
HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell - snowmaker
Starting at 11 am PST today, Trevor Blackwell and I are going to do online office hours. If you&#x27;d like help with your startup, please post a top-level comment with a one or two sentence description of what you do and the first thing you&#x27;d like to talk about.<p>Update: We&#x27;ve gotta run, but this was great. Thanks so much and enjoy the weekend.
======
yurivish
Hi Trevor and Jared,

[http://weavesilk.com](http://weavesilk.com) is a side project of mine for
many years. I put out a brand new version of the iOS app this month and am
thinking about developing it further but find it very hard to decide what
direction to go.

The website is popular, and people love Silk, but for different reasons: some
find it relaxing and meditative, others like that it closes the gap between
their artistic ability and taste.

It's been used as an inspirational sketching tool for artists
([http://bit.ly/1Qlm1kA](http://bit.ly/1Qlm1kA)), to make album art, and has
been on exhibit at the Children's Creativity Museum. Some teachers use it to
teach kids about symmetry.

I've made something compelling but don't know what to do next, or how to
figure it out.

~~~
snowmaker
I actually really think you have something here. I spent some time playing
with it, and it's quite addictive.

What I like best is that it allows someone with zero artistic ability (like
me) to make a piece of artwork that they'd be proud of. That's quite a trick.

What are some things you've thought about building on top of it? What have
your users been asking for?

~~~
yurivish
Thanks, Jared!

Some of the things I've thought about:

\- Expanding the expressive range. The new app has a "silk eraser" and I have
ideas for at least one new type of brush.

\- Continuous undo (as if it's a movie), or at least more undo levels.

\- Making a better Alchemy: [http://al.chemy.org/](http://al.chemy.org/)

\- Unifying the experience of the website (2013; JS/Canvas) and the new app
(Swift/Metal)

\- The website lets you share replays of your drawings that play back on the
site. What's the best way to do something similar with the app?

\- A gallery would be great but requires figuring out the previous two points
to some extent. There's a lot of potential but it feels like a lot to navigate
through.

Long-term I'd love Silk to be a Bret Victor-inspired environment for visually
exploring computation: Compute with color and time, explore the system, make
your own brushes. You can think of a brush as a function from input history to
pixels on the canvas. I think there's a lot of potential here.

Some of the common things people ask for:

\- More colors. The new app has more palettes, which is a start.

\- More undo levels.

\- High-resolution export. This will be coming to the app, potentially inside
a bundle of "pro" features.

\- Plugins for Photoshop and other professional design tools.

\- Prints. I've experimented with prints before but found that the art doesn't
come out nearly as well in print. My bar for quality here is this piece made
by a talented designer friend (Anand Sharma) many years ago:
[http://bit.ly/1TDS2sz](http://bit.ly/1TDS2sz). Maybe the right answer here is
something more ephemeral like greeting cards.

~~~
snowmaker
It sounds like you have engaged users who are giving you useful feedback.

I like the idea of a gallery - that will help you grow as people show off
their work. You don't necessarily need live replays to do it - you could start
with static and add those later.

One thing to think about is how you can make it grow more. Your users won't
generally bring you growth ideas, but it's important to always be thinking
about how to get more users.

~~~
yurivish
Good feedback. Thank you so much.

------
alantrrs
Hi! I'm building a platform for scientists to run and share their experiments
(anything computable) including their whole research environment. I want to
make scientific research easily discoverable and replicable.

First, what are your thoughts on this market?

Also, some advice: I'm currently building the prototype based on my own
experience as I'm my own user. That's the only thing I've been focusing on, I
haven't looked for external feedback yet and haven't spent much time looking
for people to join me. I figured both of those things will be much easier once
I have the prototype ready. Am I on the right track or should I be doing
everything at once?

~~~
snowmaker
I think that's a great market. The lack of reproducibility in scientific
experiments is an elephant-in-the-room problem. I feel like I read a new story
about it every week.

Even though you are your own target user, it's dangerous to build a full
prototype without talking to actual users. It's likely that you will find that
what you thought people wanted does not match 100% with what they actually
want.

Do you have mockups or screenshots of the tool? I would recommend lining up
some research scientists who can serve as product advisors. Tell them about
your idea and ask them what they would want in this kind of tool. Try to get a
commitment from them to use it after you build it - that will force clarity on
their side.

Not only will that prevent you from potentially throwing away code, it will
get you started building the kind of deep advocates in the science community
that you will need to get a movement like this started.

~~~
alantrrs
Jared, appreciate the feedback!. Any chance you could introduce me to some
people in the Open AI team? I think this would be a great fit and I'm very
interested in their thoughts.

------
srikieonline
Hi Jared & Trevor, Thank you for giving us this opportunity to discuss our
ideas with you.

I am the founder of [http://www.pnyxter.com](http://www.pnyxter.com) \- a
video (only) based debate and discussion app.

My question is about product-market fit.

A user can create topic and upload a video selfie talking on the topic or
respond to other topics via video selfie. The app does not have provision of
text comments at all - only video responses.

I've invited several friends and family for private beta, and its been 10 days
now and only 1 of my friend dared to create a video.

I also shared the link on FB and linked in and got several views, but no one
created a topic. I also did a FB ad for 2 days - no luck here too. Is this a
clear indication of product - market misfit? Or is it too early to conclude?

Or should I shift my focus only on professional and amateur debaters of
various debate clubs in cities, universities, schools etc.

