21–30 of 152 posts
I'm the founder of WebArcs (http://webarcs.com) an RSS aggregate for discovering and subscribing to websites. I'm just starting out and I want to see this be the way people surf the web in the future.
I was wondering which demographics I ought to target too too help build a strong user base?
As for the shop itself, the photographs need improvement – I set up a small lighted space on my kitchen counter and am working on this. Shop: http://zebbles.etsy.com
Feedback Hotline (feedbackhotline.com) is the easiest way for businesses to collect feedback. We provide the hotline for free. We intend to make money through data.
We think we need to prove three things to succeed:
1. Businesses/organizations will join 2. People will send a lot of feedback 3. We can monetize this feedback
We are currently optimizing for 1, focusing on small businesses. We believe for i, everything before i needs to be true before i can be true. We want to speak about this framework for optimization.
FBH
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…
What I like best is that it allows someone with zero artistic ability (like me) to make a piece of artwork that they'd be proud of. That's quite a trick.
What are some things you've thought about building on top of it? What have your users been asking for?
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…
My guess is that the developers will have to encourage or require bug reporters to use it. Their site will have to say “Here’s how to report a bug: Step 1: install BugReplay. Step 2: …” So find out whether they’re willing to do that, and how to make it as painless as possible.
It’s reasonable to want to keep the initial user base small, but usually that happens by default. The important thing is to keep the initial user base smart, and on a path to the eventual large user base. Don’t make the mistake of pursuing users that aren't your eventual target market in order to keep things small at first.
PS, if you're appealing to web devs, you need first-rate website design. It currently has formatting problems: https://www.dropbox.com/s/4hethogee0d7zgt/Screenshot%202016-...
Hello Jared and Trevor, We're developing a publishing network. Individuals and groups can start magazines. Users can read on a timeline and interact like in a social network. What's new? Now anyone can get publishing infrastructure as good as a well funded online magazine. That means lots of unique publications in verticals that well-funded magazines & newspapers cannot do. What's the best strategy to lure in people…
Have you started talking to users yet? Is the software usable?
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…
Selling to gov’t is hard, because they have a slow and heavyweight purchasing process. Selling to colleges is hard for the same reasons, and also they have small budgets. Selling management tools is very hard, because you have to get people to change the way they work. It’s very very hard to get senior officials to change their process.
If your business works, you’ll spend 1/3 of your waking hours for 10+ years talking to your customers. You can only sustain this if you sincerely like working with them. Whom would you rather spend that much time with?
I created https://codebunk.com. Its an Online Interviewing Tool for developers. Its the best tool out there. It provides code execution in 23 languages, collaborative editor, REPL shells, AV Text chat, Teams, Question banks and a lot more.
Its cash flow positive and has some of the coolest clients.
However, the rate at which it acquires new customers is pretty low (~3/month). I have exhausted (or nearly exhausted) avenues of generating buzz (PH, HN, Reddit, some tech publications). As a developer without any help, how do I promote CodeBunk further? What's the best way to reach my audience (Hiring Mangers, CTOs)?
My startup is developing technology for natural language understanding (in contrast to NLP). We believe we can approach human-level understanding for standard texts (email, blogs, online articles) in 2.5-4 years.
We are currently self-funded and can comfortably do so for about a year--by the end of which, we believe we can develop a fairly advanced demo that surpasses existing techs in some, but not all, areas.
What kind of demos do you think would impress best-in-class recruits/investors to join our team? The current options we have in mind are:
1) Solving a subset of Winograd schema (commonsense reasoning challenge) with a general approach (i.e., easily extensible with additional investment in knowledge acquisition/data sources). No systems known to public can currently solve all of them (or even a subset generally).
http://commonsensereasoning.org/winograd.html
2) A conversational agent capable of conversing with humans at the level of a 4- or 5-year-old (without resorting to typical chatbot tricks).
3) Surpassing the state-of-the-art systems in a couple of standard AI conference tasks or on datasets released by leading companies (Google, Facebook, etc).
4) Other tasks we have not thought of...
Because of resource and time limitations, we likely need to focus the initial efforts on one, or at most two, of the options above. (A mature system should be able to do all those and beyond, but this is only for about one year from now.)
A couple extra questions if you have the time:
- Given the startup's long-term timescale before monetization and its technical nature, what sorts of investors should we focus on talking with?
- Are there chances of IP leaking and causing problems with patenting our tech later on? What should we do to prevent that?
Sincerely appreciate your time to answer these questions.
-- Ken Noppadon
Hi Trevor and Jared, we have been building financial predictions on data from marketplace lending platforms. Curious to talk to you about where you see the business models of prediction going, examples other YC companies who are selling prediction and ML as a service, pricing strategies etc.
I don't know that it's particularly useful to think about business models and pricing strategies disembodied from a specific business. What is it that you predict exactly? Who is the customer and what is the value you bring them?
