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My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love
111–120 of 165 posts
Re: My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love
#112Earlier 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…
Given how long you've been doing this, you've overlapped with my last startup, which had similar issues (Edgeio.com - long since defunct; we started development in 2005; sold off the assets end of 2007; the service was a classified aggregator). We got a huge amount of traffic via SEO, and lots of long tail traffic (e.g. we'd come up first for a huge number of zip codes). A big problem with our consumer site was atroc…
I agree wholeheartedly with a lot of what you are saying. As I talked to many many people this year about funding and strategy for Twicsy I came to the conclusion that Twicsy needs to start funneling the pictures into topical verticals. I think this would help for 3 reasons:
1. It would increase engagement with users. I think they would finally understand how Twicsy could be an interesting daily destination because they could just focus on their topics of interest.
2. It would allow us to more easily control the content quality and guard against porn, which would hopefully get us back into the good graces of top tier advertisers, and allow us to target said advertising more easily. For popular verticals we could do direct ad sales which would be >100x more lucrative than the crap we serve now.
3. I think it would facilitate media partnerships. I don't want to go into too much detail here, but I think that if number 1 holds true that we could land partners for popular verticals.
The problems are that I basically ran out of time and money to be able to execute on this. I need money for a complete redesign to shift the focus to the topical verticals, and I need more time to execute on the back end tech to fill these verticals (maybe 2 months). I didn't need a ton of money, but even in this "easy time to raise money" I was unable to find an investor. I think the biggest reason for this is that I don't have a well rounded team in place, so part of this year I spent looking for a partner to focus on the business side. I was hoping I would meet someone that saw the potential as I did and believed we were right on the verge of something big. But I never found that person.
On repeat visits, yes the number of people that visit us just once is quite high. 5.8 million of the past 7.6 million visits were just one-timers. But there were over 350k people that visited us 9 or more times last month. And there were over 35k people that visited us 201 or more times. So that gives me reason to believe there are some real Twicsy fans out there! And, as I repeatedly say, we are succeeding despite the glaring drawbacks and problems with the site. Imagine if it wasn't such a piece of crap!
Re: My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love
#113I 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.
Yes but you are an Internet god and nobody has heard of me :)
But, I am happy to be considered your cuz, even if it's the one you always beat up and lock in the shed.
Re: My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love
#114Launch 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).
Then I would have 50 ideas that I don't have time or money to execute on :)
Re: My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love
#115Question: 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.
On average less than 10 cents.
Re: My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love
#116Why would you need funding? Your product seems "finished" and you have a ton of users. You just need to monetize better than crappy ads
Because I have 2 kids and I can't afford to work for no salary anymore! And the site needs a redesign.
Re: My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ?
If I knew that would probably make me even more sad!
My gut says I would probably at least triple revenue if I could serve Adsense. Which would be enough to pay myself a bad salary while I continue the fight.
Re: My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love
#118Why would you need funding? Your product seems "finished" and you have a ton of users. You just need to monetize better than crappy ads
Because I have 2 kids and I can't afford to work for no salary anymore! And the site needs a redesign.
Just some honest constructive feedback here.
Kinda just seems like an excuse to me...I don't have kids, so I can't empathize, however, it couldn't take THAT much time to work on monetization strategies. 6 million uniques on a consistent basis is pretty substantial attention, and attention = power, nowadays. Plus, why would an investor want to throw any more money at you when you've already somehow dropped well over a million bucks? I think if you just put some elbow grease in, you'd make it work.
Re: My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
The answer to this question determines how much you can afford to either outsource or invest in internal deployment of porn detection. Also, hi Chris!
Hi John! We do not download images so porn detection would be a huge endeavor.
Amazon Mechanical Turk could help with this.