I do understand the privacy issues of showing video selfie - but I've given
provision of a good privacy control (or at least I think its good).

Video based opinions are already being posted by users in Facebook and youtube
- but do not have this consolidated grouping of all video discussions on a
topic in one place. Youtube tried video response feature and closed it in 2013
due to low engagement - but of course youtube is a very generic video site -
not all videos needs video responses/discusisons/debates.

Thanks!!

~~~
huac
Your product makes me think immediately towards high school/college debate
([https://youtu.be/HGyFBRu5F8o?t=1461](https://youtu.be/HGyFBRu5F8o?t=1461)).
Policy debate in particular has the added benefit of being untranscrible
(listen for a couple minutes).

Couple ideas: (1) Analysis tool like Krossover, by cutting out prep time from
videos like the above, segmenting by speech, and allowing people to annotate,
search by annotation, etc. (2) a response platform for people to practice
debates outside of tournaments. Right now, if you want to practice, you either
debate with a teammember, or email speech docs to others, which doesn't really
capture the energy or spirit of a debate. I could see this being useful esp
for debaters at small schools without large teams, or rural areas without
nearby partner schools, etc...

~~~
srikieonline
Thank you for your advice! I've started reaching out to debate clubs in
schools and colleges already on FB. Will keep working towards that. However, I
have still not given up on general user segment.

One advantage of video is (hopefully) reduce abuse. Twitter is plagued with
the problem of anonymous abuse. However, its not easy to show your face in
video and abuse!

------
edibleEnergy
Hey Jared and Trevor,

BugReplay ([http://www.bugreplay.com](http://www.bugreplay.com)) is a bug
reporting tool in the form of a browser extension that captures a screencast
of the user’s actions synced with network traffic, javascript errors and other
browser data.

What's the best way to grow your early user base? Ideally we'd like people who
are going to use BugReplay at their jobs and open source endeavors, but we
want to keep it relatively small until we feel like it's ready for the widest
possible audience.

~~~
tlb
This kind of tool has the classic agent problem. There are two kinds of users:
people filing bug reports and people receiving bug reports. The people
receiving bug reports get the benefits, but the people filing the bug reports
decide which tool to use and have to install something to use yours.

My guess is that the developers will have to encourage or require bug
reporters to use it. Their site will have to say “Here’s how to report a bug:
Step 1: install BugReplay. Step 2: …” So find out whether they’re willing to
do that, and how to make it as painless as possible.

It’s reasonable to want to keep the initial user base small, but usually that
happens by default. The important thing is to keep the initial user base
smart, and on a path to the eventual large user base. Don’t make the mistake
of pursuing users that aren't your eventual target market in order to keep
things small at first.

PS, if you're appealing to web devs, you need first-rate website design. It
currently has formatting problems:
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/4hethogee0d7zgt/Screenshot%202016-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/4hethogee0d7zgt/Screenshot%202016-02-26%2011.02.16.png?dl=0)

~~~
edibleEnergy
The kind of user you’re describing isn’t our focus right now and I agree it
would be hard to get a user of a website such as Facebook or Twitter to go
through all those steps.

We think potential users can be broken down into different groups. The first
group would be people within the same organization (testers, design, other
devs, marketing, support, etc). In that scenario, the company would subscribe
to our service and everyone would use it internally, especially once they see
how much easier it is.

The second group would be people who have a vested interest in a website
working properly. For example, my friend has a clothing company and they sell
online through Shopify. If she encountered a bug on Shopify and they told her
this is the tool she should use, she would do that. I do agree however that
for a casual user on a website, it would take a lot to get them to use our
service. That’s why we are not focusing on that.

Thanks for pointing out that formatting problem. We use Instapage to make the
marketing site (we’re bootstrapping) and it seems fine when I logged in- I’ll
forward the screenshot to them to take a look.

As for the small user base, even if they’re really into it, it’s the kind of
tool that someone uses only when they need it. So even if we have a committed
user base, unless they have tons of buggy sites, we can’t expect to see tons
of activity. That’s why we aren’t sure how to handle it.

Thanks for giving me an opportunity to clarify and for the feedback! It’s
really appreciated.

~~~
tlb
It'd be worth trying to sell to website testing/QA as a service companies,
like [https://www.usertesting.com/](https://www.usertesting.com/). If they saw
value in offering your better bug reports to their customers, it'd get you a
lot of business fast.

~~~
edibleEnergy
We were contacted by a company like that with thousands of users and they
expressed some interest in using or licensing our product. Initially I thought
that would be too big of an undertaking for beta testing since we aren’t
certain of our costs but now I’m rethinking it. I'm also not sure how we'd
transition from free beta testing to a paid service in a situation like that.
Thanks for the idea though, I’m definitely going to explore that further.

