
Ask HN: How do you know when to give up? - jfornear
I launched a little social site dedicated to gamers in the fall, and it hasn't picked up any traction at all. It never received any press coverage or anything. The blogs I contacted never responded to any of my emails. I've tried getting the word out through gaming forums, but that didn't help. I went back to my old WoW guild's forums, and they didn't even seem to care.<p>I feel like my site hasn't even been looked at to be given a fair chance, so I'm hesitant to call it a failure. Though, another part of me wants to think it was a stupid idea with bad execution. When do you know when to move on to a new project?
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matt1
A little background, as I can relate: I built a poker calculator called ALL IN
Expert, which I thought would be a big hit but wasn't. When it launched, it
received very little coverage or attention and I quickly despaired and took
the site down, though I did keep a copy on my blog where people could go and
download it.

A few months later I do a Google search to see if anyone had said anything
about it and lo and behold, one of the notable poker training sites had done a
full hour long video on how to use ALL IN Expert to improve your game. They
had found out about the software, either because of my initial marketing or
just randomly through Google, and wouldn't you know it: they found it useful.
Now its downloaded a dozen or more times/day. Not much, but who knows what
would have happened if I had kept promoting it.

It can be hard to tell when to give up and when you should push just a little
bit harder. When I stopped working on it, I started working on a new project,
Domain Pigeon, which will likely prove to have been a good decision.

My 2c: Leave your site up, make a few changes every now and then, keep
promoting it even if only an email or forum post every few days, and re-
evaluate in a few months. There's not really a good reason to take it down,
even if you do choose to devote your time to something else.

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patio11
There is an article by Steve Pavlina which, if you file off the words
"shareware author" and replace with "web app author", I think you could
benefit from.

[http://www.gamedev.net/reference/business/features/shareprof...](http://www.gamedev.net/reference/business/features/shareprof/)

I'll warn you in advance: some of it is trite. But there is some value in the
other stuff: marketing success, for example, is not something that just
happens to a product. It is something which is the predictable result of a
strategy designed to produce it. Your submission indicates that you tried a
few things to get users, which is good, but I wonder if you thought about that
issue in a systemic manner. (Was there a plan in place? With boring things
like predicting the chicken-egg issue before it happened, and multiple avenues
for solving it? Which you then checked against reality as you encountered
reality? These are opportunities for improvement in your current project and
in how you approach future projects.)

As for when to give up: you'd be really, really surprised how far you can take
projects with persistence. That said, if my little brother said "Hey, I've got
an idea, first you take gamers and then you..." my first question would be
"Why will they pay for this when they hate paying for just about anything,
including the games which define their identity?" and I would not have a
second question until I got a satisfactory answer to the first question.

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sharkbrainguy
When the reasons you originally believe the project could (not necessarily
_would_ or even _probably would_ ) succeed become invalid, you should stop
investing in it.

To answer your question someone would have to know what those original reasons
were. As some say, what's your "secret sauce".

It looks to me like a twitter for geeks. The problem is that being twitter is
already for geeks, and I don't see any benefit in being in a _more_ exclusive
communication channel.

When you say "fair chance" to me it sounds as though you think there's a
community of intelligent people who give websites scrutiny proportional to the
effort the authors have put in. This kind of attitude is almost always going
to lead to disappointment.

The internet is more like a herd of lazy, selfish people looking for ways to
do less boring stuff and more fun stuff.

You might do better optimizing for that scenario.

edit: I originally had a critique of your site here but it wasn't strictly
relevant and this post is too long.

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ktharavaad
Googling his HN username turned up this site:

<http://www.noobindex.com/>

Clean design and layout and I dare say it looks a little inspired from the HN
design.

However the site really doesn't tell me what it does, issit like twitter?

~~~
lionhearted
Tagline to noobindex:

"Noobindex is a hangout for noobs, nerds, dorks, and gamers.

Register your handle and make your own page »"

Doesn't tell me what the value is, or why stay. 18 or 19 words, 25 syllables,
and I don't know what's going on here. I click on the first profile I see
(Juicebox). I see a picture of Mr. T flexing wearing gold chains, some
messages (latest: Juicebox is like omgsh pwnin noobs), and a Bio page with
generic contact info.

At this point, I've investigated the site, and seen no reason to stick around.

Now, if the tagline were:

"Noobindex: l33t gamers only, for celebrating games and laughing at n00bs",
then a search box below that with "Enter your favorite game and see who is
playing right now" then... maybe that'd work better some? This is all just
quick and dirty in my mind, but you need to get people's attention with
something that makes them say, "Yeah, I'd dig that!" and then get them to
interact with your site somehow.

------
Shamiq
Tangential: There's no link in your profile or in your text. Do you mind
showing us your product?

Also, if you live in the U.S. and follow typical diurnal sleeping patterns, I
recommend waiting until a more sane time in the morning to think your thoughts
through rationally.

Caveat Emptor: I do not speak from experience.

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leftnode
You've already done what so many others fail: complete a site and launch it.
There's no reason to call it a failure. You spend what, probably $10 a month
in hosting? I wouldn't close it down because it hasn't received a lot of
traffic yet.

However, as the other posters say, it sounds like you'll attract a bunch of 13
year olds. May want to steer the site in a more professional direction.

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robfitz
if you haven't already, i'd first make a budget (of time, money, or whatever
other resource you're consuming) and see what it might take to reach a win
scenario you'd be happy with (ie $3k/mo passive income). laying it out in rows
and columns with required user #s and growth is surprisingly helpful.

i haven't seen the site and have no idea of the specifics, but based on what
i'm imagining, i would jump ship. the chicken-egg issue is hard for anything
social (especially when bootstrapped w/ no marketing $), and gaming is a
saturated space, so it'll be hard to get the user base to critical mass.

that said, if you're still excited about what you're building, that carries a
lot of weight.

