Stop building apps no one wants • Hacker News Board

Re: Stop building apps no one wants

#141

Post by wikwocket » Fri, Dec 07, 2012, 4:15 PM UTC

justjimmy wrote: post #47

Just to bounce ideas/brainstorm. The issue is why would people come to this site to click 'I'd use this' or 'I support this'. (Ideas will flow in no problem, they're a dime a dozen.) So we need to provide feedbackers with incentive. 1. Reward them? Oops…nothing to stop them going around and supporting them everything and game the reward system. 2. Reward them based on their choices (and limit their votes)? Nope…these…

The obvious incentive for voters is to let them "subscribe" to an idea, so that if it launches, they get an email/beta membership/discount/etc.

The other perk to this is that idea-submitters get a home-grown email list for their new app.

Re: Stop building apps no one wants

#142

Post by mosselman » Sat, Dec 08, 2012, 12:35 PM UTC

bpatrianakos wrote: post #115

mosselman wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree this is so annoying. I love the idea though... I have a good idea -> I pitch it and then 100 people start building my idea too. Nice! Now I don't think having an idea is the same as executing it well, but I could imagine people being hesitant. Oh and because of the annoying landing page I vow to never to use your site, nice try.

There are tons of people who called Quora annoying for doing the same thing. They also have a tendency to go around in public talking about how they won't use it because it's so annoying. Annoying or not though, it gets people to sign up and many of those same people who claimed to not want to join because of it being annoying end up on the site. Maybe it is annoying but the concept works.

Good thing I am not so insecure about my ideas that I need others to give me validation for them.

I can imagine though that the kind of person who goes to networking events on eventbrite, who starts talking about his 'great and orignal' 'idea' to create an app where people can take pictures of food in restaurants and then let others search these pictures to see whats for dinner around them, does need this validation. (I have actually been to numerous events where more than one person at a single event had this 'idea'. )

I think when your idea is crap, you secretly know it, but after quitting your job and investing all of your savings, it becomes really hard to cut your losses.

Re: Stop building apps no one wants

#143

Post by vlokshin » Mon, Dec 10, 2012, 10:39 AM UTC

joeld42 wrote: post #123

vlokshin wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do think that's one of our biggest (if not the biggest) challenge. Our "chicken" in the equation would be the entrepreneurs who post. We need to incentivize them to post to a safe platform that they get something out of, but in a way that saves them time and/or money (otherwise they'd use their own launchpage + adwords and/or the launchrock-esque services). Our "egg" is the volume of (quality) users for feedback. T…

I don't think it's really a chicken/egg here. If you could instantly solve the problem of having lots of entrepreneurs posting that wouldn't necessarily create any value for potential users (beyond app discovery, which there are better places to go to discover existing apps, not just potential apps). What's in it for the user giving me feedback on my app idea? You could pay them, but then that would make it really ex…

solid idea.

Giving the reviewers something of value is going to be a challenge. Not impossible, but a challenge.