------
tedmiston
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 help guide the product and be trusted early users. In
another reply you mentioned finding users to serve as product advisors
similarly
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11183572](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11183572))
. I'm having a hard time discovering who the "right" people are and reaching
them in a compelling way. If I were further along [read: post private beta] I
would reach out to someone like Phin Barnes @ First Round, but I feel at this
stage it's too early for him to really give interest.

~~~
snowmaker
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.

------
nopinsight
Hi Trevor and Jared,

My startup is developing technology for natural language understanding (in
contrast to NLP). We believe we can approach human-level understanding for
standard texts (email, blogs, online articles) in 2.5-4 years.

We are currently self-funded and can comfortably do so for about a year--by
the end of which, we believe we can develop a fairly advanced demo that
surpasses existing techs in some, but not all, areas.

What kind of demos do you think would impress best-in-class recruits/investors
to join our team? The current options we have in mind are:

1) Solving a subset of Winograd schema (commonsense reasoning challenge) with
a general approach (i.e., easily extensible with additional investment in
knowledge acquisition/data sources). No systems known to public can currently
solve all of them (or even a subset generally).

[http://commonsensereasoning.org/winograd.html](http://commonsensereasoning.org/winograd.html)

2) A conversational agent capable of conversing with humans at the level of a
4- or 5-year-old (without resorting to typical chatbot tricks).

3) Surpassing the state-of-the-art systems in a couple of standard AI
conference tasks or on datasets released by leading companies (Google,
Facebook, etc).

4) Other tasks we have not thought of...

Because of resource and time limitations, we likely need to focus the initial
efforts on one, or at most two, of the options above. (A mature system should
be able to do all those and beyond, but this is only for about one year from
now.)

A couple extra questions if you have the time:

\- Given the startup's long-term timescale before monetization and its
technical nature, what sorts of investors should we focus on talking with?

\- Are there chances of IP leaking and causing problems with patenting our
tech later on? What should we do to prevent that?

Sincerely appreciate your time to answer these questions.

\-- Ken Noppadon

~~~
tlb
_What kind of demos do you think would impress best-in-class recruits
/investors to join our team_

All the options you mention would be technically impressive (so good for
recruiting hackers), but none of them are obviously on the path to building a
huge business. You should lean towards the option where you can imagine having
a near-monopoly in a huge market.

There's a big danger of getting sucked into some application where better NLP
isn't the differentiator. Most interactive agents have small enough domains
(getting cable TV installed, parsing S-10s, triaging support emails, ...) that
general reasoning isn't critical, and the companies that succeed in this space
will be defined by other factors like sales and integration with the
customer's IT stack.

I wouldn't worry about IP leakage. I've seen a lot of companies, but none that
failed because of IP leakage. They fail for a long list of other reasons: slow
execution, bad product-market fit, founder breakups, etc.

------
spicavigo
Hi Jared and Trevor,

I created [https://codebunk.com](https://codebunk.com). Its an Online
Interviewing Tool for developers. Its the best tool out there. It provides
code execution in 23 languages, collaborative editor, REPL shells, AV Text
chat, Teams, Question banks and a lot more.

Its cash flow positive and has some of the coolest clients.

However, the rate at which it acquires new customers is pretty low (~3/month).
I have exhausted (or nearly exhausted) avenues of generating buzz (PH, HN,
Reddit, some tech publications). As a developer without any help, how do I
promote CodeBunk further? What's the best way to reach my audience (Hiring
Mangers, CTOs)?

~~~
snowmaker
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"

~~~
spicavigo
Thanks! That seems like a good playbook. I will start simultaneously on a
couple of those.

------
zeeshanm
I am founder and CEO of Exivest [[http://exivest.com/](http://exivest.com/)].
We help startup employees value their equity, help match them with direct
buyers or arrange synthetic liquidity.

We've talked to many startup employees and they all have given positive
feedback. One concern that comes up is that startups are not OK with changing
the cap table for tiny transactions. In that case, we have plans to offer
synthetic liquidity solutions via derivative transactions.

We'd like to hire your thoughts on the problem we are solving and our approach
so far.

~~~
thinkdevcode
I click on the "Value Now" button under Equity Value Calculator and I go to
Heroku Welcome page...

Edit: all three buttons go to same page

[https://exivest.herokuapp.com/](https://exivest.herokuapp.com/)

------
lpaone
Hi Jared and Trevor,

[http://www.stroomnews.com](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 a major news media company
about our enterprise product. We believe that signing up users for our
enterprise solution will also help grow our B2C platform.

We also have an idea in the area of video compression (both founders have
experience in this industry) that we believe could be huge in the streaming
video industry. Our initial tests have shown very promising results, but we
have not had much time to work on this due to focusing on our platform and
enterprise product. The success of this tech does not only provide a large
advantage for our business, but opens us up to many other industries and
opportunities.

As our ability to bootstrap dwindles (due to amount of savings), do we
continue along our path and try to get revenue as soon as we can by working on
our enterprise product or do we spend time trying to raise money so we can
focus on our tech, which may not produce anything product worthy for a much
longer time (or ever as it is still in the research stage)?

Thanks for your time!

~~~
snowmaker
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.

~~~
lpaone
Thanks for the advice.

The enterprise product provides a dashboard that allows a news room to manage
past and present media content created through our platform. It allows live
modification of stream quality (full bit stream quality control) and
description, remote control of the camera, live communication with the
reporter/camera person, and some other features we are working on that bring
us closer to parity and beyond with other companies in this field. A huge
benefit over our competitors is our significantly lower cost and no need to
carry around expensive specialized hardware, as we do not require it.

We are probably 2-3 months away from having a revenue generating product.
Although we are in conversations with one major news organization, we have
found it very difficult getting in the door with other companies.

As for the compression tech, it provides an opportunity to delivery adaptive
bit rate video in a single stream. It would significantly decrease bandwidth,
storage and compression costs. Anyone who has large libraries of variable
bitrate video and is streaming it (YouTube, Netflix, etc.) would be very
interested in this.

