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The depressing reality of your startup failing

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Re: The depressing reality of your startup failing

#3

Post by mrsteveman1 »

A bit early to declare something a failure no? If I had declared some of the App Store stuff I've done to have failed the same day they went up for sale purely based on watching analytics data, I would have totally missed the media coverage, chart rankings and word of mouth exposure (not to mention the loads of "thank you" emails from users) that occurred 1,2,3+ weeks later.

In any case from what I can tell this is exclusive to Amazon right? I'm guessing they have an API for this sort of thing or a way for you to scrape specific products.

Can Amazon notify users when prices drop? What makes this system you've setup unique? Pitch me, because it's not over yet :)

Re: The depressing reality of your startup failing

#5

Post by jasonshen »

Look - your startup hasn't failed. First of all, it's not a startup, it's just a project you've been working on. You haven't spent savings or taken debt or investment to do this. It sounds like you are maybe still in school.

Second, you put it on HN and on person signed up. This doesn't mean you failed. It is merely the first in a very long line of setbacks that every startup, both great ones and not so great ones face along the way. Figure out why no one was interested in this - talk to potential customers, tweak the product/landing page/distribution channel and tr again.

I hope this doesn't come across as harsh because projects become our babies and it hurts when no one else cares, but hopefully you can take a step back and realize there's a lot you can do to remedy the situation.

Re: The depressing reality of your startup failing

#7

Post by colinplamondon »

This is a horrifically dumb article. If you care about the first day, you didn't launch a startup, you launched a project. Submitting an article to Hacker News isn't a launch strategy, it's showing off a cute project you did.

A startup is something you fully commit to until you're convinced you tried every reasonable permutation in a scalable market opportunity.

The average startup takes 7 years to get to liquidity. That's 2,520 days. You got one day in before throwing in the towel.

Re: The depressing reality of your startup failing

#8

Post by ComNik »

mrsteveman1 wrote: post #3

A bit early to declare something a failure no? If I had declared some of the App Store stuff I've done to have failed the same day they went up for sale purely based on watching analytics data, I would have totally missed the media coverage, chart rankings and word of mouth exposure (not to mention the loads of "thank you" emails from users) that occurred 1,2,3+ weeks later. In any case from what I can tell this is e…

Thank you for the encouragement :)

I tried using Amazon's builtin wishlist feature, but never recieved a notification (I had the items in my Rankique wishlist at the same time and got one).

Jep, this is exclusive to Amazon, but I planned to implement BestBuy and whatnot if the concept seems to work (the backend is designed to manage multiple data sources).

What makes this system unique is, that I have no interest in squeezing everything out of a customer (that may be because I don't need to make any money from this). I try to minimize the time you spend shopping and I wan't you to pay the lowest price.

The replies here got me thinking, this is the first time I'm doing something like this, and I think I overinterpreted what Eric Ries has thought me about pivoting...

I'm increasingly feeling naive here... (which may very well be)

Re: The depressing reality of your startup failing

#9

Post by cynusx »

The value proposition of the site when you visit rankique.com is not clear enough. Changing the headline to "Track products and get notified when the price drops" and making the headline bigger will help a bit.

Driving traffic to the site may be harder. There is no built-in customer acquisition channel as having one user does not lead to more exposure. It might be something that gets some word of mouth once it has made a user happy but that's something you should test.

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