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Ask HN: Save my dying Startup

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Re: Ask HN: Save my dying Startup

#11

Post by lsc »

so, here's what I'd do. I'd make it free (if you intend to start charging at some point, make that clear to your customers. It's best to never raise prices, you know instead add some premium feature... you can have the old thing for free, but we have these new useful features you have to pay for. but sometimes, that's not practical. Next best is to say "It's free... but won't always be so")

Now, for free to work, you need to make sure your infrastructure is cheap. You'd be amazed how many users you can cram on to a $2500 AMD server with 8 cores and 32GiB ram that costs you $200/month to co-locate. (depending on your financial situation... if those numbers aren't trivially small to you, you may want to start with a $20/month VPS and scale up as you need. I'm just pointing out you can save a whole lot of money once you start needing capacity by outsourcing less.)

This will give the site a chance to grow, if users like it. If it does grow, well, that's exciting, right?

See, meanwhile, I'd get a job. It's nice to have a job. It's a different pace, you get health insurance and a bunch of cash, and you don't have to work so hard. A job isn't forever. My experience has been that if I'm feeling frustrated and hopeless with my company, a year at a regular job cures me.

If people start getting interested in the site and it excites you, you can quit and go back to doing it. If people start getting interested in the site and you still want to keep your job, well, customers will attract new investors and possible partners. Stock brokers are usually good marketers, so I think you may have potential marketing people in your customer base.

Re: Ask HN: Save my dying Startup

#12

Post by [deleted] »

bendmorris wrote: post #4

This comment is for your post, not your question. Maybe I just have a short attention span, but I could not read through this giant block of text. I'd suggest breaking it up into bite-size paragraphs and adding a URL so people can have more of an idea what you're talking about.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Save my dying Startup

#13

Post by versus »

I could tell you that I know a guy who used to be pretty close to the top of the currency trading group of a major international bank/ib and that he's in contact with traders/investors/programmers etc. that may have an interest in putting some cash in your project. But if you yourself work in the the industry, I don't see how that would make a difference for you since you would already come across such people in your day to day work. Your problem is not the money. It's a mental problem. What motivates you? Money? Gorgeous women? If I told you that I guarantee you a billion dollars and a date with Heidi Klum if you got 100,000 subscribers in 9 months, would you tell me it's impossible? No. You'd find a way to do it. So it's just mental. You've lost your muse. Go out for long walks. Refresh your brain. Stay away from your project. Reduce your work hours or ask your boss if you can trade your 2 weeks vacation for a few months of 3 day weekends. Recharge your batteries and your energy level will go up like the hero of your favorite game. The go at it again with the newly-gained wisdom of realizing that starting a business is not only not mostly sexy-publicity-fun-and-games, it's ALMOST NEVER sexy-publicity-fun-and-games except for a few darlings like, say, Facebook. But if it helps take a look at Steve Jobs at Apple. He's everywhere now because of the huge success but can you tell me what he was up to from 1998 to 2003 or so? Aside from launching the iMac, you can't tell me anything. Because he put it the hard work slowly but surely in relative quiet and isolation. You have to do the same. Love of your business will make you want to get up and do it. It will fuel you to do things you "don't want to do." But if you're just doing it for the big IPO payoff day with sports cars and sexy playboy bunnies, that is not only too vague of a payoff but it's too out of your control and distant to help drive you through the tough times in your business's life.

Re: Ask HN: Save my dying Startup

#14

Post by traderjoe »

lsc wrote: post #11

so, here's what I'd do. I'd make it free (if you intend to start charging at some point, make that clear to your customers. It's best to never raise prices, you know instead add some premium feature... you can have the old thing for free, but we have these new useful features you have to pay for. but sometimes, that's not practical. Next best is to say "It's free... but won't always be so") Now, for free to work, you…

Although I said a lot in my original post I did leave out some key points as it relates to the startup; a. Our website is 100% free to join and play... for now. Obviously future investors will want to see ROI but for the near future it remains to be free (subscription plans for better prizes is what's planned for long-term. b. As far as infrastructure goes, we are actually lucky in that our original investor is hosting our website for free with his own server(s) and security --it was part of our original agreement. c. I'm actually employed full time, and finished up my masters not too long ago. That's I think where the problem began, when I actually decided to take on more responsibilities at work AND enroll into grad school... All of a sudden the startup now had 1/4 of my attention and I assume things went static from then on.

