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HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

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Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#91

Post by snowmaker »

lpaone wrote: post #15

Hi Jared and Trevor, http://www.stroomnews.com is a bootstrapped breaking news and events focused sharing platform, that allows live-streaming and pre-captured video and image sharing through our mobile app and website. We are also working on an enterprise solution for the news industry that ties into our platform. Our B2C app was released this past Fall, but has shown little traction and we have had discussions with…

What would the enterprise solution do? How long would it take to build the product to the part where it can generate revenue?

For the video compression technology, it's hard to say without knowing more. What does it do, and who would want it?

As cool as video compression tech is, trying to raise money for pure technology, without demonstrating market demand, is almost impossible. So if you go down the video compression route, you'll need to think hard about exactly what products people could build with it, and how you could show that people would buy them even before you can build them.

Getting to revenue and selling the enterprise product is the safer path.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#92

Post by tlb »

BinaryResult wrote: post #17

Hey Guys, I am one of the Co-founders of Disco Melee ( https://beta.discomelee.com/hub ). We are a live streaming social network designed around the needs of gamers. You could think of us like if Twitch and Facebook had a baby who liked to party and was eyeing up Reddit for a future fling. The gamers that find us tend to rave about our overall vision, low latency and other base features like IM system, streamer store…

Social networks are all about network effects. It's nearly impossible to compete head-to-head with an established social network (which is why established social network companies are so valuable).

Usually, the answer is to focus on a niche where you can do something special to be dramatically better than the incumbents, so you can dominate the niche. On your site I see Street Fighter V, which is pretty mainstream and works fine on Twitch. Is there some game you can support 10x better than Twitch?

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#93

Post by [deleted] »

snowmaker wrote: post #89
[deleted] wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

That's great. There was a YC company a few years ago called Talkbin which did something similar. They got acquired by Google. If the businesses really like it, can they refer you to other businesses? Local business owners tend to know each other. How exactly do you plan to make money from the data? Generally for this business I would think you would simply charge the businesses who are using it a small fee.

[deleted]

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#94

Post by tlb »

wootcamp wrote: post #83
tlb wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not start with affiliate links to Amazon? It's minimal effort on your part, and you can see what your users are interesting in purchasing. Even when you eventually have your own inventory, it's worth throwing in affiliate links in case you discover that people watching your beauty content actually buy something else more often than your own products.

Hi Trevor, thanks for the reply. We had that thought as well but we're from Southeast Asia with most of our traffic originating from here. Only some of the products related to our site actually ship here from Amazon and incurs international shipping costs so it might hinder orders. We'll still give it a shot since it can give us an idea of how the conversions do. Would you happen to have any further insights on if af…

Or instead of Amazon, whomever your customers currently buy from. The affiliate revenue isn't the most important thing: the important thing is to find out what your users will buy. Once you know that, you can invest in inventory.

For beauty products, affiliate marketing works great. That is how the e-commerce world should work: you show users the results they can get with such-and-such product, and you get a percentage of sales.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#95

Post by chejazi »

snowmaker wrote: post #88
chejazi wrote: post #49

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.h…

Why do people use this versus bit.ly or a non-paid link shortener? Are they actually interested in sharing the interstitial page's content, or is this primarily a way to make money? What's the nature of the publisher deal you are thinking about? Generally, you should start talking to publishers when you can pay them a meaningful amount of revenue. How much is meaningful? Depends on the publisher. For a small blog, it…

People use us over Bitly because they earn rewards. What we know from the feedback we've received is users don't like seeing blatant ads (ex. banners) on the page. Our response has been to syndicate other content the user has shared; so far the design has received a some praise and nobody has complained (whereas w/ ads we received complaints), but the change hasn't been live for long (less than a month ago we were showing ads).

