Question: what CPM are you getting for your ads?
Depending on how much you're getting, I may know some people who would be interested in beating that price.
My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love
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Re: My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love
#52This is proof of Marc Andreessen's idea[1] that if you obtain good product market fit nothing else really matters. Despite ignoring this product for 4 years and having a totally outdated design the market is compelling this product to exist none the less.
You've basically invented Instagram for Twitter here and don't seem to even realize it.
Please do your users a favor and apply Twitter's Bootstrap to the site ASAP, its really not that hard, you've been at this for 10 years, might as well learn a little HTML CSS you've come this far.
1. "Personally, I’ll take the third position – I’ll assert that market is the most impor- tant factor in a startup’s success or failure. Why? In a great market – a market with lots of real potential customers – the market pulls product out of the startup. The market needs to be fulfilled and the market will be fulfilled, by the first viable product that comes along. The product doesn’t need to be great; it just has to basically work. And, the market doesn’t care how good the team is, as long as the team can produce that viable product."
Re: My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love
#53If you want some cricisim, the website style might be turning people away. http://twicsy.com/ The colours, contrast, and various sizes/spacing of things are somewhat unsettling.
Yep, his first hire should be/have been a designer. People only care about interfaces, they couldn't care less how great the backend is.
Re: My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love
#54I 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!
Don't worry, you haven't seen the last of Twicsy!
Re: My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love
#55Why 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 actually meant to put successful in quotes but then forgot. The way I meant it is, if you had told me I would be seeing 6 million unique visitors per month when I first started out I would have definitely said that is a huge success. In some ways it is, but obviously not the most important way. I definitely agree that raising money is not success, and actually all of the money raised was prior to launching Twicsy.
Re: My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love
#56I can heavily relate to this with one of my early projects, Jellibug. It aggregated celebrity pictures from Instagram, Twitter, etc and at one point had 1M+ pictures and 250k+ visitors/month. Except it didn't make money and became a "piece of shit startup I hate to love". I stopped working on it about a year ago and finally shut it down last month. Almost all traffic to it was organic, just like Twicsy. And it was mostly teenagers using the site which is a very hard audience to monetize. I couldn't see it as a business anymore so why bother wasting time even thinking about it? Sometimes things fall apart so that better things can fall together. Since then, I've stopped chasing the sexy and cool ideas with no business plan. Today, I run 2 unsexy and boring startups that make money. My advice would be to ditch Twicsy and instead find a problem and solve it.
Re: My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love
#57I 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!
I know... his failure has already been more successful than many people's successes.
Re: My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love
#58Where does the traffic come from? I think I may know. TRAFFIC A brief glance at alexa (I know, I know...) shows the source breakdown of his traffic: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/twicsy.com USA (17.5%), India (13.4%), Indonesia (11.3%), Japan (4.1%) More interestingly, it lists some feeder pages, and there's one interesting one: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090722010355AA... Which contains this answe…
For those interested (notlisted appears to be!) here are some actual numbers from Google Analytics for October:
Unique Visitors 6,461,357
Visits 7,592,870
Pageviews 28,461,178
Avg. Visit Duration 00:02:07
Geos
USA: 1.6m visits Indonesia: 687k Japan: 569k not set: 513k UK: 369k Mexico: 261k Turkey: 247k France: 232k Germany: 213k Spain: 185k
And an amazingly long tail from there. So that is definitely part of the problem when it comes to monetization. There are 120 different countries that had more than 1000 visits in October.
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I do not actually believe that rss produces a significant amount of traffic for Twicsy. I don't see any evidence in the stats it has much of an impact at all.
Re: My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
SEO is the largest feeder of traffic for Twicsy. People get there by searching for a very long tail of things. But there are quite a few that return just to browse around it seems, or check out the top photos. Agreed, the UX/UI is terrible. One big problem is that I am a terrible web developer, I am really just a back end data guy that knows enough to be dangerous on the front end. But that's part of the reason why I…
I'd love to do a free redesign for Twicsy. Email me (inlith@gmail.com) if you're interested. My portfolio is at madebyargon.com
Will do!
Re: My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love
#60My general anti-B2C bias may be showing, but unless you've discovered a new core interaction for people (Instagrammy) I'm betting the 6 million visits a month is basically just a function of having a lot of content about Justin Bieber (and a zillion other topics) which is beating Twitter because Twitter has relatively poor SEO (for a reason). This sort of suggests that the momentary attention of 6 million people is worth what people are willing to pay for it.
You're clearly smart and connected. You've built sites this successful before and probably will again. Why not make something which matters rather than aggregating hashtagged selfies? There's more money in things that matter and they are frequently more rewarding to work on.