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

How long can you survive on bootstrapping?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–32 of 32 posts

Re: How long can you survive on bootstrapping?

#31

Post by richesh »

IMO, you need to do 2 things to be successful with this app:

1. Integrate with major IM services, AIM, Jabber etc, and have your own "Say Hi service" in there for LBS chat.

2. Put something around the app, as in make it do more than just chat. Explore making it a dating app, so that you can chat/"quick date"/"lunch date" people around you that are signed up with your service. Companies like match.com etc have just stopped innovating in this space and you may be able to get traction.

I haven't done the research to see who else is doing this but it seems like for your app these two things look like an obvious steps.

Re: How long can you survive on bootstrapping?

#32

Post by [deleted] »

rcmorin wrote: post #23
paulsingh wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 for "Figure out something your team can do that will make money. Then think about the long term." I'm in the same boat at the moment, we've raised some seed money and are somewhat in the same boat. In our case, we spent 2-3 weeks of June talking to ~2K of our users on the phone to get some real feedback on how they use the product, what sucks and what else they want to see. At the end of it, we had a pretty solid…

Thanks paul. I think the most immediate answer is: improve the product and keep pumping out features. In the short-term our costs are really under control. I apologize if my initial thread sounded like I was shouting "fire" in a crowded theater. With the recession and downturn in the economic climate, startup logic (understandably) has shifted from the web 2.0/YCombinator preaching of: build, find users, get acquired…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN