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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

#121

Post by tlb »

aarzee wrote: post #113

Hi Trevor and Jared, I'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 Lea…

Talk to your friends. The advantage you, as a young person, have over game studios with millions of dollars and hundreds of employees is that you and your friends are the customer for this sort of thing. So you should work on understanding what you and your friends want.

Then, you have to figure out the common ground between what you want (every game free!) and what's possible. The particular idea you mention, discounts on games for other platforms, seems like it would require deals with the game studios, which might be hard to get. But https://www.humblebundle.com/ built a good business around bundling several games together at a big discount, and there are probably more possibilities.

The tricky part about asking your friends is that they'll tell you what they think you want to hear. The only way to find out if they'd really buy something is... sell it to them for real money. Like, actually go out and buy a PS4 and XBox copy of something, and find out what they'd pay for the two together. Or try some other combinations to see what works.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#122

Post by snowmaker »

chejazi wrote: post #95
snowmaker wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

People use us over Bitly because they earn rewards. What we know from the feedback we've received is users don't like seeing blatant ads (ex. banners) on the page. Our response has been to syndicate other content the user has shared; so far the design has received a some praise and nobody has complained (whereas w/ ads we received complaints), but the change hasn't been live for long (less than a month ago we were sh…

I see. OK, so the goal is to get publisher content because it's less intrusive than blatant ads.

What you said about CPMs and minimum ad buys is true. The solution, it seems to me, is to simply go to smaller publishers. There are a million small blogs out there that might pay you $100 for some content marketing. The thing to think about is what your unique value proposition can be that will get them to spend their ad dollars with you. Perhaps it's something to do with the full-page sized ad format. It reminds me (from the advertiser standpoint) of the StumbleUpon model, which is very successful for certain kinds of sites.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#123

Post by snowmaker »

RyM21 wrote: post #107

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 trac…

I like the idea for WordBrewery! That's a clever model for optimizing language learning.

Yes, you will need to incorporate your company to raise seed funding. A really easy way is using Stripe Atlas: https://stripe.com/atlas - they will do all the paperwork for you to get a company legal structure.

You're probably at the stage where it makes sense to apply to accelerators. Any major accelerator program will help you with the legal structure as well as providing funding.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#125

Post by tlb »

masudhossain wrote: post #106

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…

Definitely start by getting students to love it first, then sell something to the university. Universities take a long time to make decisions, and they don't have a budget item for "help students find parties to go to". But as Facebook showed, the right thing can spread through a campus in a couple weeks.

There have been a lot of failures in this space. The big problem is getting quality listings. It's a fair bit of work for event organizers to post their event on multiple platforms, and they're probably already posting on Facebook and a campus mailing list, so it's a hard battle to make them list on yours too. And if you don't have most of the listings, users will just check Facebook instead of you.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#126

Post by danieltillett »

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…

As a former academic I will share my thoughts here. I agree that there is a great need for this, but not demand from those with the data. In science you are effectively discouraged from sharing data since doing so means you lose the ability to rehash the data and publish a new paper. The second problem is scientists as a general rule won't pay for software or any sort of saas.

Can I suggest an idea for a related product; a platform to make collaboration between different areas easier. Right now if you have an area where you lack a skill or background it can be very time consuming finding the right people to collaborate with, especially internationally. Make it easier to create collaborations that result in publication and you will have a product with paying customers.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#127

Post by gnat »

ForrestN wrote: post #99
tlb wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need a great developer. You can't offer more salary than Google or Facebook, so you have to offer a mission that they believe in. I think your mission would be really exciting for the right person -- you just have to find them. Tip: if you're in the Bay Area, there'll be a lot of developer/artists here this weekend: http://grayarea.org/event/deepdream-the-art-of-neural-networ...

Thanks— I suspected as much. I'm in LA but even the prospect of finding events like this is very smart. Cheers.

(You could also put an ad on your own site/s for your job -- "Love Contemporary Art? Want to Help Us Bring it to the Masses?) Your next developer might already be a reader.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#128

Post by lpaone »

snowmaker wrote: post #120
lpaone wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The news room product sounds interesting, but I'm concerned that you've only got one potential customer. Maybe you could build out your network of news organizations, rather than "selling" a product directly. You could try to meet individual employees (even low level, or former ones) to learn more about how their individual news room works. You could even get a part-time job in one! If you knew you had several custom…

Thanks for the ideas and taking the time to give advice. It has sparked some ideas for getting in contact with more potential customers and getting more feedback on the product.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#129

Post by wootcamp »

tlb wrote: post #94
wootcamp wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 af…

Or instead of Amazon, whomever your customers currently buy from. The affiliate revenue isn't the most important thing: the important thing is to find out what your users will buy. Once you know that, you can invest in inventory. For beauty products, affiliate marketing works great. That is how the e-commerce world should work: you show users the results they can get with such-and-such product, and you get a percenta…

If its not by affiliate then maybe we can find a way to accept pre-orders for a bulk purchase. We notice there are lot of products used by our audience that are not carried by local distributors so they find ways to import it themselves.

Right, didn't think about sales for the sake of getting data. Currently we have a way to map out the products our users use most and made an assumption that these are the ones that they will buy. Would be interesting to compare the data and see if it matches. Hope the conversion works out well once we activate it.

Also just to share that showing users the results they can get with these products is exactly what we do and its in a visual manner, especially since this industry is driven by imagery.

Would love to continue this conversation in a private space if there’s any chance for it. Anyhow thanks for your input and we’ll be sending in an application for YC!

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#130

Post by nradov »

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…

Mainstream publishers and journalists would consider it unethical for their sources to pay for placement in editorial content. That's a clear conflict of interest. You would be better off targeting bloggers.
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