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My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love

twicsy.tumblr.com

11–20 of 165 posts

Re: My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love

#11
I get that people are trying to be helpful, and think that's great.

But this blog post was awesome, raw, and captured something that so few of us can really relate to.

Dude grinds for 10 years, keeps grinding, doesn't know where to go but will probably keep grinding.

"Twicsy, you son of a bitch. You frustrate me so. I love you, but oh how I hate to love you."

Shine on, buddy. Best of luck!

Re: My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love

#13
post #6
post #4

Why does he say "really successful" in the title, if it doesn't even break even? EDIT: Must be the traffic, but these days that's not (that) impressive if there's no revenue model around it. That said, I'd love 6 million users/month. EDIT 2: downvotes? I guess funding = success still around here, huh?

I'd hate to have 6 million visitors a month if they're viewing pictures (high bandwidth) and I'm not actually making any money from them.

It appears the pictures are actually hosted on Twitter, so not that much traffic.

Re: My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love

#14
post #3
post #2

You should make it look better, imo.

How would that solve the issue of it not making money?

Depends on how he decides to monetize it I guess. But at the very least a better designed site gives the impression of professionalism and security, and users who trust you will also trust you with their money. Also a better organized (I think less noisy) site would make the ads easier to see and more relevant.

Although for me, the bigger issue is finding what Twicsy offers that's worth paying for?

Re: My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love

#15
Some monetization ideas:

* Follow the 4chan's method. Add captcha to search and offer captcha bypass for $15~ per year

* Make iOS / Android app, sell it for $1.99~ (you can make it with HTML/Javascript via PhoneGap)

* Offer API for affordable price

and please change current website design, make it simple and cleaner (Twitter Bootstrap is nice for that job and it's easy to learn)

Re: My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love

#17
A few comments from an initial glance:

- Site could be improved a lot for mobile. If you get a lot of mobile traffic, which wouldn't surprise me, I'll bet it massively underperforms desktop traffic on site engagement and ad revenue.

- You need to A/B test your ad locations a lot more. The locations do not look particularly good to me, but then again this does depend a lot on how most people interact with your site (which likely isn't starting at the homepage).

- More ad networks isn't always better. Are these ad networks actually outperforming adsense? Are you banned from adsense?

Edit: Ignore these two below, thanks jim-greer. Twitter is in fact hosting the images!

- (ignore) You probably could compress the big images more to save bandwidth. I don't know how big of an expense your edgecast bill is, but I'll bet you could cut it down by a lot.

- (ignore) Additionally, fix the cache headers on your images (change them from max-age: 0 to cache forever -- they look immutable). This will immediately lower your edgecast bill by a little bit and really help performance.

Re: My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love

#18
I don't use twitter much.

But recently there was a large tanker crash near where I live. The truck had exploded, and there were lots of people killed and hurt.

I wanted to see some pictures, but one hour after the incident the story was not (yet) on the TV news. So I turned to twitter, and using the standard twitter search, I found a few ransoms photos of the incident.

What I needed was a better way to search twitter for photos, with a specific tag or time frame posting, and perhaps even a geographical filter too (since the incident was at a specific place).

I'm sure other people would find this useful, especially when large events unfold live (I.e boston bombings, plane crash etc etc)

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