Ask HN: looking for fresh ideas, my startup is not working

#1

Post by phineas » Wed, Oct 24, 2012, 9:59 PM UTC

I have been bootstrapping a startup for about a year. The startup has pivoted twice but it is not monetizable as I see it.

My original idea: My concept is to help people solve their emergencies (not life or death but something that defines a motivated buyer) in finding products or services. I go on Twitter and search for tweets like “back hurts, anyone know a good chiropractor” or “my phone cracked anyone know where to get it fixed.” I would call or email the businesses in their area that could solve their problem. In this email I would say that I have a lead and ask them to reply. All the replies would go on a page where the buyer would be able to easily send messages to the vendors which I had hoped would turn into a chat.

The problems: Maybe I am finding products for people that are priced too low because people are not willing to pay for our searching and businesses are not willing to pay for the lead. If I could validate the lead it could help but thats hard to do with people off Twitter.

Looking to the future: I would love if I could somehow transition from people off Twitter to the corporate market where I could hopefully charge more and when the products/services searched for would be more repeatable. Do you think a corporation has any needs/emergencies that could be filled regularly?

The value I provide: I save time and frustration in searching, calling, and emailing. I also provide multiple vendor options during an emergency. At one point I had hoped that I could even get the people to negotiate on prices with the vendors or maybe that the vendors would compete a bit for the lead and offer discounts.

Any help is appreciated. If the answer is drop it and move on to something fresh, it is welcome if you could provide a new possible startup idea. Thank you.

Re: Ask HN: looking for fresh ideas, my startup is not working

#2

Post by manglav » Wed, Oct 24, 2012, 10:26 PM UTC

Your examples explain it. “back hurts, anyone know a good chiropractor”, and "my phone cracked anyone know where to get it fixed.” People trend to trust other people, so why would they trust you? What curation and validation are you doing on the businesses? If you are rating them, what are you basing your ratings on? These are questions that I think about when I hear your business. Also, it sounds complicated, and non-scalable.

What you can do: if the people are already on twitter, go to them. Create a twitter-bot that people can follow, and it automatically follows you back. When someone says "my back hurts", you use natural language processing on their tweets, and recommend a solution to them, gluing together Yelp, Angie's List, or anything else that might be relevant. Offer three months free, if they like it, they pay a monthly subscription. If not, take them off a list. When successful enough with consumers, you MAY be able to turn around and start charging businesses, but then, you have the responsibilities of curation, and I think it's easier to let companies who specialize in that ( like Yelp or Angie's List) do that, and you piggy back off them. Check if you're allowed to use their data, and if they charge for it.

Re: Ask HN: looking for fresh ideas, my startup is not working

#3

Post by jkaykin » Wed, Oct 24, 2012, 11:17 PM UTC

This is a great idea but as manglav said, people trust the opinions of their network so it will be hard to get users to use it when they can ask their friends/colleagues.

Also the solution manglav provides, perfect, if you can do it that would make the process much simpler but it would take a lot of work. Check out http://chirpify.com, they do something interesting with NLP on Twitter.

If you want to work on something else, I would be happy to talk to you more about what I am working on. Email is on my profile.

Re: Ask HN: looking for fresh ideas, my startup is not working

#4

Post by pedalpete » Wed, Oct 24, 2012, 11:56 PM UTC

manglav wrote: post #2

Your examples explain it. “back hurts, anyone know a good chiropractor”, and "my phone cracked anyone know where to get it fixed.” People trend to trust other people, so why would they trust you? What curation and validation are you doing on the businesses? If you are rating them, what are you basing your ratings on? These are questions that I think about when I hear your business. Also, it sounds complicated, and no…

Another way of doing this might be to look at that persons friends on facebook and see if somebody has liked a page associated with 'chiropractor', then the referral essentially comes from friends.

Re: Ask HN: looking for fresh ideas, my startup is not working

#5

Post by brudgers » Thu, Oct 25, 2012, 12:44 AM UTC

If a human has to search, call and email, the business model won't scale quickly enough to ever fit the Silicon Valley idea of a startup.

Likewise if the business model is addressing unique customer needs one at a time.

There's not much value in leads for chiropractors, either. Their business grows largely by word of mouth or broadcast marketing.

If you're going to leads one at a time, the sales have to be big. The problems have to be non-trivial, and the actual research more valuable than the localized results from Bing.

Re: Ask HN: looking for fresh ideas, my startup is not working

#6

Post by phineas » Thu, Oct 25, 2012, 2:03 AM UTC

brudgers wrote: post #5

If a human has to search, call and email, the business model won't scale quickly enough to ever fit the Silicon Valley idea of a startup. Likewise if the business model is addressing unique customer needs one at a time. There's not much value in leads for chiropractors, either. Their business grows largely by word of mouth or broadcast marketing. If you're going to leads one at a time, the sales have to be big. The p…

On the point that is will not scale quickly. I wrote a bot that searches through various directories and pulls off email addresses, so its an automated process that does my work and emailing. I don't trust my bot yet so I still check over everything it does. The only reason I mention calling is if they want something done really fast and they are willing to pay for it. I understand completely that using a human to call is not scaleable. Its still a way to gauge my market and get customer feedback.