~~~
snowmaker
The news room product sounds interesting, but I'm concerned that you've only
got one potential customer. Maybe you could build out your network of news
organizations, rather than "selling" a product directly. You could try to meet
individual employees (even low level, or former ones) to learn more about how
their individual news room works. You could even get a part-time job in one!

If you knew you had several customers lined up, you'd (1) have more confidence
going down that route and (2) be more confident that you were designing the
product right.

~~~
lpaone
Thanks for the ideas and taking the time to give advice. It has sparked some
ideas for getting in contact with more potential customers and getting more
feedback on the product.

------
plehoux
Hi Jared and Trevor,

I'm a co-founder at [https://www.missiveapp.com](https://www.missiveapp.com),
a collaborative email client (Slack meets Gmail). We've launched our open beta
last January and are actively recruiting beta users.

We're a fully bootstrapped team of 4 working from Quebec city, Canada. We were
able to bootstrap Missive with the $ we rake in from another project we
launched three years ago called ConferenceBadge.com [1].

My question is, do you think it's a mistake to run two businesses in parallel?

Right now 85% of our time is invested in Missive even though it's bringing $0
in revenue.

Our philosophy is that if we were to look for funding, we would have to invest
at least 15% of our time on fundraising and investor relationships.

We also believe that looking for investment before market fit is a recipe for
disaster (need not to forget that we are not from/in the valley).

[1] [https://medium.com/@plehoux/successfully-bootstrapped-a-
prod...](https://medium.com/@plehoux/successfully-bootstrapped-a-product-then-
what-b4483276fd14)).

[2] What are chat conversations doing in an email client? Here are few
examples of cool possibilities they enable:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcRQhGfT620](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcRQhGfT620)

~~~
tlb
First some product advice: You're trying to replace various more specialized
tools with a general purpose tool. For example, I use Slack, Front, and Lever
in addition to gmail, for internal, external, and recruiting-related
conversations respectively. You should explain clearly how your one tool will
be better than a combination of the many special-purpose tools.

If you can support yourselves with only 15% time on the old project, that's
pretty good. You can probably get Missive off the ground with 85%. Once it's
off the ground, it should be easy to get investment to focus on it full-time.

I like to think that investors aren't just a time sink, but can give useful
advice about the parts of the business that are common to the other businesses
they work with, like customer acquisition, hiring, and managing teams.

~~~
rafBM
Co-founder here, we indeed thought of crafting our tagline in such a way:

“With all these carefully thought collaborative features baked within an email
client, Missive might very well replace your help desk, CRM, and messaging
app.”

We do think there is a cost to always switch between multiple apps, but as new
kids in a crowd full of big players, we’ve been wondering whether we should
expect / try to catch users by “playing well with others” or be bolder and
encourage them to ditch other apps?

------
boxerab
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/](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 would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

~~~
tlb
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 boxes (or whatever the
ratio is.) Are enough customers like this to justify building a business
around it?

~~~
boxerab
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

------
feedbackhotline
Jared and Trevor,

Feedback Hotline (feedbackhotline.com) is the easiest way for businesses to
collect feedback. We provide the hotline for free. We intend to make money
through data.

We think we need to prove three things to succeed:

1\. Businesses/organizations will join 2\. People will send a lot of feedback
3\. We can monetize this feedback

We are currently optimizing for 1, focusing on small businesses. We believe
for i, everything before i needs to be true before i can be true. We want to
speak about this framework for optimization.

FBH

~~~
snowmaker
That's right. Your customers are the businesses who will adopt this. The
people who send feedback are also important, but they're not your direct
customers, and you have to start with businesses before you get them.

I see some businesses on your site. Are these all actual customers? How are
they using it, and what do they think of it so far?

------
dcole2929
Hey Jared & Trevor

I'm working on a few different projects all of which I think could become
viable companies but having a hard time deciding which to focus on. I've
already seen interest from relevant parties in each of the separate projects.

I think the hardest one but also the one with the most growth potential would
be a project I'm working on to provide management tools (similar to the stuff
a ceo might use) to high level government officials. However, with the way
that government contracts are handled I wonder if this is even a reasonable
industry to target.

Secondly I have two different projects that focus on College Students, where I
would be selling solutions to the Colleges themselves. The first project is an
art application that allows users to upload art in any medium and be seen by
other students. This would allow them to easily build fan bases by taking
advantage of pre-existing school connections.

The other idea is similar but focuses on user generated events. It tackles the
question of how does one find interesting things to do, in a new area, when
you don't know anyone. And has certain measures in place to help alleviate the
awkwardness of trying to join pre-existing groups.

Thanks

~~~
tlb
College art students vs gov’t officials. It’s hard to think of two more
different kinds of customers.

Selling to gov’t is hard, because they have a slow and heavyweight purchasing
process. Selling to colleges is hard for the same reasons, and also they have
small budgets. Selling management tools is very hard, because you have to get
people to change the way they work. It’s very very hard to get senior
officials to change their process.

If your business works, you’ll spend 1/3 of your waking hours for 10+ years
talking to your customers. You can only sustain this if you sincerely like
working with them. Whom would you rather spend that much time with?

~~~
dcole2929
These are very good points and kind of why I'm debating which way to go. I
have a few ways to pivot out of the college market even if I start there so I
may explore that some more. As far as management tools go, I'd largely be
competing with Excel spreadsheets, and meetings. Anyway thanks, I appreciate
the insights.

