

Ask HN: I am shutting down. And starting up, again? What do you think? - mittermayr

Hey guys, I've been around enough for quite some time to see people excited about building new things and then some shutting the very same business down a year or two later. It's just a thing that happens and is most likely a smart call to make in most of these cases.<p>Today, I made the decision to shut down my business. Something I've worked on for over 2 years right after quitting an insanely well paid job at Microsoft. I am running my bank accounts dry (there's something left, no worries) and did not succeed in pushing my revolution enough.<p>I am starting a new project called urbanvisitor.com and I wanted to see what you guys think beforehand. Opinions are always to be treated with caution, but the last time, I was the only one who was 100% sure I'll succeed, so that didn't work out well.<p>So quickly:
I want to build a real-time scheduling/meeting slots application centered around the idea of meeting new contacts (professionally, friendly) anywhere you go. I travel a LOT and always try hard to meet locals. Anyone I met turned out to be the absolute best experience I could have had in a particular city (I've always kept it professional, so that helps).<p>I want to have an ARRIVALS and DEPARTURES section for every large city in the world. As a local, you can scan the list and suggest for anyone on it to meet you. As a traveler, you can allot a number of slots (say 5 slots each 1 hour on Tuesday) available, receive meeting inquiries and can accept whoever you want and deny (in a friendly way) those you are not interested in meeting.<p>What do you think? Help me out guys, I value this community so much and would really benefit from any thought you might have on this. I have the man/technical-power and business experience to execute on it, it's really just a question of whether people need this enough.<p>Thanks again.<p>edit: just adding this real quick, the comments below is exactly what i value in hacker news. thanks so much. i hope this place stays like it is now for a long time to come.
======
simonw
This is a very hard kind of service to bootstrap - I'm certain it's been tried
before. That's not to say that you can't do it, but it's a high-risk project.

I'd suggest trying to prove the concept without developing any actual
technology - something as simple as a shared Google Docs spreadsheet might be
enough. That way you reduce the risk of wasting months working on the wrong
technology, but you can still get a good idea for if the concept has legs.

~~~
mittermayr
well risk is just a matter of money/time invested on this one. I still have a
bit left to get this off the ground and i love making working prototypes
(12-year long developer) despite my business background. so that should be the
easy part and risk-wise, i've had great success with weekend projects in the
past - so i am planning to invest a couple of weekends to get the prototype up
and then go from there. i have a good network globally, so i am hoping for
referrals on that part to get people excited. it's obviously more about the
hosts first than the guests, i'd assume.

~~~
yoseph
You didn't listen to what he said...

He said that you should test it while dedicating minimal resources. In this
case, a Google Doc spreadsheet could do the trick. It's a great piece of
advice.

Why spend multiple weekends working on building a prototype when you could
start testing the idea's viability (virtually) straight away?

~~~
mittermayr
well, i like the simplicity of a very minimalistic approach. at the same time,
i feel it will require a certain presentation to get enough people to sign up.
not breaking a sweat with the developing here, this one is more about bringing
on the right people. so i'll be investing more time on refining the message
and pushing it out than developing the site. but i guess a google docs is just
too much of a gamble to risk my first set of contacts to the feedback of
'google docs? seriously?' -- of course it's the easiest way to test the idea.
i'm not talking pay a developer two grand to build this and we'll take a look
afterwards. i'm taking very simple (hopefully not another bootstrap, but
maybe) implementation with a database hookup and basic design. i was thinking
a facebook page could help as well to test the idea, but again, too risky to
burn contacts. no? curious to hear a counter statement here... thanks!

~~~
jessedhillon
Ugh. I am getting some serious "when I ask for advice I mean tell me how great
this will be" vibes from this thread.

~~~
mittermayr
i find it easier to challenge those with negative opinions and prefer when
they take time to follow up. this is by far the most helpful stuff here. i
take it from your comment history you're a critical person, which i'd
definitely value if you added a tiny bit of what you actually thought about
the idea. still curious.

~~~
thaumaturgy
Respectfully, I think this is a good example of why some of the best people on
HN are getting more reluctant to participate in Ask threads.

Don't do this: Ask -> "Challenge those with negative opinions"

Do this: Ask -> Consider opinions -> ask more smart questions.

simonw and yoseph are exactly right. They are asking you, " _How do you know
that this is something people want?_ " Just because it would be valuable to
_you_ doesn't mean it's going to be valuable to enough other people to make
enough money for you to live on.

You could find out if you have a market or not by throwing together something
really small and simple and using that for a while, or you can find out by
building a fancy website and doing everything else you're talking about to
make your first presentation pretty, and then a year from now find yourself in
the same position you're in now except with less money.

How many people need this?

How much are they willing to pay?

How are you going to make money?

How are you going to reach your market? (Can you partner up somehow with
AirBnB or other popular travelers' sites?)

~~~
mittermayr
just one point: was never planning to build a 'fancy' website first. i just
wanted something a bit more polished than a google docs.

everything else, yeah, i see your point and sort of feel bad. i get what
you're saying and it makes sense. i do have an attitude that was trained to
challenge negative statements because there's just so much 'this sucks!' on
the internet and i always want to understand the motivation behind it.

on the statement of testing viability, 100% agree. asking around here whether
you guys know if this will succeed or not is the wrong approach. i should have
showed up with the google docs here and asked people to use it please and tell
me what i missed. agree.

