31–40 of 76 posts
The value proposition of WikiTorrents.org is that you can easily find a continually evolving list of videos about whatever topic you're researching, no matter how specific or obscure the topic and no matter what sites actually have the videos.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That particular belief was actually one of the most counter-productive ones I have come across. Not only will you never get a meeting with a business angel unless you actually reach out to anyone. If your own view of your business potential is that pitching it to someone would pretty much amount to harassing that person, then maybe your idea needs a little more work. Bottom line is that neither job offers or angel fi…
I agree that seeking "face time" with particular people is useful and necessary. But the initial comment sounded like I should stalk people, corner them, and in general be a jerk. I refuse to do that. I also agree that the idea "needs a little work", probably more than a little. That's what seed money is intended to address: keeping a roof over my head while I work on the idea. To paraphrase Paul Graham, for the thir…
Thats a pretty big leap from my initial suggestion of asking one of your existing LinkedIn contacts to introduce you to one of their existing LinkedIn contacts that may be able to help you out.
You've got some good food for thought and advice from others throughout this thread. I'd suggest taking a time out, coming back and reading through the 30ish posts here with as objective an eye as possible.
What if you compiled all of this scraped data and made microsites for each category? I think your idea is interesting but so far the implementation is off-putting. You could do all sorts of organic SEO tweaks and then put some ads on the pages for a revenue stream. Don't give up, but also don't expect people to throw money at you for making something. If that were true, everyone on HN would be millionaires.
I don't consider my goal of 500/week to pursue the idea much the equivalent of people throwing money at me. That's about minimum wage to pursue a technical idea that might payoff big. $500 a week is nothing by silicon valley standards.
Now, I gave you encouragement and a legitimate suggestion on how to take what you have and spin it into something that would probably generate some money. Others have done the same in this thread. You responded with a delusional claim that people should provide money for you just because your idea "might" pay off big. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence on HN that speculative words like "might" are pretty worthless. If you think your idea is that good, commit to it, prove us all wrong.
It is however counter productive to complain to fellow HNers, who are most sympathetic to the frustrations of trying to build products people want, about some bias against you because no one wants to give you jobs or money for your talents. That is not how it works.
My final comment about the value proposition before I go to Thursday NightLife at the California Academy of Sciences ( http://www.calacademy.org/events/nightlife/ ): The value proposition of WikiTorrents.org is that you can easily find a continually evolving list of videos about whatever topic you're researching, no matter how specific or obscure the topic and no matter what sites actually have the videos.
I know you might feel like you're getting beat up in this thread, but every comment I've read has been constructive criticism. Take it in stride and don't discount anything offhand. I can almost see your vision for WikiTorrents; it has merit. You're certainly passionate so I believe you can do it.
3,000 uniques in a single day doesn’t validate an idea, let alone a business model. The influx of visitors you had is equivalent to the traffic any blog receives when one of its post hits the HN front page. Yet, none of them is complaining about not having gotten a lucrative book deal.
That being said, the idea of a torrent of videos is interesting. I’m much less convinced about its implementation. Not to sound rude, but a bunch of links on a wiki, that's it?
Maybe you could look at XSPF? It’s a shareable playlist format. See http://www.xspf.org/quickstart/ for more info. Since you are sharing links to videos, distributing them into a standard format could be a good idea for instance.
Or hook it to the YouTube API, to provide more info about each video. And most of the time, it takes a while before things get off the ground, so be patient and keep working hard on it.
Good luck.
My final comment about the value proposition before I go to Thursday NightLife at the California Academy of Sciences ( http://www.calacademy.org/events/nightlife/ ): The value proposition of WikiTorrents.org is that you can easily find a continually evolving list of videos about whatever topic you're researching, no matter how specific or obscure the topic and no matter what sites actually have the videos.
Here's what I'd like to see:
1. A list of every video related to Gary V, Seth Godin, Alexis, etc, on the web. Start with big names and then tag these videos.
2. Now that they are tagged you can start to search for SaaS and I can watch everything ever said about SaaS on the internet.
I like this idea, but the website is less than ideal. You need to focus on a niche and get acceptance there.
My final comment about the value proposition before I go to Thursday NightLife at the California Academy of Sciences ( http://www.calacademy.org/events/nightlife/ ): The value proposition of WikiTorrents.org is that you can easily find a continually evolving list of videos about whatever topic you're researching, no matter how specific or obscure the topic and no matter what sites actually have the videos.
To put it simply, your value proposition doesn't exist. Maybe after years of seeding the site with content, but right now I cannot "find a continually evolving list about whatever topic." In order to gain traction among users, you must provide me value _now_. I know you might feel like you're getting beat up in this thread, but every comment I've read has been constructive criticism. Take it in stride and don't disco…
Lets say you go to google, find a search result, and click to leave google. If you do all that within a coule seconds, then google was successful even though you spent almost no time on google. This is similar to that.
Remember, too, to paraphrase paul graham for at least the fourth time in this thread, that the yahoo directory started out as jerry yang's personal collection of bookmarks.
jerry yang's multibillion dollar company bought out paul graham's viaweb and made paul graham into a millionaire.
so consider all that, let it all sink in, and then decide whether you want to tell me that my idea is bad.
Remember that the best way to get money is to not need it. Investors aren't interested in "helping you out"; they're interested in making money, and broadcasting "we were rejected from YC and we're desperate for money" isn't a very good way to convince potential investors that you can make them rich(er).
They call it "angel money" for a reason. If you were "ramen profitable", then you wouldn't need angel money, you'd need legitimate venture capital to get big fast. "Ramen profitable" right now is about 500 bucks a week. I also indicated I was looking for work. If I had some outside work, I could self-fund my ventures. With all these deep silicon valley pockets, I'm surprised nobody offered me any sort of work.
Patrick, 3,000 uniques in a single day doesn’t validate an idea, let alone a business model. The influx of visitors you had is equivalent to the traffic any blog receives when one of its post hits the HN front page. Yet, none of them is complaining about not having gotten a lucrative book deal. That being said, the idea of a torrent of videos is interesting. I’m much less convinced about its implementation. Not to so…
The point with the ycombinator video page was this: theoretically, if you had 365 lists, each able to generate that much uniques each day, then you'd have over a million uniques a year just with that traffic. A million uniques is a good size of traffic and potential traction.