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

twicsy.tumblr.com

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

#81

Post by jaredsohn »

SandersAK wrote: post #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!

>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."

Maybe not the ten years part, but I imagine that a decent number of people here can relate to this (i.e. working on a startup for awhile and having a love/hate relationship with it while it is not yet a financial success.)

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

#83

Post by 23andwalnut »

dumbfounder wrote: post #40
martinkallstrom wrote: post #20

Make 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...

Happy to help you with some of your web dev and design issues. Check out some of my work at http://www.duetapp.com, http://www.getsoloapp.com, http://www.23andwalnut.com. Shoot me an email at from any one of those sites if you're interested.

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

#84

Post by lsc »

jff wrote: post #6
cwe wrote: 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.

eh, I'd take it. Bandwidth is cheap... and I have the sort of ego that derives a lot of pleasure from creating something that other people find useful and use.

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

#85

Post by NovemberWest »

lubujackson wrote: post #72
dumbfounder wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is also not much money in "curing cancer", unfortunately.

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

#86

Post by moot »

SandersAK wrote: post #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!

I know this man's feels.

4chan is only one month older. It's like we're cousins.

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

#87

Post by notlisted »

dumbfounder wrote: post #58
notlisted wrote: post #46

Where 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 am. Like digging through analytics. Some people pay me for it (not a hint, just a fact).

I feel something is missing in this story...

Google has very few sites linking to yours (~35 pages, mostly garbage pages), reports a huge number of indexed pages, but actually shows very few. Why? Hummingbird update or something else?

A search for Twicsy links in twitter finds hardly anything, except the site name in combination with a link to http://po.st.

You have 30k followers on Twitter, quite a few but not humongous, so your top trend tweets won't generate major traffic. 24k on FB, but most status updates get little or no comments, likes or shares.

I see a bunch of twicsy-'hosted' images on pinterest and tumblr. Most PG-18 search terms on your site are blocked, but when I do a google image search or twitter search, quite a few, I'd say 1 in 20 are of an adult nature (which perhaps doesn't help in terms of getting advertisers).

Is the real reason for your success & traffic really... pr0n?

Edit: One of the reasons I ask this is the source of your traffic. Would visits to your site allow Indonesians to bypass their 1MM site pr0n filters?

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

#88

Post by triplesec »

dumbfounder wrote: post #37
aresant wrote: post #8

Sharing some of the analytics behind how you think people use the site would probably make for a much more interesting discussion around monetization. EG - I can't figure out how or why 6m uniques would show up here, or what they're doing. And that's not an insult, I am curious - are they looking for discovery / trends? Are they looking to see all the latest pics of a user? etc? Those are dramatically different user…

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…

it would make sense to hire complementary skills, like UX-design. I hear this is what the usual advices say.

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

#89

Post by sitkack »

dumbfounder wrote: post #37
aresant wrote: post #8

Sharing some of the analytics behind how you think people use the site would probably make for a much more interesting discussion around monetization. EG - I can't figure out how or why 6m uniques would show up here, or what they're doing. And that's not an insult, I am curious - are they looking for discovery / trends? Are they looking to see all the latest pics of a user? etc? Those are dramatically different user…

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…

seriously, just put images in divs and use some box to move them around. flat sexy gravity. ken burns effect for web 4.x

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

#90

Post by brendonjohn »

notlisted wrote: post #87
dumbfounder wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 am. Like digging through analytics. Some people pay me for it (not a hint, just a fact). I feel something is missing in this story... Google has very few sites linking to yours (~35 pages, mostly garbage pages), reports a huge number of indexed pages, but actually shows very few. Why? Hummingbird update or something else? A search for Twicsy links in twitter finds hardly anything, except the site name in combinatio…

hmm, you've reaffirmed my suspicions. The image suggestions for a google search of Twicsy was just adult material.

The TechCrunch article in 2009 criticised the website for being creepy http://techcrunch.com/2009/06/19/twicsy-is-a-killer-and-kind...

"As you might imagine, this service pulls up a lot of slightly personal pics, such as couples being all cutesy together. Since you don’t know any of them, it’s slightly creepy. But hey, if they don’t want those seen, they shouldn’t be sharing them over Twitter in the first place."

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