

Ask HN: Am I on the right track? - jrussbowman

I have reached a point in my project where my product is functional, and am starting to focus on the UI to make it usable.<p>I've taken it slow the past couple months, as my wife was pregnant. I haven't registered a corporation or anything. My daughter was born last week, and now I'm looking at what the next steps should be after I get through the newborn induced sleep deprivation stage.<p>I don't have a co-founder, not even sure how I'd look for one or if I really need one. I now have a wife and 2 kids and like many Americans am upside down in a house, so quitting the good paying day job isn't an option.<p>The product is www.unscatter.com. The monetization plan is to get in on Bing's advertising platform once I have enough traffic and corporation registered, and also to start selling features on top of the hosted search solution. For example, domain hosting so the search page could be at search.yourdomain.com. Other ideas would be a monthly fee for letting users upload a logo, or to remove advertising.<p>It seems like my plan should be polish the UI, register the business the identity, then start trying to get users while working on creating the features to sell.<p>I'm avoiding looking for investors because while I'm convinced my plan which includes future search indexing and complete support for enterprise class customers is an obvious no way to fail scenario, I should probably at least prove I can get customers first. I'm avoiding looking for a cofounder because I know even less about finding one of those, and what I should look for in one. I think this post is just looking for others to validate I'm on the right track, and the nagging doubts on if I should start focusing on investors or co-founders can continue to be ignored.
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pierrefar
What does it do? Put up a tag line or a quick explanation on the home page.

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alttab
This. When I went there it looked like a search engine.

Embedding search for sites? Google does that. Using Bing's advertising
platform? Who uses Bing? Twitter / Facebook results? People are already using
tools for this. Search Portals? Yahoo, iGoogle, Bing... etc.

You seem convinced you have a great idea for a product but you were unable to
convince me. In fact, I'm still not sure what it does or how today's tools
don't do what you're trying to do already. It may have been because you are
doing this part time, you were beat to the punch.

You need to make people _badly want_ something you are selling. I can't want
something if I don't know what it does. And since your product is related to
search and trends, you have a very very very steep uphill battle ahead of you.

The main issue is your marketing. I noticed on your blog that you said,
_"Really, if I need to spend a lot of time writing about what the product is
for people to understand it, then I’ve failed."_

This is so far from the truth. I know the technology is great. I know its
interesting, but that's the _how_. Most, no -- _all_ consumers don't give a
damn about how, they care about _what_. Ask any marketing person worth their
salt and they will tell you it takes _9 to 18 months for a story to catch on
and echo within a community/industry._ Unless you go viral, it will take
longer in the search sector.

The how becomes interesting if your primary market is technical. But even then
you are throwing away non-technical leads that could make the same decision.

My overall impression is that you've been cave-coding for too long without
iterative feedback from other professionals, market analysts, or consultants.
There may be situational factors that explain all of this but from a "give me
money" perspective no one will care.

From a pivot perspective, it seems like integrating this functionality into a
platform or library for other hackers to use and integrate into their own
platforms could be a possible avenue. You've used and created some cool
technology - repackage it and evangelize your approach. Even if it doesn't
make any money, it can help garner a reputation that may help you move out
onto other opportunities that pay more.

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jrussbowman
Ok, does sound like I do need get more information up about what it does.

The product I'll be selling is the hosted search solution. The idea is that
while you can get an embedded site search via Google or other search
providers, I'll be offering my customers more than just a way to provide
search results for their viewers.

The concept is that these days businesses are publishing content not only to
their websites, but also to Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and other sites. My
solution allows them a way to unscatter all that content, putting it one place
for their viewers. Combined with the RSS feed display, it also gives them an
out of the box portal with all their content in one place.

It also allows people to create topic based search solutions as well. I'll
create and post links to examples of those when I make them later this week.
One idea I'll be publishing is a Conservation Search, where search results
will be provided from The Nature Conservancy, Greenpeace and WWF, while also
showing their most recent content from Twitter, Facebook and Youtube.

In the future I'll be adding more providers for customers to add to their
portal, as well as eventually building my own crawler and search indexer,
which for a fee will allow customers to really customize what gets indexed and
how search results are displayed.

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pedalpete
the unscattering of published content from multiple sources sounds like a
great idea to start. I wouldn't get into the topic based searching right away
as you are diluting your brand. Do one thing REALLY well to start, then move
into other things.

Since I suspect this is a product that would be used by businesses, rather
than displaying an end-user type page where you have a search box, how about
building a few examples of unscattered media.

I'd suggest taking a few topics which will be in the news for a bit, such as
the gulf oil spill (I wouldn't unscatter the BP stuff, but maybe the gov't
action), maybe greenpeaces media, stuff like that, and show a demo of what the
services can do for businesses.

That's the best way to get people to get it. And if you build a demo for these
publishers, maybe they'll install your widget on their page bringing you more
customers.

Don't talk about it if you can show it.

Congrats on being a father, and best of luck with the new indeavor. Really an
interesting and useful idea i think.

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jrussbowman
Topic based search is just another way to use the tools I'm providing. I do
agree I need some better demos of what can be done with the product, and I
believe that will be priority one after the UI is built.

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AmberShah
Just my 2 cents, but I think you're underestimating the newborn sleeplessness
phase if you're rearing to go with a 1-week old.

I think you're right that you are going to need to polish the UI a lot. This
seems like a perfect candidate for 99designs. Since you already have a base UI
for them to work off of, and then you can start to take advantage of having
lots of other people thinking about it and the usabliity of it.

You absolutely positively need a tagline or something on the front page. You
absolutely positively need a feedback button (try UserVoice for something free
and easy).

Hey - I noticed that you're on Rackspace Cloud. I was wondering if you
wouldn't mind sharing how the cost has been for your traffic? Email's in my
profile. Thx.

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jrussbowman
Email sent. Also, I've done the newborn thing, so I know what I'm getting into
a little (of course you never really remember what it's like those first
couple months). I'm not really rearing to go, I'm validating plans and still
doing a little development each week. At this point I'm basically down to a
couple hours on the weekend when my girls (I have a 2 year old too) are
napping.

I was thinking about 99designs actually, but I think I'm first going to take a
stab at building the interface on my own. I'm comfortable enough with
javascript and YUI I think I can knock something out, and I think with AlloyUI
being released recently, using it can save me a lot of time.

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imp
Seems like an okay plan. I would put more importance on getting people to use
your paid product. I've also has developed projects in limited hours per week,
and the features I thought were important at the time really weren't after I
put it in front of actual users. The faster you get feedback on your paid
product the better.

~~~
jrussbowman
Very true.. I spent months working on social network aggregation for end
users, only to scrap it because it was a lot of resource consumption for
something that I wasn't going to be able to monetize will bootstrapping
myself.

