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My Start-Up: 3000 unique users a day, only 3 offers?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: My Start-Up: 3000 unique users a day, only 3 offers?

#21

Post by jim_h »

citizenkeys wrote: post #16
timelinex wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, what is it sustainable competitive advantage? How do you plan on getting traction? What are the legal implications? How much have you personally invested both in terms of time and money into this project? What previous projects have you completed? Can you get a friend to co-found this with you? Show us something that would indicate you punch above your weight class, eg Academics, Social, Hacking.

Sustainable competitive advantage is that we don't incur the costs of bandwidth or storage. Videos are stored on any other site on the Internet. Another advantage involves some API possibilities. Traction is people creating lists. Yes, the ycombinator list got 3000 uniques a day. But ANYBODY can create a very particular list of videos that draws that many uniques or more. More traffic equals more traction. I have inv…

How is it different from other torrent sites?

Re: My Start-Up: 3000 unique users a day, only 3 offers?

#22

Post by bobf »

It may be harsh, but here's some honest feedback: I don't see the value of WikiTorrents. (That probably doesn't mean anything, as I wouldn't have considered Twitter to be a huge winner either, but it is a data point for you nonetheless.) The name is non-intuitive, as it doesn't have much to do with torrents - or wikis in the traditional sense. Manually compiled/user-submitted lists of videos seems to be easily duplicable, meaning there is little competitive advantage.

Re: My Start-Up: 3000 unique users a day, only 3 offers?

#23

Post by citizenkeys »

I think many of you are missing the forest for the trees. If the idea were profitable, I wouldn't be looking for seed money. If the implementation of my idea were very refined, then it would be a mature product and not a working prototype.

The idea now is a working prototype of a site where users can create lists of videos. That's all the idea is supposed to be. Right now, it's very rough around the edges with lots of usability issues. That's why I need seed money to work on it and make it user-friendly, add features, move features, etc.

If I may paraphrase Paul Graham, implement an idea that the founder himself needs. In my case, it's lists of videos I can find all over the Internet. To quote Paul Graham again, release early, release often, and surprise your users by constantly listening to them and revising the product.

Re: My Start-Up: 3000 unique users a day, only 3 offers?

#24

Post by martinkallstrom »

citizenkeys wrote: post #15
answerly wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For example... I just looked up your LinkedIn profile and you have a contact that is connected to 5 entrepreneurs that I happen to also know who have raised seed funding. Have you tried reaching out to that person to get intros to those entrepreneurs (4 of which have raised money in the last 3-6 months)?

My personal belief is that a broad "anybody want to help" approach is better than a creepy "in your face" approach to a particular person. I would think that singling-out a particular person and harassing them would result in burning all sorts of bridges. That's just my particular belief. Seriously, What other suggestions you got?

That particular belief was actually one of the most counter-productive ones I have come across. Not only will you never get a meeting with a business angel unless you actually reach out to anyone. If your own view of your business potential is that pitching it to someone would pretty much amount to harassing that person, then maybe your idea needs a little more work.

Bottom line is that neither job offers or angel financing will come to you as a result of you indicating that you need it in a comment on a web page. You need to talk to actual people (yes, to their faces) and tell them what's in it for them. It's not about them helping you, it's you offering them something valuable.

By the way, if your site has nothing to do with torrents, maybe the word torrent shouldn't be in the name? To not confuse people.

Re: My Start-Up: 3000 unique users a day, only 3 offers?

#25

Post by bfung »

citizenkeys wrote: post #17
bfung wrote: post #13

I've seen some posts about wikitorrents the past few days; finally went to see the site. Perhaps the amount of unique page views (especially on that page) is a side effect of ycombinator brand and timing of events and investors trying to see what kind of companies ycombinator wants to invest in (in an effort to better their own investments). What are the unique page views from other pages? Or the entire site in gener…

WikiTorrents doesn't really have much to do with bittorrent. It's an evolving idea. The idea is simple: if you can come up with a good, unique, specific list of videos, then you can translate that easy into lots of traffic. Traffic = traction = money.

who gets the money? =P Why wouldn't I just put that list of videos on my own blog to generate revenue?

