

Ask HN: Refocusing our Family-focused Startup for Business Users? - markbao

Ramamia is our startup that helps families keep in touch with each other and store their memories. We've been using Ramamia with our team for a bit now and have had a few other companies inquire about it.<p>It's simpler and easier way to just share information with your team as a startup.  Sure, there are other companies out there, but we find this a lot easier than Sharepoint or something like SocialCast/Yammer.<p>We'd certainly pay for the product as a startup and think others would.  We would price somewhere around $9.99 per month for about 10 users a month with a good amount of storage (not sure on a number, but you would not have to worry about there not being enough).<p>Sign up for our service and let us know what you think. Should we stick with the family consumer market or refocus to the business app market?  Business users pay, we know them better being entrepreneurs, and families are hard to monetize with a paid product (we don't want to do ad supported).<p>I talked to Jason Fried after Startup School and he talked about how it was hard to sell to the consumer market, so they switched their Backpack app over to a team sharing thing. We can do both, too—as in, keep Ramamia and create an app for business users based off of Ramamia.<p>http://staging.ramamia.com<p>Thanks!
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markbao
Clickable: <http://staging.ramamia.com>

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prabodh
Just Curious..How you arrived at that name ramamia

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jasonlbaptiste
it means my branches in spanish. we were originally going after the latin
american market when we bought the domain. we realized, we wouldn't be able to
use our product, and didn't beta launch with that focus.

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mrshoe
Obligatory response to this (and most) web startups: why won't Wave kill this?

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angelbob
Having the ability to do something doesn't mean it'll be focused that way or
convenient to use that way.

Look at Twitter and say: "why won't blogging kill this?" Part of the answer is
focus: they're making some things easy, not just possible.

Part of the answer is demographic/cultural. Reddit isn't Hacker News, even if
a lot of the technology is very similar, and StackOverflow isn't any of its
many different-topic clones even if nearly _all_ of the technology is shared.
A community is affected by focus, policies and advertising, not just the
technology.

If Google Wave has the technology to kill most web startups (I'm not sure I
believe this), then it's not focused enough to matter in almost any of their
specific domains.

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jasonlbaptiste
As one of the co-founders of Ramamia, I have to say this is a great answer,
probably even better than I could give. Domain and niche expertise is
powerful.

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keltecp11
If you stick with families, you should position towards an individual niche
like military families, grand parents, or someone along those lines. Marketing
it would be pretty easy - take the military example; there are dozens of
magazines that hit that demographic and you could very easily change your
layout and focus and brand yourself towards military families. Once this was
done I could imagine one of those magazines covering Ramamia for an article or
'site suggestion of the week' etc... just my 2 cents.

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markbao
Huh, interesting idea, thanks! Is there any kind of data on niche vs. general
(and bigger) audience?

The press thing has actually happened twice, even though we haven't done any
marketing nor have we press-launched yet.
<http://screenshots.markbao.com/articles-20091104-162137.png>

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skmurphy
Targeting a niche doesn't preclude you from later targeting another niche and
ultimately "general (and bigger) audiences." It intensifies word of mouth
effects because people in a niche are more likely to reference each other's
buy decisions than in a general market (e.g. if you reach out to military
families saying that other military families use it--provided, obviously that
this is true--you are more likely to get signup than telling a general
population that "families use it."). If you can't target a niche, at least
initially, you may need to raise a lot of money to cover your customer
acquisition costs.

The two press clippings you cite actually address two distinct niches: global
families (families with members widely geographically separated who want to
stay in touch), and scrap bookers, people who want to commemorate family
events and milestones and pass them along. You don't have general press
coverage, you have two distinct use cases.

Pay attention to what you early customers do, in particular the words that
they use to describe the benefits of your offering. It will often give you a
recipe for a niche. I note that neither "stay in touch with overseas
relatives" or "on-line scrapbook to keep in touch" appear on your home page.
You might spin it to incorporate one or both and reduce the generic language
you are currently using.

