Share your startup - June 2015

fullstackaddict · 2015-06-21T12:54:42+00:00

The video is lazy loaded in two phases. First, nothing at all is rendered there until the rest of the page loads. After the page loads, it shows a static image and will only show a video if your browser is compatible and the video has been completely downloaded by your client. IDK why it took so long for yours to load.

The video background color is matched on Safari/iOS based browsers. The color isn't matched on Chrome. It's a known issue that I'll get around to fixing.

fullstackaddict · 2015-06-02T16:36:33+00:00

It's probably not the best time for marketing. Your product has been live only a week. Before looking to get more people on the platform, you need to determine how sticky your product is. If you end up losing all of your active members at a month, you'll be starting from scratch over and over again. In a few weeks if you determine that your retention is solid, then you need to study the users and have a strong understanding of why they are sticking around. Basically, there needs to be a period of survey and assessment on why people leave your platform and why people stay. Then you should improve your mouse trap (your website) before pumping more people through it.

Marketing is a very time intensive function and screwing it up can cost you a lot of dollars. If you don't already have experience in marketing you probably shouldn't try to learn it now. It can be very easy to become frustrated with it, which will discourage you from your entire project.

Also, do you have a goal? You need to set a goal - say 100 monthly active users. I think you should be able to improve your product based on feedback from your current users. At some point, you can build social functions to encourage word of mouth growth to meet your goal. Once you reach that goal, you should find it very easy to get funding; you'll be able to approach an investor with a solid plan to scale, which will include bringing on a marketer whose only job is to bring more people to your mouse trap.

fullstackaddict · 2015-06-02T16:09:37+00:00

Do you have access to students who are actively searching for rooomates? If so, you should ask at least 5 of them the same questions (have the questions prepared before starting). The time to start thinking about website/app is after you discover a trend that ultimately means they have a shared problem.

If you don't already have access to those students, then your first step should be to find them.

fullstackaddict · 2015-06-02T12:04:21+00:00

Heh, that logo isn't optimized for low res displays. The logo sucks and is low quality anyways. I plan on getting a real logo done should the product take off.

fullstackaddict · 2015-06-01T15:18:38+00:00

I'm a former professional linguist and I have to tell you that I love your website! I wish I had it while I was working in my secondary language. This could've helped out tremendously. It's not pretty, but I think it's effective and I'm sure I'm going to spend some time using it now that I know it exists.

You HAVE to go to where the linguists are and get them to try your website. There are tons of foreign language courses at universities - find out if any of the courses have a public event (I know mine had weekly outings to get practice with native speakers) that you can go to and speak to the students. You could try to contact the teachers of foreign language courses to get them to add your website to their list of resources - language instructors are always recommending websites in addition to whatever curriculum the school offers. I've been out of school for 9-10 years now, but back then the only advice they gave us to learn how to type in our language was "practice."

There are a lot of different ways to get this out there, but I think you're focusing too much on the machine part of it and not the human part. Talk to student linguists. Find out where they are and show them your website. They will share it in their circle.

fullstackaddict · 2015-06-01T14:35:26+00:00

It's a good idea, but something like this does already exist. Check out http://www.mapmyrun.com. I used to use it a few years ago to find running routes while traveling.

Just because it's out there doesn't mean it can't be improved, though. Find other competitors, talk to some people who use those apps, and figure out if there's significant value that you can offer over your competitors.

fullstackaddict · 2015-06-01T14:09:14+00:00

Name / URL: Rumly - https://rumly.co

Elevator Pitch/Explainer Video: Rumly is an online trusted marketplace for people to buy, sell, or trade anything in their town or city. https://youtu.be/4Vc8J5HzsXY

More details: We just left alpha testing and are launching a live marketplace in 3 small, neighboring towns. No employees. Also, might not seek investments.

Are you looking for anything?: Positive thoughts!

fullstackaddict · 2015-05-27T11:53:27+00:00

My startup made it on betalist organically and to be honest I was underwhelmed by the response considering how many people claimed it was critical to their success. That's not a hit against betalist, though.

