Ask HN: We were told our idea is amazing, but our startup is failing

Re: Ask HN: We were told our idea is amazing, but our startup is failing - what now?

#41

Post by sixQuarks » Thu, Dec 22, 2011, 10:06 PM UTC

A question for you: Why did you decide to offer these travel guides worldwide instead of concentrating on one city first?

It seems like you should test out your ideas on one city (which is much easier to market), then once you find a successful model, start branching out into other cities.

You could spend some money on PPC ads on keywords such as "San Francisco tours", "San Francisco golden gate bridge", etc, and test out different landing pages and different types of guides.

I also think something like this would work better if the information was all free, and people get to rate the quality of each tour. The ones with higher ratings will be shown higher up - maybe offer prizes to authors who have highly rated tours.

Re: Ask HN: We were told our idea is amazing, but our startup is failing - what now?

#42

Post by danhodgins » Wed, Dec 28, 2011, 2:23 AM UTC

SHOwnsYou wrote: post #3

Keep contracting to pay the bills. As you guys save up some cash, hire a designer to make the pages prettier. So many people will disregard the praise for your site if it's ugly or they can't figure it out. Edit: A little more food for thought - I opened the page you linked, then went to the homepage, then closed the page. It just didn't appeal to me visually. It wasn't until I saw the comment about charging too much…

According to reams of empirical data prices with 7's or 9's as the last digit (e.g. $17, $49) tend to convert best. I would suggest testing prices between $7 - $11 as a simple, 'low hanging fruit' way to get started.

Re: Ask HN: We were told our idea is amazing, but our startup is failing - what now?

#43

Post by danhodgins » Wed, Dec 28, 2011, 2:29 AM UTC

Court the traffic gatekeepers who reach your target audience by pitching them via email. In my experience asking a single direct/focused question elicits a response at least 50% of the time.

Inbound link juice from being featured on a site that's old, trusted and authoritative is 90% of the SEO game. Getting traffic is all about courting and pitching traffic gatekeepers at progressive levels of difficulty/reach, so you might as well start refining your approach.

For an inspiring read on growing your traffic check out "Crush It" by Gary Vaynerchuk, and start getting your content and community hustle on!