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The depressing reality of your startup failing

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Re: The depressing reality of your startup failing

#21

Post by ComNik »

tolmasky wrote: post #14
cynusx wrote: post #9

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 ma…

I have to agree that if the headline was "get notified when a price drops" I might consider signing up, or at least be intrigued to learn more. However, "save money and time, while shopping online"... sure it rhymes but its a vague value-proposition that's being offered by a thousand other sites right now. It could be anything from a store aggregator to another etsy.

Changing it right now, absolutely makes sense.

Re: The depressing reality of your startup failing

#23

Post by dlitwak »

1) as many have mentioned, submitting to a news site like this does not a launch strategy make. Look into strategic partnerships, try to get some legit press, figure out how to incentivize people to share it etc., virality etc., all the typical stuff that it seems like you haven't put any thought into. It's easy not to, and is perhaps one of the pros of talking to investors actually, they will remind you of your woefully inadequate customer acquisition strategies and get you rethinking them.

2) hackernews is a reflection of silicon valley, which is a bit of an echo chamber, keep that in mind. The common behaviors of people using this site are so drastically different than the average person that you shouldn't read much into its success, either way.

3) don't give up so easily.

4) props for having the balls to put yourself out there like this. Too may people in silicon valley have this facade of success all the time. They are always "killing it." This is somewhat necessary as when we are looking for funding we aren't about to publicize any setbacks, but they are there and good to remind people of.

Re: The depressing reality of your startup failing

#24

Post by tlianza »

ComNik wrote: post #8
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…

FWIW, I wrote that same feature for Wishpot (price alerts) including the infrastructure for scraping thousands of stores that don't have APIs.

It's a pretty interesting problem, but to be honest I never could see it as a product in and of itself. A lot of people have tried. Some spun it as a way to track things you've already bought in case you might be able to get a refund/rebate when the price dropped, which was a nice spin on the idea. But, to my knowledge none of these services have taken off.

Fundamental to all of this is that if you want to launch a consumer service and have it "take off" you need to figure out distribution first. If the idea doesn't have "social built in" and if you don't have lots of money to spend on advertising and marketing (which, in the consumer space is considerably more than if you're in the b2b space) it's Really Difficult to get attention.

That's the biggest thing I'd recommend to anyone in the consumer space... before you build it, figure out how people are going to hear about it. Most of the consumer business models require millions of users to pay off (ads, freemium, affiliate, etc). So, no million users, no business. Andrew Chen wrote a great article about how programmers can (and should) mitigate that problem these days: http://andrewchenblog.com/2012/04/27/how-to-be-a-growth-hack...

Re: The depressing reality of your startup failing

#26

Post by psg »

Jason's comment (as well as others) is spot-on. It's only a project. However, projects are how many sustainable businesses begin.

Your project is based on your assumptions on what customers wants. You now need to discover whether those assumptions are true (facts) or completely wrong. If they turn out to be true, then you're on to something.

Don't give up. Even if your assumptions turn out to be wrong, 'failures' are part of the process, and you can use what you learned on your next quest for a sustainable business.

Re: The depressing reality of your startup failing

#27

Post by diminish »

nbashaw wrote: post #19
ComNik wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This did not came across harsh, this came across as a reminder to not give up so quickly. I still think that what I said about sharing more stories of failure is true, but maybe the reason for my post was more of an impulsive reaction :/

It ok - user acquisition is tough! It takes a lot of work, and submitting your link to Hacker News is not really work. I'd start out by doing some user testing. Have people look at your site and tell you what they think. Then maybe a bit of usability testing - tell people to perform actions (like signing up or adding a product to their list) and see where they get stuck. This is called funnel optimization. Then you c…

if I am not mistaken, pinterest and many other success stories had long phases of slow user growth..

Re: The depressing reality of your startup failing

#28

Post by larrys »

F_J_H wrote: post #13
colinplamondon wrote: post #7

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.…

Stephen R. Covey once said something along the lines of "In any given situation, you can be right or you can be kind. It's better to be kind." What you said is correct. Said differently (i.e. in a more kind manner), it also would have been a good example of really helpful mentorship.

One advantage of being harsh (vs. kind) is that it forces someone to think before they act for fear of looking like an idiot and wasting everyone's time.

Re: The depressing reality of your startup failing

#29

Post by johnnydt »

I think there is a site that does this already. Try camelcamelcamel.com

Having said that, I appreciate your zeal and effort. No amount of education would have prepared you as much as the workk involved in creating a fairly complicated website.

Good job. I might just be using it. :)

Re: The depressing reality of your startup failing

#30

Post by colinplamondon »

ComNik wrote: post #16
colinplamondon wrote: post #7

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.…

Maybe that was a bit harsh, but I definitely got your point. I overreacted and maybe this bit of public embarrassment was necessary. Thank you.

Sorry, that was phrased dickishly! Definitely hit me up if I can ever be of help.
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