You might want to try swinging by r/coffee and see what they think. They love taking pics of their latte art.
Startup Hypothesis: Do users want to be social with coffee?
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Re: Startup Hypothesis: Do users want to be social with coffee?
#12You might want to try swinging by r/coffee and see what they think. They love taking pics of their latte art.
Actually did that and didn't get much of a response:
Posted a couple weeks ago: http://www.reddit.com/r/Coffee/comments/zdbdr/socialatte_lov...
Also posted in Startup today to see what I could get: http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/105sr8/started_soc...
Re: Startup Hypothesis: Do users want to be social with coffee?
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
Definitely helps, thank you :) So maybe more than just sharing coffee pictures. Maybe links as well :) Possibly rendering/generating a screenshot of the website as the image itself would do.
Sweet! Yep more than just pics, I can see you positioning yourself as the world coffee hub, connecting coffee lovers globally. This then becomes an attractive proposition for advertisers of everything coffee (coffee bean brands, coffee machines, coffee making courses etc) :)
Definitely. I could watch the posting trends and build categories off of the postings. e.g. users post a lot of recipes thus I would create a recipe category.
Re: Startup Hypothesis: Do users want to be social with coffee?
#14Sounds like you're just getting started. Time to focus on execution.
1. You have "sign in with Twitter" but not "sign in with Facebook". That's an obvious feature if you're focused on viral growth.
2. It's okay to do nonscalable things at the start. Convince a dozen of your friends to post on socialatte every day, by any means necessary. Then listen to their feedback and implement their suggestions.
3. When someone declines to sign in via twitter, they go to a 404 page. Fix that.
4. Drop that donate and sponsors junk. It's taking up real estate, looks crappy, and you're never going to make a noticeable amount of money before you get big anyway.
5. Let me sign in with an email and password.
6. Build an iOS app. It makes a lot of sense to post a picture of coffee from your phone. More sense than a website.
7. Find a cofounder. The biggest problem at this stage is that you are likely to give up before putting enough effort into it. A cofounder will keep you working.
Keep working - you have only just begun.
Re: Startup Hypothesis: Do users want to be social with coffee?
#15Sounds like you're just getting started. Time to focus on execution. 1. You have "sign in with Twitter" but not "sign in with Facebook". That's an obvious feature if you're focused on viral growth. 2. It's okay to do nonscalable things at the start. Convince a dozen of your friends to post on socialatte every day, by any means necessary. Then listen to their feedback and implement their suggestions. 3. When someone d…
Thank you for the advice :) It is deeply appreciated. As you guessed, I am just starting out. I felt out what I thought might be a good idea and trying to allow it to grow into its own. Actually a few people have already stated that they would like facebook login so I may need to rework my account model. I don't really have many users right now so this might be a good time to pivot.
As far as donations and sponsors, I agree with you on the donations but confused how I will be able to generate revenue at the start. I currently am a freelancer and funding would allow me to work on this full time but, again, this may be too early in the idea to think about so you may be right on both of those fronts.
I am currently looking into Appcelerator's Titanium for the mobile app at least for a prototype. As for co-founder, my brother has a stake in the idea and is a bit of a designer/illustrator and has presented quite a few good ideas that we coalesced into what the site is currently.
As for scalabilities sake, we were going to look at Node.js as a technology as we may have a lot of realtime features on the website but, again, I didn't want to work that far ahead as I knew there would be some pivoting of my strategy.
Thank you very much for your insight :)
Re: Startup Hypothesis: Do users want to be social with coffee?
#16If anyone else has any advice, let me know. I thank everyone that has already given me advice :)
Re: Startup Hypothesis: Do users want to be social with coffee?
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah that is why I said it is too early to tell that it is. As for going to a coffee shop and asking people, how do you think I should go about that. I wouldn't want to go sit down at a random table and be like "Hey you, what do you think of this idea". Maybe my head is in the wrong place as far as customer discovery is concerned :) Thank you for the advice.
Go to a highly trafficked coffee shop, grab a latte, and just start talking to people around you. You'll just have to get over the awkwardness of talking to strangers :) Have a set of questions you can rotate through. Sometimes you can ask 1 or 2 questions before they get annoyed. Other times you can have hour long conversations. Use your judgement to see how engaged they are.
Definitely. Thanks for the help :)