HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

Hey, I want to present http://grobyk.com, a platform that wants to help teams to grow by engaging the team's members to find/create/share useful articles. In this way they will build a knowledge base and grow as a team. We want some feedback regarding the idea and how we can attract customers.

Our most famous project is called Contemporary Art Daily, but our most ambitious, new project is called Contemporary Art Quarterly. The organization is called Contemporary Art Group.

We're generating $250k of income, a bit more than our present expenses, largely based on the value of our audience.

Being a non-profit also, very importantly, speaks to our motives, which mostly are to fulfill a mission to make important art more accessible to the public, rather than to get bigger and enrich the people involved.

Thank you very much for responding. I definitely see your point about starting in a small vertical. I already have a couple of potential solutions in mind to solve the critical mass problem, but the fact that you saw it immediately as my number one issue makes me want to revisit them. Re: marketing, I will try the relationship building route rather than an outright pitch. Thanks again.

It sounds like you've tried PR and social media, but haven't tried any other channels.

If you've made something people want, and it sounds like you have, it's time to invest in getting customers. A good rule of thumb is that you should spend 50% of your time working on your product and 50% of your time getting customers. I have a feeling that's higher than what you're currently doing.

There are a number of distribution channels you can try. Here are a few ideas: 1) It sounds like you have some great customers (pebble, flipboard). Do you know them personally? Get to know them, in person or over the phone ideally, and then ask them for referrals. CTOs / hiring managers all know each other.

2) You guys don't seem to have a blog. Content marketing is great for your space because engineers love to read posts about how much hiring sucks - there's practically a daily thread on this on HN. There is so much you could write about the best way to do technical interviews. Each time you get a post like that to go viral, you'll pick up some customers.

3) There are lots of recruiting conferences and events. Those are good places to meet customers.

4) It might be possible to negotiate distribution partnerships with other companies in the hiring space. ATS's, job boards, and new models like hiring networks (i.e., Hired) are all upstream of an online interviewing tool. Maybe they should integrate with one directly.

5) There are a bunch of standard techniques that rarely work amazingly well but usually work to a certain extent that you can start with: everything from adwords and facebook ads to email campaigns to hiring managers.

Overall, you need to be very experimental to find good distribution channels. A good book to get your creative juices going is "Traction: how any startup can achieve explosive growth"

Hi YC partners,

We're a link shortener called Credhot and our business model is to syndicate (potentially sponsored) content on an interstitial page. We also rev-share with our users based on the number of visits. The biggest hurdle to this strategy has been building an interstitial people want to share with their friends. Here is an example of our latest attempt at that, leading to "coinmarketcap.com": https://crd.ht/H7TLMpn.

Our volume is low enough that we haven't tested syndicating sponsored content on that page. Right now we're mostly focused on "building a product that users love" but at some point we will need to strike a deal with a publisher. When should those conversations start happening? We're currently bootstrapping but will want to raise capital in the next few months as we're growing (we've doubled since the last HN office hours ~34 days ago). Should we wait until after securing funding?