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HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#11

Post by 3Dpuzzlepiece »

Howdy! How would you suggest marketing a new service to a hard-to-reach audience?

Brief overview: I would like to market local, weekend yoga retreats to professionals in the oil and gas, energy, and finance industries. No long absences from work or family, and no long-distance travel. The startup is set up in Houston, but can operate in any city in the USA. Lots of different marketing and advertising methods are being tried (online groups, directories, online forums, linkedin, etc.), but I am pretty much throwing things to the wall and seeing what sticks. Any suggestions are appreciated. Thanks!

startup: bodyhugs: hug your body with movement and care

website: http://www.bodyhugs.org/

local health and wellness retreats in the USA

Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#12

Post by Smirnoff »

Hi Kevin and Sam,

We are about to finish building a table reservation system (think OpenTable or SeatMe but on steroids). Although it's a "Me Too" product, we will offer features that our competitors can't or won't, e.g. bigger API control for restaurants, various hooks to extend the service such as food delivery, pre-paid reservations, and ticketing for tables to name a few. Essentially, we will offer an iPhone/iPad app for restaurants to manage their reservations/orders, while their guests can use an iPhone-app/Android-app/Search-Engine/Restaurant's-Website to make those reservations.

I have a question about a launch/pricing strategy:

- Is it sane to do a freemium model for our product? For example, restaurants would be able download our Manager app in App Store for free but it would have limited offline features. If restaurants want to accept online orders, then they must get that feature via in-app purchase. If restaurant wants to incorporate discount cards, then it's a different in-app purchase. This logic applies to all different features.

- Or should we go through a regular sales process, i.e. sign up restaurants one-by-one, charge them via check/credit-card/etc and escape Apple's 30% cut?

Thanks in advance and I hope it will be helpful for other startups that are in a similar position.

Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#13

Post by trsohmers »

Hi Kevin and Sam,

May be a bit out of your area, but I'm curious about your thoughts. Even though we are in "Silicon" Valley, there has been very little when it comes to new semiconductors investments. I'm the co founder and CEO of REX Computing (http://rexcomputing.com), a new semiconductor startup working on a super energy efficient processor architecture. We've actually raised seed funding, and I'm interested in what you think about the semiconductor space in general (and its future in the valley), plus ideas on how we can thrive as a very low level hardware company in a primarily software world.

Thanks!

Edit: One other thing I should note is that we are also big on software! We're utilizing a lot of open source projects to help build up our compiler and other software tools. Obviously hardware without software to run on it is pretty useless.

Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#14

Post by marcuslongmuir »

Hi Kevin and Sam,

We’re MinoHubs (https://www.minohubs.com) and we build commercial and community tools for software projects. The barrier to building a successful software project is high - apart from writing the code, you need to build a community and potentially set up some commercialisation (backing, licenses, support etc.) which isn’t an easy task.

We provide customizable hubs that give projects:

Commercial tools

- Paid support - ability to offer on-demand consultation to businesses and developers.

- Licensing - ability to sell one time and recurring licenses to businesses and developers (coming soon).

- Backing - monthly contributions. In return, backers get more visibility in Discussions.

Community tools

- Powerful discussions with voting.

- Announcements - emails and notifications to project followers.

From Kevin’s initial feedback (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9746206) we understand that we need to be better at:

1. Leading the user through things to do after creating a hub.

2. Showcasing the benefit of using MinoHubs.

We’re working on those right now.

Our challenge is that, as Kevin also pointed out, we have a lot of features, but we’re also trying to appeal to an audience that would use different combinations of features; open source software, commercial software or projects that want to just use community features.

How do we reconcile that users want a wide variety of functionality with the issue that this might present too many features for us to convey concisely?

Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#15

Post by undeterred »

Hi,

Office Our provides a portal for investors to interact with their top 5 potential investments. "Separate the wheat from the chaff."©

At Office Our an investor creates a post (or "bulletin") inviting the community to pitch their startup. Users vote on the "wheat" and the top 5 earn the right to receive a response. The investors can then manage their bulletin and follow-up outside of our platform.

For this we charge a simple, flat $5 fee to each investor per potential investment per month on an annualized basis in the form of credits which are distributed by each of the user's votes in batches of baker's dozens. "Investing - simplified"©

I look forward to your feedback.

Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#16

Post by gmarx »

Stealth mode side project is software for creating data entry forms for clinical medicine and research. I have, uniquely, solved the discrete data with ontology problem in healthcare and healthcare analytics. The question I would like to discuss is what is my point of entry into the market; what kind of customers would be best targets as early adopters?

Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#17

Post by rohanmmit »

Hi, We are developing a self-checkout mobile application that allows consumers to scan items in a store and then pay with just their phone. Our app will use geolocation to identify which store the consumer is in and then automatically connect with the store’s point of sale system to ensure payment.

We built a prototype last week and went to stores and a retail conference this week. We are having problems convincing stores to adopt out product as they are very concerned with shoplifting.

Thanks, Rohan

Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#19

Post by pmoorcraft »

I launched Tech Talks and Books (www.ttbooks.io) about three weeks and just got my first 600 subscribers. It's similar to product hunt but for book and videos about tech and the community of submitters is more restricted than PH.

I'd like to discuss two things:

1- Signal vs Noise in online communities: Since you've been heavily involved in Reddit (Sam), I'd like to know how what your opinion in curating content vs. having an algorithm sift through the noise. We see companies like netflix and ph (allegedly?) combining big data with human curation and having a lot of success, so my question is: Should online communities invest in curation or big data? Is there a trend towards one or the other?

2- Monetisation: I'm having a hard time monetising this community. Since I'm looking to bootstrap it, its crucial that I get monetisation right so I was wondering if you had any tips on monetising communities?

Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#20

Post by deepGem »

We want to bring real time and accurate air pollution data to people on their mobile phones, using a network of low cost, solar powered sensors deployed at key road locations. Our sensor network will be more accurate and cost less than the EPA monitoring stations.

Help needed - We think that either the government or certain enterprises will pay for this data (since they already are spending money on such technology). What is the best way to validate these channels?

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