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

A Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Hardbound Update

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 59 posts

Re: A Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Hardbound Update

#31

Post by nbashaw »

chongli wrote: post #17
bbrizzi wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of DHH's talk about having just a "nice italian restaurant" : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY

Seriously. I kept thinking about YouTube when reading the story. What Hardbound tried to do is get VC money for an early stage YouTube channel. That's just silly. The business model for a YouTube channel is to start with nothing, make a video, nobody watches it, so then you make another video. Thousands of videos later you have a few people watching. You get a few of those people to give you a couple bucks on Patreon…

You're right -- it takes a long time for most media companies to get off the ground, and it's often near-impossible to raise money in the early days. But how many youtube channels that get ~7,000 weekly unique viewers are able to convert ~1,200 into paying monthly subscribers?

Consider this: you might not already know everything there is to know about my business by skimming one blog post!

Re: A Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Hardbound Update

#32

Post by Semiapies »

I'm really wondering how VC money was supposed to make this business profitable. Sure, the idea is let them last long enough to grow their customer base, but with "millions" of pages read, they were making ramen-profitable-for-one-guy money from something that required a team of people. I imagine it didn't seem clear to investors that there was a big potential for growth, and they'd need big growth just to survive, much less provide a return to investors or drive off into the sunset in a Ferrari.

Re: A Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Hardbound Update

#33

Post by dayve »

nbashaw wrote: post #26
alphajulietmike wrote: post #4

Sounds like you should be the platform and let content creators in. Pay them commission on sales and you can QC anything coming in until you can afford to pay someone else.

It's definitely something we considered! We actually were really focused on that for a long time, but didn't get a lot of traction with it, because creating content in our format requires illustration and animation, which is not easy to do. A lot of people said they wanted to do it, but very few followed through. We did some partnerships with media companies but we didn't solve a critical problem for them (the origin…

Have you tried creating a 'creator's' software that's lightweight, easy to use and has lots of pre-loaded illustration packs (with a wide variety of themes) & drag-and-drop style animation presets?

Re: A Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Hardbound Update

#34

Post by ryanwaggoner »

nbashaw wrote: post #31
chongli wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously. I kept thinking about YouTube when reading the story. What Hardbound tried to do is get VC money for an early stage YouTube channel. That's just silly. The business model for a YouTube channel is to start with nothing, make a video, nobody watches it, so then you make another video. Thousands of videos later you have a few people watching. You get a few of those people to give you a couple bucks on Patreon…

You're right -- it takes a long time for most media companies to get off the ground, and it's often near-impossible to raise money in the early days. But how many youtube channels that get ~7,000 weekly unique viewers are able to convert ~1,200 into paying monthly subscribers? Consider this: you might not already know everything there is to know about my business by skimming one blog post!

A piece of friendly advice: I get that you're in a pretty low place right now, and that this is your baby, but don't take comments on HN so personally.

You're coming across as pretty defensive, which is understandable, but probably not helpful. People here can see this from a perspective that you can't, and if you're defensive, you're missing out on learning something.

Otherwise, why are you bothering to interact here?

Re: A Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Hardbound Update

#35

Post by lazyasciiart »

That analogy really didn't work for me. "Crawling towards the horizon" seems to correspond to option 2, continuing to run the business at a much slower pace. Options 3+4 are more like stopping to look at the car, take a breath and re-evaluate whether it's designed right.

Re: A Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Hardbound Update

#36

Post by rexreed »

You should never have raised money in the first place. It sounds like this was not a business that was compatible with the goals and requirements of a venture-backed business. The moment you accepted your first investment you were committed to that path. I agree - not all businesses are VC businesses, and many startup failures are a result of pursuing the wrong model for assuring continued operation and not a reflection (necessarily) of the "business".

Re: A Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Hardbound Update

#37

Post by nbashaw »

Semiapies wrote: post #32

I'm really wondering how VC money was supposed to make this business profitable. Sure, the idea is let them last long enough to grow their customer base, but with "millions" of pages read, they were making ramen-profitable-for-one-guy money from something that required a team of people. I imagine it didn't seem clear to investors that there was a big potential for growth, and they'd need big growth just to survive ,…

Actually we had a pretty detailed financial model for how we expected to get to profitability! We currently have ~1,200 subscribers, and about half are paying us $1.99/mo (our old price point) and the other half is paying $3.99/mo. Our growth model is based on people sharing our content, and so we can predict pretty well how many new customers we'll get every time we post something new. With a $15k monthly content budget (a couple writers, network of freelance designers) we were pretty sure we'd be able to bend the growth curve to the point where we'd reach profitability (~15k subscribers) in about 10 months, assuming modest improvements in conversion rates and share rates (we'd obviously be doing a ton of experiments to move these numbers).

At the end of the day, investors weren't convinced, so you certainly have a point! There may have been something seriously wrong with the plan. But I challenge your assertion that we'd need "big growth just to survive". Yeah we'd need pretty good growth, for sure. But not "unrealistic, crazy unlikely" growth.

And on the upside, once we got there, all growth would be pretty much pure margins after that! We don't think we'd need to dramatically increase our investment in content.

Basically, it might not be as dumb as it seems.

Re: A Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Hardbound Update

#38

Post by ryanwaggoner »

rexreed wrote: post #36

You should never have raised money in the first place. It sounds like this was not a business that was compatible with the goals and requirements of a venture-backed business. The moment you accepted your first investment you were committed to that path. I agree - not all businesses are VC businesses, and many startup failures are a result of pursuing the wrong model for assuring continued operation and not a reflect…

Assuming significant investment, I would agree. On the other hand, they might have just raised $50k from an angel or two, which wouldn't really cause issues with bootstrapping...

...unless they used it to bump up burn rate to the point where another round or layoffs were inevitable, because profitability before out of runway was never feasible. That's what it looks like, but hard to tell from outside.

Re: A Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Hardbound Update

#39

Post by chongli »

nbashaw wrote: post #31
chongli wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously. I kept thinking about YouTube when reading the story. What Hardbound tried to do is get VC money for an early stage YouTube channel. That's just silly. The business model for a YouTube channel is to start with nothing, make a video, nobody watches it, so then you make another video. Thousands of videos later you have a few people watching. You get a few of those people to give you a couple bucks on Patreon…

You're right -- it takes a long time for most media companies to get off the ground, and it's often near-impossible to raise money in the early days. But how many youtube channels that get ~7,000 weekly unique viewers are able to convert ~1,200 into paying monthly subscribers? Consider this: you might not already know everything there is to know about my business by skimming one blog post!

I'm sorry. It's all too easy to play backseat driver on an internet discussion board. It's far tougher to actually go out and build something with your real life and your relationships in the mix.

I've been part of a failed business that's left my father with a mountain of debt in his late middle age. I am in the process of retooling my life to go back to school and earn a degree. I recognize what it's like to face a crossroads in your life. It's not something that can be casually dismissed.

Post reply on HN