My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love • Hacker News Board

Re: My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love

#161

Post by dumbfounder » Mon, Nov 04, 2013, 1:55 PM UTC

andrewhillman wrote: post #157

cmac2992 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I certainly understand needing to support your family. But I understand why investors are so leery. Additional $$$ in the business and a redesign would probably result in more users but probably not a substantial increase in revenue. Your monetization strategy is not working at 6 million(impressive btw) users then why would it work at 12 million users. There is a very small ROI with the current strategy. Properly mon…

As someone who is in "this space" and a product guy, @Dumbfounder, needs to refocus then rework the design. Its not much many to edit a decent psd designer then get it chopped off and ready for xhtml.I've done many Its a cheap way to get a slick new design in no time at all. Refine later. I have access to some who do high quality psd+css w/ good turn around time. You tell them what you want, toss around ideas and you…

A redesign is only a piece of the puzzle, it will not make the site suddenly fundable. I need the time to work on a few fundamental things to position the site to be more attractive to both users and investors, and time is money.

Re: My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love

#162

Post by billmalarky » Tue, Nov 05, 2013, 12:50 AM UTC

Axsuul wrote: post #56

I can heavily relate to this with one of my early projects, Jellibug. It aggregated celebrity pictures from Instagram, Twitter, etc and at one point had 1M+ pictures and 250k+ visitors/month. Except it didn't make money and became a "piece of shit startup I hate to love". I stopped working on it about a year ago and finally shut it down last month. Almost all traffic to it was organic, just like Twicsy. And it was mo…

I am feeling this so hard right now. Same situation except about double the traffic and yet still losing money.

Definitely looking into SAAS as my next project.

Re: My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love

#163

Post by billmalarky » Tue, Nov 05, 2013, 1:09 AM UTC

boonez123 wrote: post #141

More ads man! I had a site that had 1 million page views per day and we generated about $1500-$3000/day off the ads. Placement of the ad is imperative.

Can you email me? I've got a site that does high pageviews that I'm struggling to monetize.

Re: My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love

#164

Post by andrewhillman » Tue, Nov 05, 2013, 4:09 AM UTC

dumbfounder wrote: post #161

andrewhillman wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who is in "this space" and a product guy, @Dumbfounder, needs to refocus then rework the design. Its not much many to edit a decent psd designer then get it chopped off and ready for xhtml.I've done many Its a cheap way to get a slick new design in no time at all. Refine later. I have access to some who do high quality psd+css w/ good turn around time. You tell them what you want, toss around ideas and you…

A redesign is only a piece of the puzzle, it will not make the site suddenly fundable. I need the time to work on a few fundamental things to position the site to be more attractive to both users and investors, and time is money.

I just reread what I wrote. Yikes! Please excuse all the auto-correct typos. Is this a "new" startup or is it part of your previously funded searchles company?

I completely understand that a redesign is only a piece of the puzzle but when dealing with visual site... design can be a huge piece of puzzle. It can also make a big difference in revenue.

I dig your passion.

Re: My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love

#165

Post by photorized » Tue, Nov 05, 2013, 7:07 PM UTC

dumbfounder wrote: post #114

photorized wrote: post #76

Launch a contest, some folks would probably be willing to solve the monetization problem for a percentage of the revenue. I'd love to work with you on this, that kind of traffic isn't easy to build. I'd also spin off a separate product for marketers (based on the same engine, but without the global trend noise), make it useful (there are a few ways to do that).

Then I would have 50 ideas that I don't have time or money to execute on :)

idea being you let them execute for rev share :)