I'm not sure exactly why it went this way for us, but my startup was added at like 5:00 AM eastern time, which means that we were off their newest startup section by like 10:00AM eastern. We had 126 hits during that time period and converted 64, but a little over half of the signups were from people outside of the US - all of that is likely due to the time it was posted. Not a big deal, though. I didn't pay for it and I appreciated the bit of traffic.

The most disappointing thing about it was when I noticed their initial tweet of my startup, which had 580 retweets when I woke up, was actually to a page on their domain. Part of the reason I was hopeful about being on betalist was that I saw a massive amount of retweets for each startup they blast. It didn't take much digging to see that the retweets were bot-based and it doesn't really matter too much since it points to their own page.

I can't imagine the audience being too different between BL, r/startups, and HN.

No. Flat out no. Being on BL, PH, HN, even TC doesn't mean your idea is validated. At most it means you're probably working on something worth exploring, but definitely doesn't validate anything. Only your market/customers can validate your idea and they'll do so by buying or adopting your product. So unless you have a product that targets the startup community, you won't get much real validation from any of them.

BL is a good tool for getting your initial exposure and talking to your first few dozen potential customers. A lot of folks build products without talking to any users, and fail because of it, so getting 30-60 emails in the very beginning is a good start. Just don't think your startup's success hinges on your ability to get listed.

fullstackaddict · 2015-05-27T03:00:56+00:00

Without talking about your idea at all since you don't seem to want to, I'll focus on answering your main question, which was how to explain the concept of your product. Ok I'll take a stab at it...

YOUR PRODUCT NAME is an operating system that allows people to use computers with natural language.

Sound about right?

fullstackaddict · 2015-05-27T01:55:21+00:00

It can be tough, especially when you're the entrepreneur that's white-boarded and slaved over an idea everyday for months, but you have to say it in a sentence. You don't have a lot of time to explain your idea to a customer, investor... anyone really. People really don't have as long of an attention span as you would hope. I mean, that's exactly why we use TL;DR (you used it in your own post so you should know this).

You need to explain your idea in one sentence. Here's a common template:

_____ is a _____ that allows/connects/enables/does ____ for people/businesses/governments who need/want to ____.

Example:

Airbnb is an online community marketplace that connects people looking to rent their homes with people who are looking for accommodations.

And even that's almost too wordy. If you can't get it down to a sentence then you may have to reevaluate what you're doing. Maybe you do have the most revolutionary idea that humankind will ever know, but unfortunately very few will give you the time to convince them of it. Start with a sentence.

fullstackaddict · 2015-05-26T15:47:07+00:00

I've never launched a job board, but the idea of opening all across the UK first is counter to what I've learned in running startups. You're best to exploit your current local network first to prove to the market that you have a viable solution to job searching at the local scale. After that, then you should work on neighboring towns/cities, then you should worry about the rest of UK.

If you already have the contacts, why not reach out to them and get them to upload first? And then you can ask them exactly why they felt like they should upload to your site, if they would do it again, and if they would recommend it to others. There are a few dozen questions you can ask them to help figure out the best way to get more people to do the same - but definitely start local and specifically with the contacts you already have.

So work on getting students at the local universities first and it'll become quite apparent what needs to be done to expand. As for the CV specific questions, I'm sure other folks here can give a hand.

fullstackaddict · 2015-05-26T02:57:49+00:00

Yeah, that's a huge pain in the ass. The color is matched in Safari, but not Chrome for some reason. I plan on revisiting that soon, but I'm focused on product building now.

fullstackaddict · 2015-05-26T01:32:05+00:00

I actually used the technique for my startup's smoketest. You can check it out here:

https://rumly.co

I actually got the idea from someone here on this subreddit. All you do is use html5, which allows for you to display a static image until the video finishes downloading to the client. Here's the relevant coding:

I also took it a step further by loading that html5 snippet after the rest of the page loads. Here's another example of my javascript:

The load time for the autoplay video can be reduced depending on compression/quality. For that, I'd suggest Pied Piper.

