Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to Kill a Startup Idea with Google Keyword Planner and AdWords: A Case Study

psl.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 193 posts

Re: How to Kill a Startup Idea with Google Keyword Planner and AdWords: A Case Study

#121

Post by patmorgan23 »

awb wrote: post #93
rubyn00bie wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I was right there with you, thinking it was a completely shit idea, but a little math shows how it at least popped up on the radar (and I don't think its quite so bad myself after some thought): 100,000 music instructors, $60 per hour, at 365 days per year is roughly: $2.19 billion gross revenue per year-hour in the segment. Assuming, the average hours per day are like 3.5 (I can't imagine folks doing this are g…

$60/hr and booking 3.5hrs per day all 365 days of the year are all really high estimates IMO. That's $76k/year. My guess is that only the top 1% of music tutors are making that much per year. And only 100k tutors in the US is an incredibly small market.

Yeah booking 10-15 hrs a week at $35/hr for 40 weeks would probably be a much more representative sample (Thats $14,000/year per person on the low end)

Re: How to Kill a Startup Idea with Google Keyword Planner and AdWords: A Case Study

#122

Post by tobr »

This might come off as awfully naive, but this doesn’t sit right with me:

> XYLO's mobile music lesson technology is the easiest way to learn new music, right from the comfort of your home. Our platform can teach your child any instrument on any schedule, and let them replay lessons forever.

As far as I understand, this is... a complete lie? You just made some crap up to see if you can make people click?

Re: How to Kill a Startup Idea with Google Keyword Planner and AdWords: A Case Study

#123

Post by patmorgan23 »

tacon wrote: post #108
shiftpgdn wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But music lessons are an ongoing (hopefully) expense. If your pockets are deep enough you can run out all the other players and capture the market.

The lessons are an ongoing expense, but the principals will rather quickly eliminate the middle man marketplace after meeting and being happy with the connection.

Unless you can provide other useful services to help the teacher to manage thier students. Maybe scheduling, accounting, payments.

Re: How to Kill a Startup Idea with Google Keyword Planner and AdWords: A Case Study

#124

Post by hobofan »

ssivark wrote: post #105
rubyn00bie wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I was right there with you, thinking it was a completely shit idea, but a little math shows how it at least popped up on the radar (and I don't think its quite so bad myself after some thought): 100,000 music instructors, $60 per hour, at 365 days per year is roughly: $2.19 billion gross revenue per year-hour in the segment. Assuming, the average hours per day are like 3.5 (I can't imagine folks doing this are g…

> Assuming they could earn a 20% stake in 100% of the market, that's like $1.53bn. That makes no sense. Why would/should instructors+students continue to give them 20% commission for follow-up classes beyond the first one? It seems like just wishful thinking. The app store situation is very unusual (monopoly/monopsony), and does not apply in this context.

By providing some small value-add products that are not possible easy for individual instructors to provide, but customers like to see. E.g. nicer scheduling of lessons or a way to share sheet music with the customers?

Re: How to Kill a Startup Idea with Google Keyword Planner and AdWords: A Case Study

#125

Post by r_deckard »

woutr_be wrote: post #116
jmull3n wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would only need to be paired with one maid though.

Correct, and if that maid is a match, you proceed. How is that different from a dating site? In theory they only have to match you with one other person. But my main point was; on dating sites the middle man is almost always cut out instantly. Usually you try to immediately exchange numbers, and then proceed from there.

You probably need to go back to the dating site multiple times until you finally found "the one". Exchanging numbers and using the dating site service, again and again, multiple times.

Whereas when you're looking for a maid, you probably only need to exchange number once, and that maid will probably suit your need just fine for a really long time.

Re: How to Kill a Startup Idea with Google Keyword Planner and AdWords: A Case Study

#126

Post by Iv »

crikli wrote: post #21

So...to me this article illustrates the dramatic differences in objective and mentality between bootstrappers and VCs. This VC looks at this idea, figures out that in order to own the market and make $fuckton, they'd have to spend > $fuckton. Decides to bail. As a bootstrapper of businesses, I look at this case study and go "well yeah of course it'll take $fuckton because you're haven't focused on a narrow enough nic…

Totally makes sense for both sides really.