Re: Ask HN: Save my dying Startup

#15

Post by traderjoe »

runjake wrote: post #9

For me, the text is just one huge blob, so I made a half-assed attempt to format it so that it's more readable: The website he is referring to is http://www.yatrader.com --- Dear HNers, I am writing this post in hopes of getting some help on saving my startup which is slowly decaying before my eyes; countless hours of work, tens of thousands of dollars spent, and a ton of sacrifice just dying. There is a wealth of kn…

Lesson learned; don't type and paste from notepad when you want someones full attention. Sorry!

Re: Ask HN: Save my dying Startup

#16

Post by coryl »

The only reason you'll fail is because your product sucks, not lack of marketing or money.

You are trying to do too much too soon, making everything mediocre crap.

1) Simplify everything; figure out what the one thing your site does well is (whatever is doing most successful, which looks like contests/predictions). Get rid of everything that people aren't using, like yaNotes.

2) Don't do international, focus on building where you live and work. Nobody cares that theres international traders. I'd rather have 500 US traders then 25 traders from 20 countries. This is called the network effect.

3) Clean up your homepage after you've done accordingly. Users probably only need to see 3 sentences out of what you've written.

4) Make something viral a core part of your product (getting users to announce predictions on twitter to be part of a giveaway?).

I hate to say it, but you did it wrong (I did this too while trying to build a social network). You poured money into it thinking you could design the perfect community and features and just launch it. I see nothing that requires hiring graphics artists, mathematicians, or two outsourced dev firms.

You can still make this a success, just expect to lose a majority of what you have now. All the work you've put in will essentially be deleted and you'll have to let it go. Good luck.

Re: Ask HN: Save my dying Startup

#17

Post by athst »

Have you looked at competitors like Stockpickr, StockTwits, inTrade, and Motley Fool CAPS? How is your site different from them and what can you do better? When I go to the site it shouts "contests" and stock market game, which has existed in a lot of forms before.

It's not clear to me what the value proposition is - this could use some work. Sites like this essentially come down to one question: "How does this help me make money?" You have a lot of users making predictions about the market - can you roll this up in a more understandable and actionable way? Why should someone be required to log in before they can see the data? If you're trying to create a community, it would also be helpful to actually see community content on the front page (like discussions, etc) not just their cold predictions.

Re: Ask HN: Save my dying Startup

#18

Post by aresant »

The international time clocks on your landing page say it best: you need to trim a lot of fat from your landing page, and probably the app itself.

The join button's on the bottom left, and I'm forced to read a half dozen paragraphs to even figure out what the site does.

Digging in, the site carries this feature-rich / benefit-poor style throughout.

If you're serious about saving the start-up I would reccomend that you either hire a professional UI / marketing firm or look for that skill set in a late stage "co-founder".

The underlying tech and idea are great, but the execution of the user interface and messaging need a lot of work before you're going to get traction.

Re: Ask HN: Save my dying Startup

#19

Post by jacquesm »

That's a lot of words, basically it boils down to:

We are a late stage start-up and our follow up money failed us at a critical moment.

What made your investor back out ?

Can you scale back your expenses to below your income ?

Re: Ask HN: Save my dying Startup

#20

Post by jon_dahl »

This is the key phrase to me:

What does an aspiring entrepreneur do now knowing that his idea can still work but has no motivation to continue without short-term incentives?

Startups are 1% idea, 6% brilliant founders, and 93% tenacity[1]. Of course, you have to be tenacious in a smart way, which typically means iterating and knowing when to pivot. If you're not motivated to stick it out, then your best bet is probably to put the project on ice. Maybe you'll find the funding and motivation in a year or two. But unless you want to do that, you need to keep grinding it out.

The hard part about grinding it out is that you're out of money, and you outsourced your development. That puts you in a hard position. Can you take over lead development yourself, and work on it nights/weekends?

Beyond that, read some Steve Blank. Are you convinced that: (1) people really want your product, and (2) you've built a product that clicks really well with the market? If not, you need to do that before you do anything else. No point in marketing a product that doesn't click. If you've done that, then it's a matter of getting the word out.

[1] Citation needed.

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