------
sharemywin
Hi Jared & Trevor,

Do you think that marketplaces for services is too mature of a market? I'm
working on a site called bid2mow.com to help new lawn care companies find
work. It seems like everyone is focused on come to my app/website and I'll get
you a price versus an ebay model. I know task rabbit had that model and went
away from it. Ebay may not be amazon but it's no business to sneeze at either.

~~~
tlb
I don't think there's a general answer: different services are very different.
The lawn industry is very different from other home services, and we've seen
different things work in those two businesses.

Usually, marketplaces get started around the margins. Today, eBay sells
everything but at first it was obscure collectibles. For lawn care, weather
and seasonality drive the short-term market dynamics. So when there's rain or
drought, the supply-demand curve shifts rapidly and that's when lawn care
providers might look for work to fill up their schedules. You should look into
how your marketplace might work on different kinds of days, to see if will be
a useful part of the ecosystem.

~~~
sharemywin
Thanks for doing this and answering,

All this is assuming minimal outside funding.(as a solo founder I doubt I can
get funding)

I guess my plan is to play $50-$100 million game of "moneyball." Lawn care was
the lowest hanging fruit to get 10k-50k/mo fees with in a year or two. Next
was probably to try and go after cleaning and maybe even do a little cross
selling. I'm also looking at launching www.bid2flyer.com which will help with
a channel to feed businesses looking for marketing. The code is about the same
for each of these and the marketing channel is what I have experience in.
Obviously not a traditional way to do things.

------
cddotdotslash
Hi, thank you both for doing this. I've been working on a project on and off
for about two years now which I finally launched as a beta last year. It's
called CloudSploit ([https://cloudsploit.com](https://cloudsploit.com)) and is
a service designed to allow users to continuously scan their AWS accounts for
vulnerabilities (account-level risks that could lead to a compromise). AWS has
some security products, and their are certainly competitors in the space, but
we've heard from countless customers that our price point and features are
ideal for them. My goal is to now move this out of beta and to actually
advertise it.

My question for you is: what challenges are there around marketing for
security-focused products? Of course, trust is a key factor, but are there
other things I should consider? I'm thinking of Twitter ads, but I'm sure
there are better options between that and cold emailing. Thanks again!

~~~
tlb
Don't buy ads. Your product should spread by word of mouth, since developers
know lots of other developers. The viral message (from current customer to
potential customer) would be something like: "I got a scan from Cloudsploit
and they found like 4 remote exploits in my AWS. You should have them check
your infrastructure." Hearing that from a friend would be more powerful than
any number of Twitter ads.

------
BinaryResult
Hey Guys,

I am one of the Co-founders of Disco Melee
([https://beta.discomelee.com/hub](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 storefronts, and free donate/sub
buttons for all. The problem however is that (except for our hardcore
believers) they don't seem stick around very long due to the pull of network
effects from the established players. What strategies could you recommend for
overcoming network effects to the point where we can start generating our own?
Thanks!

~~~
tlb
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?

------
RyM21
Hi Trevor and Jared,

WordBrewery ([http://wordbrewery.com](http://wordbrewery.com)) teaches
languages by scraping real sentences from news sites around world, then
processing each sentence with an algorithm that estimates (on the basis of
word frequency and other variables) how likely the sentence is to be useful to
learners at different levels.

We are now a member of 1776 and participating in Microsoft BizSpark, so we are
on the right track. But I am new to the startup world, and I am funding the
website entirely by myself at this point using money from my day-job paycheck.
What is the best way to pursue seed funding at this early stage while we are
developing core features? Do I need to organize it as an LLC or corporation to
get funding?

Thank you, Ryan

~~~
snowmaker
I like the idea for WordBrewery! That's a clever model for optimizing language
learning.

Yes, you will need to incorporate your company to raise seed funding. A really
easy way is using Stripe Atlas:
[https://stripe.com/atlas](https://stripe.com/atlas) \- they will do all the
paperwork for you to get a company legal structure.

You're probably at the stage where it makes sense to apply to accelerators.
Any major accelerator program will help you with the legal structure as well
as providing funding.

~~~
RyM21
Excellent, thank you! We will be adding many features in the next few months,
but my favorite is individualized but automatically generated language
courses. We will use the technology you see on the site's front page to
present users with sentences on an individualized basis depending on what
words they already know. If a user knows the 500 most common Spanish words,
for example, we will show them an authentic sentence that uses one or more of
those 500 words plus the 501st most common word. As the user demonstrates
knowledge of more words, the set of possible sentences for that user will
gradually increase. This will reinforce existing vocabulary while building new
vocabulary as efficiently as possible.

------
aarzee
Hi Trevor and Jared,

I'm in the idea stages of creating a website, and I have no previous
experience with startups or other business; I'm only a senior in high school.
The idea is that there are people who would like to own the same game on
multiple platforms, and so the website would offer a discount on a game that
you already own, for another platform. So, for example, if you have the Xbox
One version of Rocket League, the website would offer a discount on the Steam
version.

