Why would you need funding? Your product seems "finished" and you have a ton of users. You just need to monetize better than crappy ads
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
#72My 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 w…
I will keep Twicsy going until it makes much less than no sense at all!!!!!!! But, I am already working on the next thing and we have generated more revenue in the last few months than Twicsy/Dumbfind/Searchles did in 10 years.
I agree with this perspective. Every idea can't be curing cancer, and many innovative ideas are stumbled on while playing with something else - like Feynman discovering quantum electrodynamics because he was curious about why spinning plates wobble. You need to follow your instincts.
At a minimum, you're providing a service to thousands of people and sheparding a product through its lifecycle. I don't know if working on Twicsy will have any real influence on your future work, but following its story seems more valuable than dropping it to "pivot" off in some random trajectory.
Re: My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love
#73Make a Twicsy app, price it at a dollar, push it through the site and you're set.
I agree this idea has potential, and I have thought about it, but I am a bad web developer, and an even worse app developer. I have been looking for a partner to possibly do it with a rev share and I have contacted numerous people, but no takers...
I'd love to help out with doing some of your web stuff if you are interested. Shoot me an email, anhkiet(at)gmail
Re: My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love
#74I 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!
Well put! (and a bit unusual to see such kindness in an HN comment haha)
Kudos to the author, best wishes for the future!
Re: My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love
#75Earlier 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
I'm curious. Why free? Portfolio juice?
Re: My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love
#76Launch a contest, some folks would probably be willing to solve the monetization problem for a percentage of the revenue. I'd love to work with you on this, that kind of traffic isn't easy to build.
I'd also spin off a separate product for marketers (based on the same engine, but without the global trend noise), make it useful (there are a few ways to do that).
Re: My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love
#77Where 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 prob…
I just looked how much we made in Google Adsense in Oct based on the number of unique visitors we received. I calculate that we would have made roughly $42K in Oct based on your unique visitors value. This sounds nonintuitive, but its my opinion that you actually have too many ads on your site to make any money from them. My site is fotoblur.com. You can reach me through the support page if you'd like to chat. I'd love to help you if I can.
Re: My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love
#78You are making me love my little enterprise startup.
10 years, no funding -> $750K/year.
Of course, that one company is AT&T. We help send about 1/3% of all direct mail advertising in the U.S. (Sorry about that -- we are trying to get them to switch to digital but it's a hard sell to when that's what they do for a living.)
Re: My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love
#79A 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 (w…
Agreed with mobile optimization, I have over 35% mobile traffic and I am doing a terrible job of taking advantage of this. But I don't know the first thing about how to do this. I have done some research and experiments but honestly couldn't make sense of it. Yes, I am banned from Adsense, and just about every top tier ad network. There is a certain amount of porn on Twicsy (maybe 10% of overall traffic, nothing eart…
How much do these bannings hurt your profitability ? Any way to quantify it ?
Re: My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love
#80This 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,…
Well, not nothing else. As the author said, it makes next to no money. And it sounds like the traffic is almost entirely transient, which reduces its value greatly. The site averaged less than 2 visits per unique visitor.
So, while I get your point that an interested audience propelled the site to great use without much work at all, that's not the whole equation, not even close.