I think my point is that it's not enough to just make something that's already been done (a website of a list of stuff...). Your solution needs to solve someone's problem... say if you had some algorithm that could generate these interesting lists of videos w/o user intervention, or some automation to aggregate videos of similar content.

Re: My Start-Up: 3000 unique users a day, only 3 offers?

#26

Post by citizenkeys »

bobf wrote: post #22

It may be harsh, but here's some honest feedback: I don't see the value of WikiTorrents. (That probably doesn't mean anything, as I wouldn't have considered Twitter to be a huge winner either, but it is a data point for you nonetheless.) The name is non-intuitive, as it doesn't have much to do with torrents - or wikis in the traditional sense. Manually compiled/user-submitted lists of videos seems to be easily duplic…

It's very tao... Some people look at the empty bowl and say "this bowl is empty and therefore worthless."

Other people look at the bowl and say "this bowl is empty. How useful to have an empty bowl that I can fill."

I'm a member of the second group. The site has little to do with wikis and/or torrents. The value of wikitorrents.org is the lists of videos, not the simplicity of the site. One good list of videos, regardless of the topic, can generate an exponential amount of traffic that find that particular list useful. If you had seen the traffic from just that one specific list of ycombinator applicant videos, you would understand the potential.

Re: My Start-Up: 3000 unique users a day, only 3 offers?

#27

Post by citizenkeys »

martinkallstrom wrote: post #24
citizenkeys wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal belief is that a broad "anybody want to help" approach is better than a creepy "in your face" approach to a particular person. I would think that singling-out a particular person and harassing them would result in burning all sorts of bridges. That's just my particular belief. Seriously, What other suggestions you got?

That particular belief was actually one of the most counter-productive ones I have come across. Not only will you never get a meeting with a business angel unless you actually reach out to anyone. If your own view of your business potential is that pitching it to someone would pretty much amount to harassing that person, then maybe your idea needs a little more work. Bottom line is that neither job offers or angel fi…

I agree that seeking "face time" with particular people is useful and necessary. But the initial comment sounded like I should stalk people, corner them, and in general be a jerk. I refuse to do that.

I also agree that the idea "needs a little work", probably more than a little. That's what seed money is intended to address: keeping a roof over my head while I work on the idea.

To paraphrase Paul Graham, for the third time in this thread, the final product tends to look very little like the initial idea.

Yes, I agree the site probably needs a name change. The very initial idea in this case was user-created lists of bittorrent files, "Wikipedia meets BitTorrent", if you will. I've modified the idea to include links to videos that are not bittorrent files, including youtube, vimeo, posterous, and justin.tv. So yeah, the site probably needs a name change, which I've considered for awhile.

Re: My Start-Up: 3000 unique users a day, only 3 offers?

#28

Post by krisneuharth »

What if you compiled all of this scraped data and made microsites for each category? I think your idea is interesting but so far the implementation is off-putting. You could do all sorts of organic SEO tweaks and then put some ads on the pages for a revenue stream.

Don't give up, but also don't expect people to throw money at you for making something. If that were true, everyone on HN would be millionaires.

Re: My Start-Up: 3000 unique users a day, only 3 offers?

#30

Post by citizenkeys »

krisneuharth wrote: post #28

What if you compiled all of this scraped data and made microsites for each category? I think your idea is interesting but so far the implementation is off-putting. You could do all sorts of organic SEO tweaks and then put some ads on the pages for a revenue stream. Don't give up, but also don't expect people to throw money at you for making something. If that were true, everyone on HN would be millionaires.

I don't consider my goal of 500/week to pursue the idea much the equivalent of people throwing money at me.

That's about minimum wage to pursue a technical idea that might payoff big. $500 a week is nothing by silicon valley standards.

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