Re: Ask HN: looking for fresh ideas, my startup is not working

#7

Post by phineas » Thu, Oct 25, 2012, 2:33 AM UTC

manglav wrote: post #2

Your examples explain it. “back hurts, anyone know a good chiropractor”, and "my phone cracked anyone know where to get it fixed.” People trend to trust other people, so why would they trust you? What curation and validation are you doing on the businesses? If you are rating them, what are you basing your ratings on? These are questions that I think about when I hear your business. Also, it sounds complicated, and no…

This is absolutely fantastic feedback and advice and it gives me a new possible road to take. Thank you. I might be misunderstanding something, but the main thing I wanted to do which a tweet-bot wouldn't is start conversations with the "bad back" person and the chiropractors. Even one or two messages back and forth could answer a question where a bot would come short, for instance "I hurt a muscle around my left shoulder blade lifting weights. Is this a normal athletic case for you to work on? If so would I need an initial x-ray? Do you take insurance and when is the earliest you can fit me in?" If the hurting back person was able to get a few chiropractors to answer these question then they could make a much better buying decision.

Re: Ask HN: looking for fresh ideas, my startup is not working

#8

Post by manglav » Thu, Oct 25, 2012, 3:50 AM UTC

phineas wrote: post #7

manglav wrote: post #2

Your examples explain it. “back hurts, anyone know a good chiropractor”, and "my phone cracked anyone know where to get it fixed.” People trend to trust other people, so why would they trust you? What curation and validation are you doing on the businesses? If you are rating them, what are you basing your ratings on? These are questions that I think about when I hear your business. Also, it sounds complicated, and no…

This is absolutely fantastic feedback and advice and it gives me a new possible road to take. Thank you. I might be misunderstanding something, but the main thing I wanted to do which a tweet-bot wouldn't is start conversations with the "bad back" person and the chiropractors. Even one or two messages back and forth could answer a question where a bot would come short, for instance "I hurt a muscle around my left sho…

It seems like you're trying to apply a Business to Business (B2B) mentality to a business to consumer relationship. Is there a reason for that? Is that your background? The problem is, business to consumer is low margin, high volume. You need to find a way to make that work.

It sounds like you want to do a LawPivot, for general consumer application. You want to build a MARKET, which is the hardest thing imo to do in the startup world. Too many variables, and even with millions of dollars and a great founding team, you can fail (Airtime didn't fail, but for what they were hyped up as, I think it did). If you want to really do this, start with a small sector.

Btw, LawPivot would not work over tweets - it would ruin their professional presence (at least currently). Maybe you want to make a 411 tweet-bot of sorts? Where you tweet a question, and you answer it?

I feel as though you're hitting several different things at once, try to hit one thing, HARD.

Also, automate business to consumer, IN THE LONG TERM. Short term, anything goes. Mechanical Turk, you and a friend doing google searches after reading tweets, anything. Get paid, then automate. This is covered in "The Lean Startup", required reading.

That was just my stream of consciousness, thanks for reading!

Re: Ask HN: looking for fresh ideas, my startup is not working

#9

Post by phineas » Thu, Oct 25, 2012, 4:11 AM UTC

jkaykin wrote: post #3

This is a great idea but as manglav said, people trust the opinions of their network so it will be hard to get users to use it when they can ask their friends/colleagues. Also the solution manglav provides, perfect, if you can do it that would make the process much simpler but it would take a lot of work. Check out http://chirpify.com , they do something interesting with NLP on Twitter. If you want to work on somethi…

The one thing we have proven is that while people do trust their own network, they have been open to hearing from us. Off the top of my head, we convert maybe 40% of the time. By convert I mean getting someone to click on a link to our site from twitter.

Re: Ask HN: looking for fresh ideas, my startup is not working

#10

Post by phineas » Thu, Oct 25, 2012, 4:16 AM UTC

manglav wrote: post #8

phineas wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is absolutely fantastic feedback and advice and it gives me a new possible road to take. Thank you. I might be misunderstanding something, but the main thing I wanted to do which a tweet-bot wouldn't is start conversations with the "bad back" person and the chiropractors. Even one or two messages back and forth could answer a question where a bot would come short, for instance "I hurt a muscle around my left sho…

It seems like you're trying to apply a Business to Business (B2B) mentality to a business to consumer relationship. Is there a reason for that? Is that your background? The problem is, business to consumer is low margin, high volume. You need to find a way to make that work. It sounds like you want to do a LawPivot, for general consumer application. You want to build a MARKET, which is the hardest thing imo to do in…

I really want to thank you Manglav. You have helped me immensely. Your last reply is spot on. It is like LawPivot and most importantly I think I am failing because I am trying to build a MARKET. This really brings things into perspective for me. Building a MARKET is just not something I can do. Do you think there is way to find a specific niche in the market that I could start with? Also, I am curious as to your thoughts on Pinterest. It has no natural pre-existing market or at least I dont see how one reaches girls who like to create scrapbooks. Yet it succeeded. I am not saying I could do what they did. I am just curious as to how you would define their market.