The money in a publisher deal flows opposite of the direction you described. They would pay us to get their content syndicated on the interstitial. From my limited knowledge, ad sales for bigger publishers start from 10k and go up, which means we need to guarantee (at $1 CPM) 10M impressions. Currently the service does about 3M monthly impressions, so we're not quite there yet.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#96

Post by snowmaker »

tedmiston wrote: post #84

My app is a way for sneakerheads to follow, discover, and ultimately purchase new sneakers online from first announcement until they're available for purchase with minimal interaction. Today everyone does this by following blogs that make hundreds of posts per week with tons of repetition and very low signal to noise. I've built a prototype for myself, but would like to now connect with the right industry people to h…

Sneakerheads are the right people! The good news is that you are going after a very well-defined segment. The ones online are easy to reach - the read the same blogs, hang out in the same online forums.

What if you went to the bloggers who are writing these posts? They might find the app even more useful than normal consumers, and they have large audiences they could advertise it to.

Phin Barnes might be a good investor someday, but he won't do the work for you, which is to get sneakerheads using the app. Once you've got passionate fans in the sneakerhead community, you should go talk to him.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#97

Post by tlb »

ForrestN wrote: post #7

I founded a small nonprofit (~$250k budget this year for underpaid staff of me+3 art types) that serves an annual audience of 1 million unique visitors for the last few years with hi-res documentation of contemporary art; we are nearly ubiquitous within our field, academics have hailed our project as transformative, but we suck at fundraising and are tiny. Problem: in the midst of running everything, I do all the cod…

You need a great developer. You can't offer more salary than Google or Facebook, so you have to offer a mission that they believe in. I think your mission would be really exciting for the right person -- you just have to find them.

Tip: if you're in the Bay Area, there'll be a lot of developer/artists here this weekend: http://grayarea.org/event/deepdream-the-art-of-neural-networ...

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#98

Post by snowmaker »

FraserGreenlee wrote: post #21

Hi Trevor and Jared, 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?

Thinking of demographics is kind of a big company way of looking at things; you're not ready for that.

For now you should focus on finding any users that want to use it. The way to do that is to try to distill the value proposition. Why would people use WebArcs instead of going to an aggregator (Reddit, HN), another news reader (Pulse, flipboard), or content sites directly?

Then, show it some people and get some feedback. See if you can get people to use it as their default way to surf the web. If you can get even one person to do that (other than yourself), you've made some progress.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#99

Post by ForrestN »

tlb wrote: post #97
ForrestN wrote: post #7

I founded a small nonprofit (~$250k budget this year for underpaid staff of me+3 art types) that serves an annual audience of 1 million unique visitors for the last few years with hi-res documentation of contemporary art; we are nearly ubiquitous within our field, academics have hailed our project as transformative, but we suck at fundraising and are tiny. Problem: in the midst of running everything, I do all the cod…

You need a great developer. You can't offer more salary than Google or Facebook, so you have to offer a mission that they believe in. I think your mission would be really exciting for the right person -- you just have to find them. Tip: if you're in the Bay Area, there'll be a lot of developer/artists here this weekend: http://grayarea.org/event/deepdream-the-art-of-neural-networ...

Thanks— I suspected as much. I'm in LA but even the prospect of finding events like this is very smart. Cheers.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#100

Post by boxerab »

tlb wrote: post #64
boxerab wrote: post #42

Hi Jared and Trevor, I have developed a high-speed image encoder that runs on off-the-shelf graphics cards: http://grokimagecompression.github.io/GrokImage/ I am working on my marketing strategy: need to decide whether to focus on selling to end-users, or licensing the software to other businesses. Second option requires more $$, and a sales team, but seems to have more potential for growing the business. Any advice…

For most image compression tasks, speed isn't the metric that users care about. Since compressing images parallelizes very well, they care about total system cost for a given throughput. So your value proposition is more like "Use 1 GPU box running our code instead of 10 CPU boxes". Saving 9 boxes isn't worth an engineer spending much time hacking. You should target people with 1000 CPU boxes to switch to 100 GPU box…

Thanks, Trevor, that makes a lot of sense.

With the rise of streaming video, there are new players entering the broadcast market, so there is an opportunity to sell an inexpensive compression/decompression system for integration into these new systems. The time to develop a JPEG 2000 codec from scratch is quite large, so decreasing time to market is another part of my value proposition.

On the server side, it looks like my focus should be on total cost.

On the client side, for example digital cinema post-production, a user typically has only a single box, so speed is important in this case.

Thanks again, I really appreciate your feedback.

Aaron

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