VCs look at this and are like "We can't do that with run-off-the-mill webdevs and marketers". And they have a formula to express what to expect from this reasonable effort model.

Comes a founder with awesome experience in pedagogy, a reputation in, say, Montessori teaching, and publishing records. She knows 10 musicians who could potentially teach, 100 potential students to bootstrap the idea.

VCs re-reun the numbers with these new assumption and discover a potentially ten times higher return after Q1.

VCs and bootstrapers and founders make different assumptions in efforts and time and need each other, fit different niches.

Re: How to Kill a Startup Idea with Google Keyword Planner and AdWords: A Case Study

#127

Post by arnaudsm »

treebornfrog wrote: post #83
arnaudsm wrote: post #9

It's crazy how markets saturate quickly online. You really need a large marketing budget and/or network effect to triumph nowadays, product quality is not differentiating enough. I am scared for the future, this will inevitably lead in harder-to-break monopolies. I worked for an entire year on a next-gen comparison engine (picked.cc if you want to check it out), and even with exciting user feedback and crazy conversi…

Neat idea, I created something similar years ago but didn't know how to market it. What's your strategy to get users?

I tried every single trick in the book : SEA is too expensive. Word-to-mouth needs more critical mass. Website is not sexy enough to get press and backlinks. Blackhat SEO is out of question.

My only hope is to rebrand the website as a carbon comparison engine, which will make it easier to sell it to the mainstream media. Surfing trends is often the best solution.

Re: How to Kill a Startup Idea with Google Keyword Planner and AdWords: A Case Study

#128

Post by onion2k »

hobofan wrote: post #124
ssivark wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Assuming they could earn a 20% stake in 100% of the market, that's like $1.53bn. That makes no sense. Why would/should instructors+students continue to give them 20% commission for follow-up classes beyond the first one? It seems like just wishful thinking. The app store situation is very unusual (monopoly/monopsony), and does not apply in this context.

By providing some small value-add products that are not possible easy for individual instructors to provide, but customers like to see. E.g. nicer scheduling of lessons or a way to share sheet music with the customers?

Very few people would give up 20% of their income for "some small value-add products."

Re: How to Kill a Startup Idea with Google Keyword Planner and AdWords: A Case Study

#129

Post by vi-mode »

A wall of text intended as smart content marketing to get some awareness for a rather unknown investment firm or incubator--Crunchbase didn't show any raised funds, so I don't call them VC. The long, over-polite text, the fake landing, the ad test weren't required in the first place.

Why:

The immediate answer every experienced VC would give is a simple 'no, this isn't a VC case' without all this fuzz and waste of time.

This market is useless for VCs because it's prone to disintermediation. Once people form a long-term business relationship, it's easy and reasonable to kick-out the middlemen (eg Homejoy). Marketplaces without long-term relationships don't face this problem (eg Airbnb, Uber).

Disintermediation is a hard problem nobody solved. 101 of investing.

Edit: Just saw another user posted the same. What is interesting, PSL didn't answer to that user's thread which could be interpreted as approval. So, PSL's post shows well that most investors are not per se smarter because they invest money. They're just humans like all of us trying to get free reach for a day with 'random' blog posts.

Re: How to Kill a Startup Idea with Google Keyword Planner and AdWords: A Case Study

#130

Post by vi-mode »

lowdose wrote: post #3

So these guys have to read up on some articles about multisided marketplaces which what they were testing. Starting a matching platform between consumers and teachers is not a feasible plan because this is a longer term relationship and a platform is easily cut out. A platform like uber works because nobody has a regular cab driver. Supply and demand matching is also terrible for dog walking platforms. Don't spend ti…

Just wrote a similar piece like yours which brought up another thought: Do you think disintermediation is solvable when it's a BTB (so all parties are businesses) and you put heavy penalties on disintermediation?
Post reply on HN