My question is: how should I gauge interest in such an idea? I don't have any
real budget to speak of, and I don't know where I should go looking for people
to ask.

~~~
tlb
Talk to your friends. The advantage you, as a young person, have over game
studios with millions of dollars and hundreds of employees is that you and
your friends _are_ the customer for this sort of thing. So you should work on
understanding what you and your friends want.

Then, you have to figure out the common ground between what you want (every
game free!) and what's possible. The particular idea you mention, discounts on
games for other platforms, seems like it would require deals with the game
studios, which might be hard to get. But
[https://www.humblebundle.com/](https://www.humblebundle.com/) built a good
business around bundling several games together at a big discount, and there
are probably more possibilities.

The tricky part about asking your friends is that they'll tell you what they
think you want to hear. The only way to find out if they'd really buy
something is... sell it to them for real money. Like, actually go out and buy
a PS4 and XBox copy of something, and find out what they'd pay for the two
together. Or try some other combinations to see what works.

------
braderhart
Hello and thank you for taking the time to help other entrepreneurs. I am
working on creating a new cross-platform premier Linux distribution that uses
containers as the core init process. The goal is automatic cross-compilation
between multiple targets and using the built-in kernel sandboxing for
applications instead of what XDG App and others are trying to do. I'd like to
also target a new window manager built on Wayland with eventual Vulkan
support. Would love to get some feedback on how to handle the contention that
already exists within this space and how to get the funding I need to make
something like this successful.

~~~
tlb
That sounds like a lot of stuff to take on for a first product. Because
existing players already have long feature lists, you can't compete at first
by having a longer list. It'd be better to start with one single, simple,
useful thing and expand from there.

Cross-platform is interesting. Are there large installations that need to
migrate between Intel and ARM boxes seamlessly? That's the sort of feature
that might make someone switch distros.

------
parisi
Hey Trevor and Jared,

I am in the midst of creating a new platform as a service product while
working at a large tech company. I am not quite willing to reveal the platform
to the world yet, but it is a new take on backend-as-a-service platforms that
I think will be very intriguing to developers.

My question is not specific to my product and instead pertains to the
situation of trying to develop a startup while working full time at a large
company. I have done 0 work on the product on my employers time and am not
concerned with that aspect. I am more interested in your thoughts on when
would be the ideal time to leave my current post to work full time on the
startup? My biggest concern is leaving the financial stability of my current
job when I have no capital lined up to support a startup. I have already
launched a closed beta of the platform and am getting feedback from a small
set of users and plan to open the beta up to the world in the coming months.
In your experience have you ever seen VC's or Angel's be willing to make a
deal with a startup founded by a full time employee of a different company. If
I were able to secure funding, I would be absolutely be willing to move on and
work full time on the startup but making that leap without funding would be a
difficult decision. Any words of wisdom you can offer here would be greatly
appreciated!

Thanks!

------
publicator
Hello Jared and Trevor,

We're developing a publishing network. Individuals and groups can start
magazines. Users can read on a timeline and interact like in a social network.
What's new? Now anyone can get publishing infrastructure as good as a well
funded online magazine. That means lots of unique publications in verticals
that well-funded magazines & newspapers cannot do.

What's the best strategy to lure in people to use the service? How do we make
money?

~~~
snowmaker
So to start a new publishing network, you have to start with writers / content
creators. You can't get readers before you have content. The thing to do is to
get people who want to create a magazine to use your software.

Have you started talking to users yet? Is the software usable?

------
chejazi
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](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?

~~~
snowmaker
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 might be a hundred dollars. For the New York Times, it's probably a
million dollars.

~~~
chejazi
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.

~~~
snowmaker
I see. OK, so the goal is to get publisher content because it's less intrusive
than blatant ads.

What you said about CPMs and minimum ad buys is true. The solution, it seems
to me, is to simply go to smaller publishers. There are a million small blogs
out there that might pay you $100 for some content marketing. The thing to
think about is what your unique value proposition can be that will get them to
spend their ad dollars with you. Perhaps it's something to do with the full-
page sized ad format. It reminds me (from the advertiser standpoint) of the
StumbleUpon model, which is very successful for certain kinds of sites.

~~~
chejazi
Ok. Our takeaway is to start going after customers now instead of punting on
it. Thank you!

------
bsims
Hi Trevor and Jared, we have been building financial predictions on data from
marketplace lending platforms. Curious to talk to you about where you see the
business models of prediction going, examples other YC companies who are
selling prediction and ML as a service, pricing strategies etc.

~~~
snowmaker
We have some experience with companies like this. We worked with Framed Data
([http://framed.io](http://framed.io)), which predicts churn, among others.

I don't know that it's particularly useful to think about business models and
pricing strategies disembodied from a specific business. What is it that you
predict exactly? Who is the customer and what is the value you bring them?

------
abrie
Hello,

I've developed a custom toolchain while writing an electronic book[0]. The
toolchain automates the conversion of markdown and media into a scrollable
"app-novel". Initially I'd hoped to earn income from the book itself, but the
naiveness of that idea is quickly becoming apparent.

As a pivot, I am developing a public interface for the toolchain, with the
idea of permitting others to write books in the same style. Unfortunately it
is not ready to be demonstrated. Nonetheless, this feels like a untapped
industry to me, and I wonder what your opinions or suggestions might be.

Thank you.

[0][https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ca.goeiebook.m...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ca.goeiebook.montreal.preview)

------
masudhossain
Hey, Trevor and Jared. Thanks a lot for doing this!

WHAT WE DO: www.wiredhere.com

We integrate every social activity (university created or student created)
happening within an university into a mobile app. The students can attend and
provide feedback through the app; we than take the analytics that's created
and provide it to universities so they can assess and compare themselves to
other universities.

