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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

#131

Post by rsiqueira »

dumbfounder wrote: post #42
birken wrote: post #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 (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…

Are you banned from Adsense just because of the porn pics/videos? Or have you been banned for other reasons (e.g. not having your own content, making duplicate content from twitter, copyright issues, dmca, gambling, site quality or other) ?

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

#132

Post by NovemberWest »

jonny_eh wrote: post #101
NovemberWest wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's non-sense, people (and their pets) will continue to get cancer, even if a cure is found. The Nobel prize alone would be worth it.

Please note that "cure cancer" is in quotes. I am speaking from (bitter) firsthand experience about some other condition.

I don't expect to ever get the Nobel Prize. I mostly get called crazy.

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

#133

Post by robomartin »

And this, boys and girls, is what entrepreneurship looks like more often than not. The "over the weekend" stories are rare corner cases. In the vast majority of cases you have to be prepared to slog it out for an extended period of time before you start to see success. And that's one of the huge reasons for which most new businesses fail. Not everyone has the intestinal fortitude to, in the face of adversity, keep pushing forward.

@dumbfounder

First of all, I wish you had chosen a different handle on HN. You are not dumb at all. You are, in fact, a real asset to anyone who might want to launch a startup or get behind a difficult idea. I don't know if you project will ultimately succeed. Hard to tell. You, on the other hand, are an absolute success.

I know that from your current perspective it might seem you wasted a decade in this journey. I simply don't see it that way.

You've received plenty of design and functional advise on this thread with regards to twicsy. The first thing I thought about was something that came up in a discussion on HN a couple of days ago. Here's my short comment on that thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6647818

In my view that still rings true for twicsy. In other words, you have to deliver value that is not found elsewhere and that people are willing to pay for. Im my post I speak of the fact that the vast majority of news websites are regurgitated versions of the news item source, whereas there are a very few who provide you with real incremental value by taking the time to research and give you perspective.

If you are still interested in making twicsy a success perhaps you should start thinking laterally rather than vertically. In other words, don't stay on your current path. Explore other paths. I know that's easier said than done. For example: How might corporate marketing programs be able to use your service? Celebrities? Bloggers? How about a path to licensing some of these pictures? Not through you, through whoever owns the rights with you making a small percentage on the sale.

Don't give up. Pivot.

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

#134

Post by NovemberWest »

chacham15 wrote: post #106
jonny_eh wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's non-sense, people (and their pets) will continue to get cancer, even if a cure is found. The Nobel prize alone would be worth it.

I think what he means is that the ratio of the profits to the cost to discover a cure is much smaller than in other industries.

What she meane is that wellness is not a welcome topic in most circles, nor easily monetized. Everyone wants a new drug, literally or figuratively -- a quick fix, easy answer. No one wants to eat right, exercise, make dramatic lifestyle changes, etc. Wellness looks more like religious edicts than it does medicine.

This I cannot comprehend. Compared to the drugs I have gotten off and the potential surgeries I have evaded, what I am currently doing is a pleasant picnic. But trying to share that info has gotten me mostly open hostility. So I took the site down.

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

#135

Post by rehack »

dumbfounder wrote: post #112
vidarh wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> It would allow us to more easily control the content quality and guard against pr0n, which would hopefully get us back into the good graces of top tier advertisers

I bet this is your main problem. Having experience with a site which has similar numbers (less in fact), I was surprised to know that you are able to generate only so much, as to cover hosting expense. And on that related note, which is another "top tier advertiser" network other than Google's?

The only other reason I can think of is you having a very high bounce rate, something above 90%?

Sorry, for being (inadvertently) blunt. But this is my area of some experience and also interest.

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

#136

Post by cinquemb »

dumbfounder wrote: post #110
lgas wrote: post #102

Earlier 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.

Could you load the images from the urls into memory and try out open source code[0] that detects porn (I'm sure there's probably something better out there, but this was just a quick find on github)?

I'm not sure how helpful it might be (false positives and what not), but it could help give you more numbers to quantify whats going on?

[0] https://github.com/FreebieStock/PHP-Image-Pornographic-Conte...

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

#137

Post by pnathan »

wsieroci wrote: post #122
dumbfounder wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://distillerylab.com Sounds boring to most probably, but I love to play with data! And we have real clients!

I do not know what distillerylab.com does. On the site I found only general info about it. Could you say more, what you are doing there?

It's a BI platform for analyzing social media. Unfortunately, it's not presented very well.

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

#138

Post by dumbfounder »

rehack wrote: post #135
dumbfounder wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> It would allow us to more easily control the content quality and guard against pr0n, which would hopefully get us back into the good graces of top tier advertisers I bet this is your main problem. Having experience with a site which has similar numbers (less in fact), I was surprised to know that you are able to generate only so much, as to cover hosting expense. And on that related note, which is another "top tier…

The bounce rate is 60.5%. We do have a lot of international traffic which adds to the monetization challenge.

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

#139

Post by cmac2992 »

dumbfounder wrote: post #116
cmac2992 wrote: post #71

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

Because I have 2 kids and I can't afford to work for no salary anymore! And the site needs a redesign.

I certainly understand needing to support your family. But I understand why investors are so leery. Additional $$$ in the business and a redesign would probably result in more users but probably not a substantial increase in revenue. Your monetization strategy is not working at 6 million(impressive btw) users then why would it work at 12 million users. There is a very small ROI with the current strategy. Properly monetizing 6 million users would result in alot more than just beer money.

what you've done is awesome. With a few tweaks to the business model you could generate real revenue without needing to raise investment capital.

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

#140

Post by jaredmck »

krapp wrote: post #127
dpweb wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forget Twitter Bootstrap, if people cared what a site looks like - explain Craigslist.. You may want to rethink the ads on the home page. Text link below the banner center, remove the image boxes. You should be getting at least $3-4 per 1k imps. Maybe dropping the 'no ads when sign in'. Show ads to everybody, but very few ads. 1 per page, maybe 2, but that's it.

How much money does Craigslist actually make, though? Also not every Bootstrap site has to look Boostrappy, people just almost never bother to change the colors at all. I agree with moving the ads though. Users who've shown enough interest to click into a page might be more amenable to target advertising.

Craigslist makes somewhere in the range of $100-150 million a year, they charge $25-75 for job ads in major markets and $10 for broker-listed apartments in NYC.
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