
111–120 of 152 posts
Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
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) Cl…
Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell
#113I'm in the idea stages of creating a website, and I have no previous experience with startups or other business; I'm only a senior in high school. The idea is that there are people who would like to own the same game on multiple platforms, and so the website would offer a discount on a game that you already own, for another platform. So, for example, if you have the Xbox One version of Rocket League, the website would offer a discount on the Steam version.
My question is: how should I gauge interest in such an idea? I don't have any real budget to speak of, and I don't know where I should go looking for people to ask.
Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#115I've developed a custom toolchain while writing an electronic book[0]. The toolchain automates the conversion of markdown and media into a scrollable "app-novel". Initially I'd hoped to earn income from the book itself, but the naiveness of that idea is quickly becoming apparent.
As a pivot, I am developing a public interface for the toolchain, with the idea of permitting others to write books in the same style. Unfortunately it is not ready to be demonstrated. Nonetheless, this feels like a untapped industry to me, and I wonder what your opinions or suggestions might be.
Thank you.
[0]https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ca.goeiebook.m...
Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell
#116Hey Jared and Trevor, BugReplay ( http://www.bugreplay.com ) is a bug reporting tool in the form of a browser extension that captures a screencast of the user’s actions synced with network traffic, javascript errors and other browser data. What's the best way to grow your early user base? Ideally we'd like people who are going to use BugReplay at their jobs and open source endeavors, but we want to keep it relatively…
Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell
#117Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
It's worth a try. But video is a different medium from live debates, so it could be that debate club style doesn't work in video. You might get better results from YouTube personalities.
Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell
#119Hi 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…
All this is assuming minimal outside funding.(as a solo founder I doubt I can get funding)
I guess my plan is to play $50-$100 million game of "moneyball." Lawn care was the lowest hanging fruit to get 10k-50k/mo fees with in a year or two. Next was probably to try and go after cleaning and maybe even do a little cross selling. I'm also looking at launching www.bid2flyer.com which will help with a channel to feed businesses looking for marketing. The code is about the same for each of these and the marketing channel is what I have experience in. Obviously not a traditional way to do things.
Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 be…
If you knew you had several customers lined up, you'd (1) have more confidence going down that route and (2) be more confident that you were designing the product right.