QUESTION:

Do you think it's more optimal approach this as a SAAS for the university
since we provide them a brand new web platform to make event creation easier
and so they can reach students in a faster way? OR be a non-saas and introduce
this to the students first and let the universities catch on afterwards, and
than work with the university so they can use our web platform and mobile app?

Also, what is your opinion on our concept?

~~~
tlb
Definitely start by getting students to love it first, then sell something to
the university. Universities take a long time to make decisions, and they
don't have a budget item for "help students find parties to go to". But as
Facebook showed, the right thing can spread through a campus in a couple
weeks.

There have been a lot of failures in this space. The big problem is getting
quality listings. It's a fair bit of work for event organizers to post their
event on multiple platforms, and they're probably already posting on Facebook
and a campus mailing list, so it's a hard battle to make them list on yours
too. And if you don't have most of the listings, users will just check
Facebook instead of you.

------
downandout
Hi Jared and Trevor,

I am working on a marketplace through which publishers and journalists can
sell the ability to be quoted and linked to in an article to the highest
bidder. A realtor, for example, might be willing to pay to be quoted and
linked to in an article about how a city's real estate market has been
accelerating.

My question is how to get started with marketing it. While the growth hacking
crowd would say to simply spam a bunch of reporters to get inventory, I have
found in other ventures that people absolutely hate receiving any form of
unsolicited email with any kind of pitch.

~~~
snowmaker
One challenge with this business that you didn't mention is the difficulty
getting to critical mass. Reporters, broadly, write such varied articles that
if you have a handful of reporters and a handful of businesses on the
platform, the chance that any of them actually match for a given article is
miniscule.

To solve that, I would consider starting in a very small vertical. You could
pick one small town and their local businesses (geographical vertical), or
pick one industry and go deep into that industry. If you start in a small
vertical, the marketing becomes easier because you have a very targeted pitch
that doesn't feel spammy.

About your original question on marketing, though, there is no alternative to
talking to users. Before you start pitching people, though, you could go talk
to journalists and ask them for feedback on the idea. You can ask them if they
would value this service, and what else they wish someone would build. Rather
than just selling them, you should try to build a relationship so you can get
feedback from them over time.

~~~
downandout
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.

------
ForrestN
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 coding slowly by
myself, and the urgent coding todo list has exploded while some of our sites
age. What should I do?

Thank you!

~~~
tlb
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...](http://grayarea.org/event/deepdream-the-art-of-neural-networks/)

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

~~~
gnat
(You could also put an ad on your own site/s for your job -- "Love
Contemporary Art? Want to Help Us Bring it to the Masses?) Your next developer
might already be a reader.

------
sbashyal
Hi Trevor and Jared, thanks for doing this.

We have been working on [http://growthzilla.com](http://growthzilla.com) \- a
data driven growth solution for salons for a little more than a year now. We
have paying customers since launch and have zero cancellations. Our customers
love the product for 3 reasons (1) ease of use (2) effectiveness in driving
growth and (3) customer service

The problem: we are growing slower than we would want. Is there anything you'd
like to suggest?

~~~
snowmaker
How are you growing right now? Specifically, how do users find out about
Growthzilla? How many users do you have and how many did you add last month?

~~~
sbashyal
We started with selling to people in our network. Now we have some online ad
campaigns, referral and just went to a trade show. We currently have 50
customers. Added 10 last month.

~~~
snowmaker
If you're growing 25% / month, you're not doing too badly.

How well are online ads and referral working? How does the referral program
work?

It sounds like there are a bunch of channels you haven't tried yet. Here are a
few ideas.

Standard channels: 1) Sales. Yes, you call up the all the salons and ask them
if they need Growthzilla. This is still the way most things are sold to local
businesses like salons. You can try email, phone, even in person.

2) Content marketing. My guess is that there are a lot of salons, and not a
whole lot people writing about how to run them. Maybe you can become the go-to
place not just for software, but for the knowledge salon owners need to run
their business well.

3) Improve your website. It looks like there's no way to just try the
software, and there isn't much info about it on the site. Having something
other than "request demo" may improve conversions.

Wackier ideas: 1) There are lots of software options for salons that do
something similar. It's not clear from your site what makes you unique. What
is it? If there's nothing truly special, maybe you need to change the product.

2) Channel partnerships. Who are the big companies selling products to hair
salons? Could you get them to resell Growthzilla and split the revenue?

3) Affiliate sales. Are there affiliate sales people who sell other products
to salons (scissors, hair product, etc)? If so, can you have them sell
Growthzilla too?

4) Organize free conferences / meetups for salon owners to learn about how
they can tech-enable their business.

------
zodiac
Hi Jared and Trevor,

I'm building games and tools for language learning. While talking to users, I
asked them what language learning tools they wished existed when they were
studying in the past. A lot of them talked about a tool that lets them talk to
native speakers of their target language online.

