

So you launched your startup here first (last week, month...). Now how is it doing? - rokhayakebe

Several startups were launched here and usually users provide valuable feedback to founders. If you launched your startup here last week, month, year, Can you please share how you are doing now? What were your major obstacles? etc...<p>Thank you all,
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axod
I first put up Mibbit here...

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=83660>

It's growing pretty well now, handles around 10,000,000 messages a day. As you
can see from the original post, I started out having a telnet app, irc app,
and game app (Multiplayer jigsaws!). The biggest decision I made was to focus
on one. I chose IRC for obvious reasons. The feedback I got was that people
didn't really know what it was etc - hence the decision to focus on one app.

To be honest I was pretty gutted about the feedback, and was about to give up
on it. I then decided to post it to reddit anyway (nothing to loose) a little
later, and got a few people using it there. I then found ircatwork.com which I
bought pretty cheaply giving me some users to start with. I naively thought I
suppose, that posting to hacker news and reddit would lead to users. It
didn't. Sure, a little spike in users that lasts a day or so, but it's not
long term.

The biggest obstacle so far is probably getting to a state where you can make
money. Premium accounts, targeted ads etc all take time.

Also in my case, dealing with IRC networks has been an eye opener. Quite a lot
of the older networks are completely opposed to anything like Mibbit... "But
then anyone could connect!" they say. Most are friendly now though, and at
peak times we have 350 or so connections to freenode, and about 2,500 IRC
connections open in all.

It's growing well, but that means it's costing a little more to run, and not
yet making money. But I'm sure it'll sort itself out :/

I think the main thing is to grow and get user feedback, and that seems to be
happening ok.

~~~
maxklein
I think I'm one of the most critical critics of most of the startups here, but
I love mibbit. When I'm stuck in my C++ work, I click my mibbit button, it
auto connects me to the channel and I ask the question. And intelligent
informed answers come immediately. That's the real value of mibbit - not the
IRC per se, but the ability to use it to instantly get a reply to a specific
problem. Consider that in your plans for expansion.

~~~
axod
Thanks for the feedback. That has been the driving force so far, to keep
things dead simple, and just have the rich feature set there if people want to
delve further.

My own usage is mainly to go ask questions etc - one of the great strengths of
IRC is getting help, so any features that help people get there are always on
my mind - integrated pastebin etc...

Feel free to mail me if you have any ideas/gripes.

------
shafqat
We launched the NewsCred private alpha via HackerNews a couple months ago, and
the last 8 weeks have been a whirlwind of excitement.

The feedback here was very positive. We listened and made some changes
immediately and then reached out to a few bloggers. TechCrunch, Mashable etc
covered, and we received some decent reviews (nothing fantastic). It was still
exciting to see your baby up on TechCrunch!

Traffic that comes with these reviews was good, but I hear it used to be a lot
better before. We got a thousand new users from the TC post, nothing crazy.
Mashable was a mere blip. Other less known blogs sent a LOT more traffic. We
reached out to a lot of smaller bloggers and niche sites for feedback and that
was quite fruitful.

We have daily users who love the site. That gives us hope and makes it all
worthwhile. We've pushed out a lot of new features, and are gearing up for our
public launch (although sneak preview available now).

Our main thing is to get the daily user count in the thousands every day. We
now have some days where its less, some days where its a lot more. But we're
aiming for consistency. Considering we are about to officially launch
publicly, we're very happy with progress.

Its all about marketing and user acquisition now!

------
r7000
Growth for FlashcardDB was slow and steady for the first few months, but found
some real traction this past month for some reason (July). It is getting about
40-50 new users per day and just passed five thousand card sets, 3500 users
and just under a quarter million flashcards.

The most recent change was adding support for the Supermemo/Mnemosyne-style
Spaced Repetition algorithm:

<http://flashcarddb.com/graded>

<http://flashcarddb.com/blog/8-feeds-font-sizes-and-a-new-srs>

Since using the Leitner System is also an option, I hope to have a real set of
data eventually to compare whether or not one algorithm is truly "more
efficient" than the other.

~~~
SwellJoe
Awesome idea. Most of the existing tools in the space are kinda ugly desktop
apps for Windows. And education is a pretty good field for premium web
services...I've heard from several web-based startups that they've gotten good
uptake among teachers, even when the app wasn't originally targeted to
teachers.

