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HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

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Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#11

Post by radicalbyte »

edibleEnergy wrote: post #2

Hey Jared and Trevor, BugReplay ( http://www.bugreplay.com ) is a bug reporting tool in the form of a browser extension that captures a screencast of the user’s actions synced with network traffic, javascript errors and other browser data. What's the best way to grow your early user base? Ideally we'd like people who are going to use BugReplay at their jobs and open source endeavors, but we want to keep it relatively…

What is your target market? Developers & QA, right? Not end customers?

The copy on your site is technical + imho too long. I'm a tech lead so get it, but if I want to buy your product I'm going to have to convince a PHB that it's worth spending money on. They're going to run for the hills when the headline is "records screen usage javascript errors and network".

As a potential customer: if this could be self-hosted and runs on Windows then it's a very interesting product.

If I can deploy this, live, as part of my site, then it's more valuable for me. Again, it must be self-hosted (data protection!) - which is the reason I don't use the other tools. But giving my users the ability to record the process leading up to an error they see is fantastic.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#12

Post by srikieonline »

Hi Jared & Trevor, Thank you for giving us this opportunity to discuss our ideas with you.

I am the founder of http://www.pnyxter.com - a video (only) based debate and discussion app.

My question is about product-market fit.

A user can create topic and upload a video selfie talking on the topic or respond to other topics via video selfie. The app does not have provision of text comments at all - only video responses.

I've invited several friends and family for private beta, and its been 10 days now and only 1 of my friend dared to create a video.

I also shared the link on FB and linked in and got several views, but no one created a topic. I also did a FB ad for 2 days - no luck here too. Is this a clear indication of product - market misfit? Or is it too early to conclude?

Or should I shift my focus only on professional and amateur debaters of various debate clubs in cities, universities, schools etc.

I do understand the privacy issues of showing video selfie - but I've given provision of a good privacy control (or at least I think its good).

Video based opinions are already being posted by users in Facebook and youtube - but do not have this consolidated grouping of all video discussions on a topic in one place. Youtube tried video response feature and closed it in 2013 due to low engagement - but of course youtube is a very generic video site - not all videos needs video responses/discusisons/debates.

Thanks!!

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#13

Post by cddotdotslash »

Hi, thank you both for doing this. I've been working on a project on and off for about two years now which I finally launched as a beta last year. It's called CloudSploit (https://cloudsploit.com) and is a service designed to allow users to continuously scan their AWS accounts for vulnerabilities (account-level risks that could lead to a compromise). AWS has some security products, and their are certainly competitors in the space, but we've heard from countless customers that our price point and features are ideal for them. My goal is to now move this out of beta and to actually advertise it.

My question for you is: what challenges are there around marketing for security-focused products? Of course, trust is a key factor, but are there other things I should consider? I'm thinking of Twitter ads, but I'm sure there are better options between that and cold emailing. Thanks again!

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#14

Post by edibleEnergy »

radicalbyte wrote: post #11
edibleEnergy wrote: post #2

Hey Jared and Trevor, BugReplay ( http://www.bugreplay.com ) is a bug reporting tool in the form of a browser extension that captures a screencast of the user’s actions synced with network traffic, javascript errors and other browser data. What's the best way to grow your early user base? Ideally we'd like people who are going to use BugReplay at their jobs and open source endeavors, but we want to keep it relatively…

What is your target market? Developers & QA, right? Not end customers? The copy on your site is technical + imho too long. I'm a tech lead so get it, but if I want to buy your product I'm going to have to convince a PHB that it's worth spending money on. They're going to run for the hills when the headline is "records screen usage javascript errors and network". As a potential customer: if this could be self-hosted a…

Thanks for the feedback and for checking out our site.

We are not targeting end customers directly but hope that at some point it would be a service that a B2C would offer to their customers.

It’s really hard to describe our product without being technical but we will revisit it. Any ideas?

We are exploring how to run this self hosted, it is entirely possible but we haven't gotten there yet. As for data protection it's an issue we take very seriously. All network data is stored encrypted, and all reports are private unless explicitly set to public. We are also working on ways to obfuscate the traffic before it’s ever uploaded.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#15

Post by lpaone »

Hi Jared and Trevor,

http://www.stroomnews.com is a bootstrapped breaking news and events focused sharing platform, that allows live-streaming and pre-captured video and image sharing through our mobile app and website. We are also working on an enterprise solution for the news industry that ties into our platform. Our B2C app was released this past Fall, but has shown little traction and we have had discussions with a major news media company about our enterprise product. We believe that signing up users for our enterprise solution will also help grow our B2C platform.

