HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

Pitch: We're replacing congress with voting software. We are running 70 candidates in the 2016 Congressional elections on our platform, if any of them get voted into office we'll take all bills before congress and put them on our site where each voter in that district gets one authenticated vote.

Question: In your experience, what's the most effective way for B2C company to educate users that you even exist?

I know that signups and conversions are an art, but more than all of that, just telling people that you have something new that they may not be searching for but could still dramatically improve their life. We will take any demographic that will have us, so we aren't picky on that front.

We have 100% week-over-week growth during election cycles, and 10-20% when it's not, so we know the message is received, we just want to get more people in the top of the funnel.

We are building a platform that allows anyone with a mobile phone to earn a living by performing discrete tasks.

Our platform aims to break down complex jobs into easily actionable items, that can be performed easily by anyone, anywhere.

The first vertical we are applying this to is reservations. The Loft Club (https://useloft.com) is a service that makes reservations for you at amazing restaurants every month on your preferred day, saving you the decisions and the hassle. Through our platform, we centralize restaurant recommendations and assignments, before farming out the logistics of making and manging them to our agents.

Our question is: Should we work on building out the generic platform and expand quickly into other verticals, or focus on building out The Loft Club and owning this space first? We've customers paying us for The Loft Club with the mild publicity it has received thus far.

Thanks!

Zhuang and Derrick

The problem: our focus is divided on two types of customers (we’ve even created two landing pages for each type)

1. Product/Engineering teams - they get asked a new question every day that attempts to keep tabs on the health of the project. Questions are a combo of “post-mortem” style questions (but asked as you build product) and around prediction markets (larger n make better predictions) (https://www.getsubcurrent.com/product)

2. HR/Employee Engagement - users get asked a well researched question every 2 weeks. Instead of long, annual surveys, you now get to keep a pulse on morale and culture. Participation is higher since it only takes a single click in your already existing tools to respond. (https://www.getsubcurrent.com)

We have a number of customers using our free beta - most are using it for option #2. A very small number have connected with #1, and while we think it has a lot of promise, we haven’t talked to enough people to know how it might need to change to achieve product/market fit. We are at a crossroads of needing to pick one to focus on, because the distraction is making it difficult for both to progress.

Today, this market niche is fragmented with high search costs for consumers. My marketplace will make it much easier for consumers to find and buy the products this this niche. Once off the ground, the marketplace will be a key source of customers for the merchants.

Consumers like the product, but the merchants are difficult to get on board. I find that the prevailing view is that the status quo is 'good enough'; merchants are conservative, and very few are early adopters.

Things I'm doing to address this:

1) Price for growth -- pricing based on a small flat fee that the merchant pays per transaction to align with value delivered, with first X transactions free (obviously I would prefer to charge a % of revenue, but that's a very, very hard sell with these particular merchants).

2) Provide the merchants with tools that help them run their business (i.e. give them reasons independent of the marketplace to use the app)

3) In-person visits to merchants. These are valuable for many reasons, and are only partially a sales call. These visits will always be something I do, but it doesn't scale enough to create a marketplace.

What strategies and tactics do you suggest to get merchants into the marketplace, to build up the supply-side?