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My Startup Failed. Fuck.

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Re: My Startup Failed. Fuck.

#151

Post by ibrow »

Felix21 wrote: post #150
ibrow wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can learn a lot from this. Firstly you can learn how other people describe the type of product you are offering - not necessarily how you describe it. With Adwords you'll see the types of keywords that people are typing to have your adverts displayed, some of these keyword phrases may include words you haven't considered. You then add these new words to your list and see the results. Rinse and repeat. Now people…

Seems like you only read my first line

I am probably not making myself clear

> Is it because i drew the wrong crowd? Is it because they don't know me? is it because adwords conversions are usually very low so do i need to pay for more traffic?

You don't just put up one ad using some keywords and be done with it. You constantly tweak, seeing what keywords people are using to find your ads, which keywords have the highest click through rate.

When I did this for a little idea I was thinking of doing, this was incredibly helpfu

The product I was think about doing was related to niche websites. I thought most people would use the word "niche" to describe them, it quickly became apparent that the real word people used was "affiliate" I saw "affiliate" appear a lot with related keywords and in the stats on the site, so I added an adword targeting that and related keywords, CTR doubled.

Using adwords helps you define and recognise the crowd you draw so you can best cater to them.

> If it actually is because my product sucks, then cool.. But what do i change?

Again, don't keep it static. In my experiment above, the first 100 clicks saw no interest. I changed some wording, a tiny improvement (less bounces etc). I changed the price, less bounces. I added FAQs, less bounces, I tweaked the available functions - possibly people would want feature X. Bang! people clicking on the "order now" button. Feature X is what people want

> There is no way to know this; which is why i believe the buy button is not the way to go.... at the beginning.

Seems like you haven't tried it, ;)

Re: My Startup Failed. Fuck.

#152

Post by Felix21 »

Felix21 wrote: post #150
ibrow wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can learn a lot from this. Firstly you can learn how other people describe the type of product you are offering - not necessarily how you describe it. With Adwords you'll see the types of keywords that people are typing to have your adverts displayed, some of these keyword phrases may include words you haven't considered. You then add these new words to your list and see the results. Rinse and repeat. Now people…

Seems like you only read my first line

iBrow i get your point

All im saying is - as i summed it up in the last line - you need to talk to customers before wasting adwords dollars.

What you describe is using adwors to find your audience. I guess there might be situations where that would be useful

Re: My Startup Failed. Fuck.

#153

Post by stereosky »

human_error wrote: post #118
notimetorelax wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I didn't have my morning coffee yet, but the video seemed to be too disrespectful of musicians.

That was my interpretation as well and I didn't like "sell your sh!t" thing. I don't think a musician would like his art to be called shit.

Also, a small baggie of drugs or something from McDonalds is not the recommended way to generalise how musicians spend their distribution cheques :p

Re: My Startup Failed. Fuck.

#154

Post by ibrow »

Felix21 wrote: post #152
Felix21 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like you only read my first line

iBrow i get your point All im saying is - as i summed it up in the last line - you need to talk to customers before wasting adwords dollars. What you describe is using adwors to find your audience. I guess there might be situations where that would be useful

But talking to customers is exactly what these guys did:

> So we talked to a few artists who said they thought it was a cool idea. BOOM! Our idea had been validated!

The idea had not been validated at all, just been told it was "cool". What they should have done next (or possibly at the same time) is spend a couple of hundred dollars on adwords to see if a cool idea converted into something people would actually want to buy.

What they should not have done is

> stopped talking to artists for a year and built (and rebuilt) the software until we thought it was acceptable

My point is that I would far rather spend $200-$500 on adwords and not on 1 year development of a product that is thought to be cool, but no one has actually had the opportunity to come to it fresh and click on an "order now" button.

Re: My Startup Failed. Fuck.

#155

Post by Kequc »

dhimes wrote: post #146
Kequc wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't imagine being anything other than angry after filling out a payment form and then being told that there was no reason to have done that. On a new web application?

Although I consider the practice unethical, the other side would (does) argue: "Who cares? You are trying to get 20,000 customers and you pissed off 100 to get there." I still can't bring myself to do it, though.

You wouldn't really have any customers if you weren't accepting payments though, it would be more like you pissed off all of your potential customers just for a bit of market data.

Re: My Startup Failed. Fuck.

#157

Post by startupjerkfest »

onan_barbarian wrote: post #95

If there's a common thread between endless startup failure stories, then it is "we talked to a bunch of people who said they'd spend money on this" and when push came to shove said people didn't actually spend money. We're not failing, but even from a (modestly) successful startup perspective, the vast gulf between "people who like to talk to you as if they will spend real money" and "people who will actually spend m…

can't get no satisfaction unless you take action!

stop worrying about what might happen, and do experiments to see what does happen.

ask people to buy and collect money. if they do, tell them it's not ready yet, do they want to wait, or do they want a refund?

S I M P L E S !

@startupjerkfest

Re: My Startup Failed. Fuck.

#158

Post by flyinRyan »

3am wrote: post #40
cup wrote: post #3

Reading about failures can be more illuminating and educational than reading about success. It's interesting to see how you reached a number of gateways where you could have terminated but instead continued to pursue your goals/dreams (despite going against what many would consider the logical conclusion to close). I wonder how many other business have adopted that strategy (of ignoring initial reduced interest in yo…

So, I guess I'll be the wet blanket here. It's pretty clear to me reading this that this person and their partner were nowhere near ready to found a startup. It highlighted the potential benefits for some people of getting a corporate(ish) job, learning about the business world, and learning the trade a little more before trying to starting a company. It's like the demotivator for "Mistakes", this is probably best as…

So what are you suggesting people do? Go get a "corporate-ish" job first? Personally, I agree with the sentiment of others: no one is "ready" you just have to try. Going the corporate route first has a high chance of getting you addicted to a steady income. Once that happens you'll probably never be able to do a startup because you can't take the salary hit.

Re: My Startup Failed. Fuck.

#159

Post by taude »

dopamean wrote: post #42
delluminatus wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The post was clearly meant to be firmly tongue-in-cheek. That part in particular was simply self-deprecating sarcasm.

Exactly. Sometimes when you think your idea is good all you need is one or two other people to tell you they think its good and that's it: it's a good idea. How did Instagram come to the conclusion that their idea was a good idea? Or any other startup for that matter. If Zillionears turned out to be a success no one would have thought that having a few people say "good idea" in the beginning was insufficient to get s…

Yeup. Lots of arm-chair advice these days. It's a business all in itself. It's funny watching people compile lists of "all the mistakes" in hopes that not repeating a single one of them will equal success. Plenty of wildly successful businesses became so without having MVPs or setting up fake landing pages. They spent years building out real product-breakthroughs, maybe with even real technology/science. I'm willing to bet that for every rule that's broken in that StartUpGrave twitter list above (I haven't looked so I don't know what's really there, but I'm going on just the idea of compiling lists of mistakes), there's a company who succeeded while still failing the rule.

There's so much retro-active quarterbacking that goes on (especially in the VC-world) that says X company was success because they applied this-thing-I'm-just-now-naming as a rule. Even though, Apple has taught us things like you're users don't always know what they want or need.

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