I know I should build something users want, but there are plenty of tools that
let you do this (including a YC company, cambly) and I don't want to build
another one. So what do I do with their answer to my question?

~~~
snowmaker
If there are plenty of tools which do this (and you're right, I think there
are), but there are still a lot of people who want them but aren't using them,
then the existing companies are missing something. It could be that the
existing products don't work in quite the right way; sometimes small
differences are important. Or it could be that the companies haven't figured
out the right way to reach customers.

When users tell you this, do you show them the existing products you know of?
If your hypothesis is right that the space is saturated, then they should
start using them right away. But I suspect that they won't, which means that
there's more left to be done.

------
wootcamp
Hi Jared and Trevor,

I'm cofounder of a start up within the beauty space. We have small but active
group of users that love creating and consuming a unique type of content only
available on our platform. The revenue stream is to eventually sell tangible
products so we would like to make use of all this content to convert
purchases.

Is there a way we can test out how well the conversion rate could work without
shipping tangible products? We don't yet have capital to stockpile.

~~~
tlb
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.

~~~
wootcamp
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 affiliate marketing really
works especially when it comes to visual content?

~~~
tlb
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.

~~~
wootcamp
If its not by affiliate then maybe we can find a way to accept pre-orders for
a bulk purchase. We notice there are lot of products used by our audience that
are not carried by local distributors so they find ways to import it
themselves.

Right, didn't think about sales for the sake of getting data. Currently we
have a way to map out the products our users use most and made an assumption
that these are the ones that they will buy. Would be interesting to compare
the data and see if it matches. Hope the conversion works out well once we
activate it.

Also just to share that showing users the results they can get with these
products is exactly what we do and its in a visual manner, especially since
this industry is driven by imagery.

Would love to continue this conversation in a private space if there’s any
chance for it. Anyhow thanks for your input and we’ll be sending in an
application for YC!

------
thekonqueror
Hi Jared and Trevor,

[http://nestify.io](http://nestify.io) founder here. We're improving PHP CMS
hosting (WordPress, Drupal) with better scaling, on-page optimizations, better
security. We have paying customers and ~100 die-hard users that will be really
sad / lose revenues if we shut down.

Should we focus on building our brand while scaling or switch to whitelabel
and API services and partner with hosting providers?

~~~
snowmaker
I remember reading your YC app :).

About your question on whitelabeling: I wouldn't be too dogmatic about this
either way. It's easy to make it a question about your company's mission, but
it's more of an ROI decision. If you're seeing strong demand from companies
who will pay you well for a white-label version, and your software is written
in a way that makes it easy to build one, you should do that. Otherwise, it
may just be a distraction.

The other thing that jumps out to me about your business is that the economics
don't seem to match with the usage. You're serving a lot of traffic but not
making as much revenue as I would expect, especially considering that you have
"die-hard users" that love the service. Perhaps you can find a way to get them
to pay more money, or find other customers that can afford to pay more?

~~~
thekonqueror
Thanks for your insights. Our early customers also mention that prices are too
low.

We are now adding tiered pricing plans and charging for based on usage. I'll
make sure to add that in our current YC application too.

------
workerdee
Hello, I have a little Etsy shop and was wondering how to get technical
people’s attention. How do you find gifts for female family and friends (when
they don’t already have something in mind)?

As for the shop itself, the photographs need improvement – I set up a small
lighted space on my kitchen counter and am working on this. Shop:
[http://zebbles.etsy.com](http://zebbles.etsy.com)

~~~
snowmaker
I never know what to get female family and friends! Particularly when it comes
to things like jewelry, and I'm pretty sure many guys have the same problem.

Maybe you could start a blog offering gift advice for clueless techies, or
even become a gift concierge, offering to help individuals find the perfect
gift for a small fee.

~~~
workerdee
Thanks! The blog and gift concierge suggestions are interesting. Most of the
technical people I know don't like spending their time looking into sparkly,
girly things.

------
rsdce
Hi Jared/Trevor, my partner and I are working on developing an app for
wardrobe cataloging, which to our surprise (or not ) has already has been
implemented by lots of ppl in the apple android store. However the advanced
features that we thought of aren't implemented yet. How should we decide the
path to go : implement the app or just make the advanced features and license
them to the existing apps?

~~~
petervandijck
Licensing them to the existing apps sounds like a tiny business.

Could your R1 be significantly better than what's out there somehow?

------
mariobyn
Hey, I want to present [http://grobyk.com](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.

~~~
snowmaker
Is there a question here?

~~~
mariobyn
Sorry, let me try one. Do you think is still a good market to introduce
another tool for teams? Our approach is a little bit different, i think, we
saw a lack of distributing useful content between team members.

~~~
snowmaker
I think the market of "tools for teams" is virtually limitless. The question
you should be asking is whether people want your tool in particular.

I spent some time on your site and it took me a _long_ time to understand what
your tool does. You need to make it a lot clearer. Here's a good exercise for
this. 1) Find someone you haven't told your idea to 2) Show them your home
page. Let them read it for 30 seconds. 3) Close your laptop. Then, have them
explain what Grobyk is in their own words.

If they can't do that, you need to improve your home page.

~~~
mariobyn
We spoke with teams about the idea and they said that also they had this
problem. We started from our problem and then we decided to make it a platform
for teams. We will work on the first page, we know that is not so friendly but
thank you for your advice, we will try to see the results. Another quick
question is that if is a good approach to attract customers by searching
developers/bloggers from different companies and direct email them with our
idea or is it to forced? We are now focused only on
technology/business/startups fields. We want to attract teams from these
fields.

------
FraserGreenlee
Hi Trevor and Jared,

I'm the founder of WebArcs ([http://webarcs.com](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?

~~~
snowmaker
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.

~~~
FraserGreenlee
Thank you that really helps =D

I'll try and find the value proposition and see if I can get that one user.

------
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