~~~
lionhearted
Rob - I upvoted you because you had some great insights, but I disagree some
on "making a budget of time or money until reaching a win scenario" - in my
experience, success is totally nonlinear. You slave away, and then make major
breakthroughs. In business, any sort of milestones that correlate to anything
won't match the real world.

It's key you get some proof of concept (is this valuable to anyone? who is
going to pay me? why?). Once you've got proof of concept and you're behind
your idea, you then hustle like a motherfucker until you win. If your general
concept is a winner, and you hustle like a motherfucker, you win eventually.

~~~
robfitz
hullo - i more or less agree. i'm advocating spreadsheets as more of a sanity
check on your business assumptions than as a real predictive model.

------
nostrademons
Here's the criteria I used, courtesy of a Sam Altman post
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=95883>):

"If no new or current users/advertisers/customers/etc care about what you're
doing, and no one in the company has a plan (or, more commonly I think, a
desire) to fix it, you are probably in bad shape."

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edw519
_How do you know when to give up?_

 _When do you know when to move on to a new project?_

Ah, 2 completely different questions.

Moving on to a new project is _not_ giving up. Especially when you use
everything you learned from the previous project in the next one (which, of
course, all of us hackers always do). Just think of it as Me 2.0 and move on.
Never give up.

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alex_c
I find it useful to think in terms of rates and percentages. Sounds dull, but
hear me out.

What % of blogs respond to your product? If you've only emailed 5 or 10 blogs,
you don't really know yet - that's a pretty small number, and you might've
just had bad luck. The rate of success really depends on a lot of factors
unrelated to your site itself (subject matter, the blogs themselves, how you
approach them, etc.), but I wouldn't be surprised to get a 10% response rate
for an average product. I haven't really done this enough to go into more
detail, or to have a winning formula, but I would expect the success rate to
be relatively low, which can get discouraging.

What percentage of your visitors are sticking around? Again, if you've only
received a few hundred visits, it's hard to tell. The best way to iterate is
to have a steady stream of traffic, make changes, and see how they affect
stickiness.. but getting the traffic is the tricky part to start with, right?
I'm not really counting Digg/Reddit/Stumbleupon traffic here, since those
visitors typically have the attention span of a fruitfly.

How much search engine traffic are you getting? How feasible is it to get on
the first page of Google or Yahoo for some combinations of relevant keywords?
(use the Adwords Keyword Tool to research keywords, see how much traffic they
could potentially get you, and how competitive they are). Search engines can
bring you thousands of visitors a month who are actively looking for something
like your site. Don't ignore them.

Can you think of any other domain-specific promotions? You mentioned game
forums and guilds, I don't know how far you took that. Is there any angle
under which game developers or publishers might see an advantage to promoting
your site or collaborating with you? What about game magazines or review
sites?

These are all the cost of giving your site a chance to succeed. Weigh that
against the reward of success - how badly do you want your site to grow, and
how much effort are you willing to put in to "give it a fair chance"? (you're
the only one who can give it a fair chance, by the way - no one else cares
enough).

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vaksel
if that noobindex is your site, then you should spend a few weeks and do a
complete redesign. Right now(no offense) it looks like crap. You have to play
to your audience. Simplicity works on HN, because the site is only text and
you get the full experience anyways.

But for a gaming site to be simple is just wrong...look at your competition,
all of them have extremely visually appealing designs. So why would a person
register for something that looks like crap(pink background..really?) when
they can register for a site that looks good.

If you suck at visual design hire a designer to build you something that is
visually appealing. Probably will run you something like 500 bucks on one of
those freelancer sites.

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tontoa4
You need to believe in your own product, otherwise trying to sell it will just
make you feel guilty. So post a link i'd like to help review it.

------
pclark
Post a review post here asking for a review.

You haven't even included a link to your app! :)

~~~
delano
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=228735>

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markessien
If there is a path to making money that does not involve gaining a huge number
of users, the continue pushing it. If your only path involves becoming very
popular, then it may be the right time to give up.

------
azharcs
Read a book by Seth Godin called "The Dip - The Extraordinary benefits of
knowing when to quit ( and when to stick)". It might be useful.

~~~
akkartik
Summary/paraphrasing/my version:

a) If you can't see how to make this work, quit.

b) Beware of rationalizations for quitting when you're just in a local trough
emotionally. My heuristic: I don't stop doing this until I find something
better to do. That forces me to find a constructive reason to quit.

c) The worst possible outcome isn't failure and quitting but ongoing
mediocrity. Either because you lack the courage to quit, or because you get
just enough feedback to keep you interested. This can be arbitrarily hard to
detect, but for starters keep monitoring your metrics and looking for
opportunities to revise.

