Started writing a blog to document our startup experiences but no one visits it. Those that visit don't stay. Tried promotion through social media without success. Everyone said it will be easy to interact with those with similar interests. While not the aim to make a profit, currently no chance of making any traction, let alone profit from the blog. http://sparknlaunch.wordpress.com/
Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?
161–169 of 169 posts
Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?
#162I launched a Spanish site http://agrupados.biz which is a search engine for clasified ads in Paraguay. I learned Scala und Apache Lucene this way, now I'm hoping to get it at least covering its hosting costs. The site is up aprox. 3 month now and I had almost no visitors before paying Google. 2 days ago I started a Google AdWords campaign so people may find the site, I spend $2.62 so far and got 95 visitors and even…
Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?
#163PS: Anyways, this was very good as a personal challenge!
Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?
#164I started http://blisscontrol.com and http://notificationcontrol.com which won't be profitable.
Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?
#165I updated my circa 2007 website design last week to a more modernized look based on twitter bootstrap and my sales plummeted. Does that count?
Sometimes simple and ugly triumph? We read some marketing experiences of ugly banner adverts getting more click conversions than modern ones. 1 it's an odd one. http://sparknlaunch.wordpress.com/2012/02/02/keep-it-simple-...
It's an opinion of course, but I personally find the hacker news design to be dreadfully ugly; yet it's one of the sites I visit and interact with the most frequently. It's simple and very usable. A flashy modern design might make it look better, but if not done well it might also impede functionality, and thus make me visit it less often. And the obvious lack of pretense is psychologically satisfying. Simple and ugly is fine if it's functional.
Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?
#166We started http://www.fantasy5live.com – a real-time fantasy sports game for GAA, rugby and soccer. It's early days though.
One suggestion: Can you add the player details. May be on hover or on click. Also, I think site needs a bit more help in terms of what a user can do once he reaches the play page. May be a small tutorial or a help page might work. Out of curiosity, how do you keep track of the events? Do you have a live feed that you parse for certain phrases?
We are also adding a small tutorial as you suggest -- a number of users were asking "what do I do next" ;-)
The events are recorded manually at the moment and pushed to the users using Pusher.com. There are automated feeds but they are expensive.
Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?
#167Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?
#168Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for the suggestion. When I initially starting brainstorming on the idea, I had some Twitter integration included: auto-adding videos from your timeline (stolen from the Boxee folks) and hashtag "subscriptions"... but it started getting more convoluted to explain to people, so I thought I'd start more simply with just allowing folks to subscribe to "shows". Obviously my execution is not resonating with people (…
I understand what the leanback format is, but what is the placeshifting experience? Also: if you want to say thanks, just click the tiny triangle pointing up next to my name. That's how we give out happiness around here.