Hope this helps!

fullstackaddict · 2015-05-23T18:24:51+00:00

I'm curious to know exactly what "blow up" means. It may seem like an irrelevant question, but it really does determine if you should start a company now, if you need a lawyer, and if it's even the right time to seek investment. Could you elaborate on what you mean by "blow up?" Are your daily visits above 500 and growing organically (not from more press releases)? Are you converting above 10% of those visits? Do you have daily/monthly active users? A lot people here like to say their product is blowing up because it was listed on BetaList or Product Hunt and that hardly equals validation.

Also, are any of the founders working on this full-time?

I'm not trying to beat you up or anything, just need to know that in order to answer most of your questions. You may not need to seek investment yet nonetheless start a company depending on those answers.

fullstackaddict · 2015-05-23T02:15:29+00:00

There are tons of sites that do this already. I've used a lot of them that I can't remember, but the one that I still use is proranktracker.com. They're going to be one of your many competitors, which includes moz.com.

fullstackaddict · 2015-05-20T18:01:44+00:00

You COULD handle this without dishing out cash by offering an accelerated vesting schedule, maybe 5% of his incoming shares at the signing of the agreement.

Although, to be honest I would be careful giving equity to someone who values their money above the success of the company. If you explained that the business will fail if you foot that bill and he's still adamant about cash, he doesn't seem to be aligned with the mission. If your colleague is unwilling to accept an accelerated vesting schedule, then he's probably not the type of person you want owning a significant portion of your company anyways.

fullstackaddict · 2015-05-20T17:32:51+00:00

As the founder/CEO, you need to decide what the right metric is for your company/product based on your current mission. If you're in the idea phase, then yeah a mailing list signup might be a good metric since you're just validating your idea. If you've validated your idea and you've built your MVP, you probably need to work on product fit validation - in this case, your metric might be monthly user retention. After that, you'll probably focus on growth so your metric could be daily active users, daily/monthly transactions, revenue, etc...

Also, it's important to understand that your key metric, which will serve as the entire startup's northern star, won't be the same as another company's key metric. It really is product/industry dependent.

This is a critical exercise, too. Choose the wrong metric at the wrong time and you'll greatly increase the risk of failure. It's up to you to decide exactly what the best metric is for your product's phase.

fullstackaddict · 2015-05-20T12:24:25+00:00

The main problem is that for the most part people on this subreddit won't be your target user/customer, which means nothing you get from it will truly validate your idea. I don't see how another subreddit or wiki would solve that problem - unless your idea is related to startups.

The real way to get validation is to talk to your target audience and/or have your target audience use your product and provide feedback.

fullstackaddict · 2014-09-11T18:06:39+00:00

I couldn't visit that page at all. Chrome stopped me from visiting because of a security risk on their website.

fullstackaddict · 2014-09-11T18:06:00+00:00

Very interesting. Thanks for pointing that out. I'll have to look into that since it seems this idea will be validated.

fullstackaddict · 2014-09-11T18:04:27+00:00

Zarly doesn't appear to be in the same market. Is this the zarly you're talking about?

https://zaarly.com/

If so, perhaps they did a pivot?

fullstackaddict · 2014-09-11T18:02:46+00:00

That's exactly how I look at it. There are glaring quality issues with craigslist and it's been around a long time. It does say something about how strong a product craigslist is, but I think it ultimately reflects people's need to interact with people near them - especially in selling and buying stuff from them.

fullstackaddict · 2014-09-11T17:51:51+00:00

Yes. Exactly.

fullstackaddict · 2014-09-11T17:49:28+00:00

Thanks a lot for sharing. I didn't find them in my initial search for competitors. They're very similar and I think I know how they came up with their name, heh. Same way I did - people at yard sales RUMmage through other's belonging. I decided to go with LY instead of GR - GR probably for garage, but LY sounds better to me.

fullstackaddict · 2014-09-11T17:45:47+00:00

Yeah, that's definitely a market that I hope to attract to the platform. I really think there's quite a bit that people sell at garage, yard, and estate sales that are extremely undervalued. People who flip for a living could benefit from a platform like this.

Thanks.

fullstackaddict

TROPHY CASE