We also have an idea in the area of video compression (both founders have experience in this industry) that we believe could be huge in the streaming video industry. Our initial tests have shown very promising results, but we have not had much time to work on this due to focusing on our platform and enterprise product. The success of this tech does not only provide a large advantage for our business, but opens us up to many other industries and opportunities.

As our ability to bootstrap dwindles (due to amount of savings), do we continue along our path and try to get revenue as soon as we can by working on our enterprise product or do we spend time trying to raise money so we can focus on our tech, which may not produce anything product worthy for a much longer time (or ever as it is still in the research stage)?

Thanks for your time!

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#16

Post by plehoux »

Hi Jared and Trevor,

I'm a co-founder at https://www.missiveapp.com, a collaborative email client (Slack meets Gmail). We've launched our open beta last January and are actively recruiting beta users.

We're a fully bootstrapped team of 4 working from Quebec city, Canada. We were able to bootstrap Missive with the $ we rake in from another project we launched three years ago called ConferenceBadge.com [1].

My question is, do you think it's a mistake to run two businesses in parallel?

Right now 85% of our time is invested in Missive even though it's bringing $0 in revenue.

Our philosophy is that if we were to look for funding, we would have to invest at least 15% of our time on fundraising and investor relationships.

We also believe that looking for investment before market fit is a recipe for disaster (need not to forget that we are not from/in the valley).

[1] https://medium.com/@plehoux/successfully-bootstrapped-a-prod...).

[2] What are chat conversations doing in an email client? Here are few examples of cool possibilities they enable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcRQhGfT620

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#17

Post by BinaryResult »

Hey Guys,

I am one of the Co-founders of Disco Melee (https://beta.discomelee.com/hub). We are a live streaming social network designed around the needs of gamers. You could think of us like if Twitch and Facebook had a baby who liked to party and was eyeing up Reddit for a future fling.

The gamers that find us tend to rave about our overall vision, low latency and other base features like IM system, streamer storefronts, and free donate/sub buttons for all. The problem however is that (except for our hardcore believers) they don't seem stick around very long due to the pull of network effects from the established players. What strategies could you recommend for overcoming network effects to the point where we can start generating our own? Thanks!

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#18

Post by dcole2929 »

Hey Jared & Trevor

I'm working on a few different projects all of which I think could become viable companies but having a hard time deciding which to focus on. I've already seen interest from relevant parties in each of the separate projects.

I think the hardest one but also the one with the most growth potential would be a project I'm working on to provide management tools (similar to the stuff a ceo might use) to high level government officials. However, with the way that government contracts are handled I wonder if this is even a reasonable industry to target.

Secondly I have two different projects that focus on College Students, where I would be selling solutions to the Colleges themselves. The first project is an art application that allows users to upload art in any medium and be seen by other students. This would allow them to easily build fan bases by taking advantage of pre-existing school connections.

The other idea is similar but focuses on user generated events. It tackles the question of how does one find interesting things to do, in a new area, when you don't know anyone. And has certain measures in place to help alleviate the awkwardness of trying to join pre-existing groups.

Thanks

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#19

Post by downandout »

Hi Jared and Trevor,

I am working on a marketplace through which publishers and journalists can sell the ability to be quoted and linked to in an article to the highest bidder. A realtor, for example, might be willing to pay to be quoted and linked to in an article about how a city's real estate market has been accelerating.

My question is how to get started with marketing it. While the growth hacking crowd would say to simply spam a bunch of reporters to get inventory, I have found in other ventures that people absolutely hate receiving any form of unsolicited email with any kind of pitch.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#20

Post by nightpool »

yurivish wrote: post #5

Hi Trevor and Jared, http://weavesilk.com is a side project of mine for many years. I put out a brand new version of the iOS app this month and am thinking about developing it further but find it very hard to decide what direction to go. The website is popular, and people love Silk, but for different reasons: some find it relaxing and meditative, others like that it closes the gap between their artistic ability and t…

Wow, closing the gap between artistic ability and taste is actually a really good way to describe how weavesilk feels to me. Thanks for making it!
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