~~~
r7000
Thanks! You have a good point. Some days I get 100 card sets all nearly
identical and feedback messages saying "u suk, I hate my teacher! lol" :)

~~~
SwellJoe
Speaking of which, you probably want to work on dealing with card sets. Search
works...by some definition of "works", but it looks like things are getting a
bit out of hand with repetitive sets. One of the cool things about Supermemo
and imitators is that there are big, maintained sets for a lot of common
tasks. You might want to make a "Featured Sets" page, that gives props to the
folks who make awesome sets. Allowing folks to rate sets might also be cool,
since quality varies so wildly...but, be careful not to clutter up the page
too much. It's nice and clean right now.

~~~
r7000
I agree. I am happy to have the problem. I am thinking of some sort of
"Flashcard-Rank" that rates the quality of the card sets by using metrics such
as number of times studied, number of users who have saved the set, more than
X number of cards and maybe a simple user rating system.

The "featured card set" on the home page was a start of the "Featured Sets"
idea. That was ok when there were less sets to choose from. But, yes, it is
time to expand it now. Good examples and how-tos can really help.

Thanks very much for sharing your thoughts.

------
mooders
I posted bzplnr as a Rate My Startup, more as a beta program than an acrual
launch, and I must say the feedback was terrific - detailed, honest and even a
bit brutal, but without exception encouraging. I've made some changes (it's
now <http://www.fourthirds.com>) accordingly and it's slowly starting to
gather a few users who are tentatively having a go with it.

Aiming for a re-design and enhanced featureset soon, so I'll be back for more
HN honesty!

~~~
midnightmonster
with that redesign, you should work on making the site look like there's an
actual product. It looks 100% like a generic-template blog right now.

------
davidw
Squeezed Books isn't getting much traction, unfortunately. I've moved on to
other things for the time being, and revisit it every now and then to make
tweaks or otherwise improve it. Even the contest I'm running hasn't had any
takers... ok, a free book isn't the millions of dollars Google can offer, but
a free book for typing a sentence or two is still a good deal.

~~~
nike
Have you seen getabstract.com? They are pretty successful from what I've
heard, but their model is different from yours.

~~~
davidw
Yeah, I've seen most of the other sites doing similar things. My idea was to
try and 'fly under the radar' by having something that's probably not as high
quality, but far more open. Hopefully this would facilitate discussions of the
book in question, which is something I think that could be just as educational
as the summaries themselves, even high quality ones.

------
herewego
I launched socialpredictor.com a couple days ago. I got pretty good feedback,
mostly good but some bad, from the people who took the time to actually use
the site. I was more than pleased!

I've found that unless you have a largely technical startup, HN is probably
not the best place to launch. To get feedback, it's great, but to stir up PR,
not so much.

Now it's time to start the PR push and get that critical mass which I think is
going to be by far the hardest part. We'll see...

------
prateekdayal
I got some minimal feedback for my site <http://Muziboo.com> ... i think may
be because I am a passive reader of the community ...

------
NoBSWebDesign
I posted RateMyStudentRental here a week ago (even though we actually launched
to our school about 6 months ago), and the feedback was great. Of course
posting here didn't really lead to repeat users, since our site is aimed
primarily at students, but it was nonetheless encouraging. Since last week,
we've launched a redesign and continue to chug along.

------
mbuchanan
I previewed Microspaces 'Nested GUI' technology on HN
(<http://www.nestedguis.com>)... and based on the feedback made a few changes.
I haven't launched the sites I've built on top of it yet. but very soon.

------
jlogic77
What do you mean launching your startup here? I'm new to hackernews, how does
one do that? Is it just a comment like this or submitting a press release?

~~~
tstegart
Yes, people put up a post asking for feedback or announcing they've launched.
Usually its takes the form of "Ask YC: What do you think of my start-up idea?"
or something along those lines. It helps not to be spammy about it, and
sticking around to answer questions is always a good idea. So is having a
tough skin, because people will question your every move.

Some recent examples: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=267640>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=267049>

~~~
jlogic77
Thanks, that helps!

------
pedalpete
I posted a 'rate my start-up' for HearWhere.com a few weeks ago. The feedback
I got was brutal, but awesome! I've made some minor changes as a result, and
have been working on a major release. Of course I saw a small increase in
traffic as a result of the post, which dropped off quickly, within a few days.

------
timcederman
We posted asking for feedback on our Facebook application -
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=171712>

Last week we got acquired by Monster for 72.5 million. Coincidence? :)

~~~
jbyers
I'm sure the other six years of hard work and $18M in funding had nothing to
do with it. :)

Congratulations on the acquisition. For the curious, the company in question
is Trovix.