~~~
thaumaturgy
I get why you're reluctant to start with Google Docs. I would be too. Can I
propose an in-between solution?

How about a really simple form that just adds people to a mailing list? "I am
in [town]. I would like to receive an email when a visitor is in my area.
[subscribe]" ... coupled with, "I am visiting [town]. I'd like to meet people.
[send]"

If it stays small, you can manage this manually with little effort, and you'll
know that it's probably not a service that lots of people are looking for. If
it gets big, you won't be able to manage it manually anymore, but now you'll
know whether or not people are interested.

~~~
mittermayr
that!!! i've seen this before a couple of times on HN and i always signed up.
damn. why didn't i think of this right away. f* launchrock :) this is it. i'm
serious.

------
mikle
I meant to write a response earlier but I just left the window open. Hopefully
you'll still read my personal opinion about your venture and it helps.

I too have the problem you are talking about. I'm very interested in the
people in places I visit and taking part is "local activities". I've used
resources such as local mailing lists. reddit etc. to find interesting people
and places to go to at my travels. I've had major success with that, for
example I had the pleasure of going on a huge bike ride with someone from the
NYC Reddit mailing list from Central Park to Kony island. I had a 12 hour
connection and I don't think I could have spent those 12 hours better (I also
visited relatives, so my schedule was super tight). This is still one of my
best travel experiences.

I hope by now I've established I'm a perfect audience for your startup. I
would love to have a few meetings with local startup people at places like
Berlin for example. But I would feel VERY bad about the experience if I needed
to pay money for it. I would love to reciprocate by giving someone a place to
stay in Israel, paying for a drink or lunch (or both) or tweeting something
good as long as I actually enjoyed it. But paying for it with cash upfront
would make me feel like this isn't a genuine human experience and interaction,
but more like bought time.

I'm not saying that is something everyone feels, it might just be me, but all
I can offer you is my personal opinions and experiences.

~~~
mittermayr
thanks so much. i am still glued to this thread, i soak all the comments in
and it greatly helps shape the idea. i am working on it right now and
hopefully can launch something soon. of course, i will make sure it's a free
experience for anyone who is not using it professionally

------
IsaacL
I do like the idea. I travelled a lot in the past but never made an effort to
reach out to interesting people, so when planning future trips, I'm gonna make
an effort to connect with local startup scenes.

I think for this to work you have to really define your community. Exclusivity
will help, something like asmallworld.com (an invite-only social network).

Off the top of my head, I can think of two groups who'd use something like
this:

1) people like us, ie entrepreneurs, and others in the startup world
(investors and so on).

2) partyers, who want to find the cool places that aren't yet in the tourist
guidebooks.

I think both groups would like some exclusivity. I mean, in any local startup
scene, the most interesting people are oversubscribed - all the founders of
no-traction startups want to grab coffee with the guy who just raised a $10
mil Series B.

When the $10 mil CEO travels to a new place, he'd probably like to grab coffee
with founders at a similar level to talk shop. But those guys don't
necessarily know who he is or why he's worth talking to.

If you can get people to say "hey, this person messaged me on
urbanvisitor.com, he must be worth meeting" - then you'd have a decent
business.

~~~
mittermayr
i really, really like your comment. it reflects exactly what i was hoping for
someone else to bring up. i agree on the two groups and i agree on the
'oversubscribed people' issue. i actually love the term. i truly believe that
most services fail to deliver on this and end up having lots of hookers use it
with fake profiles, or joe the weird power networking guy who sells nothing
but his life consultancy work to you and keeps requesting meetings... so fully
agree. that's crucial to nail. thanks isaac.

~~~
IsaacL
Yeah, it seems a lot of social sites don't grasp some of the underlying
dynamics of how social networks actually work in the real world. If you can
work out those dynamics, you'll have a hit.

Despite people thinking he's an awkward nerd who got lucky, Mark Zuckerberg is
actually very good at this.

------
WiseWeasel
It would be critical to ensure that people meeting share the same goal in the
encounter. The goal of the meeting should be explicit. One way to do that
would be to target a very specific demographic which might be likely to use
such a service in a gratifying manner. This would have the benefit of helping
you market to your target audience, if you can make the case that it solves
their specific problem.

~~~
mittermayr
I like the comment. So far, I know for a fact that entrepreneurs love
traveling and meeting people, so that definitely is a group I am going to
cater to. Additionally, there's a layer of folks who just want to get showed
around town by a local, possibly even paying that person dinner or whatever -
which is a bit of a different scenario. So I am still trying to figure out
which one I should be focusing on first. The "same goal" topic is crucial, I
am currently wrapping my head around a solid haves/wants type of profile that
is as little typing as possible and a lot of pulling data from other networks
so that you'll immediately get an idea of the other person's social profile.
Plus, your one-line meeting reason.

So, yeah, thanks. I really appreciate help at this point. Solid advice!

------
dylanhassinger
You need to verify that you're solving a need that people have, and would pay
to solve. Not sure that you've done that here.

Highly recommended:

<http://theleanstartup.com>

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

~~~
mittermayr
thanks for the advice. i know the lean movement very well and I am not a very
religious person per se. but i do value your thought on whether that's
something people need. this is what I am starting right now, i am sourcing any
feedback i can get (and not only here). there's always people who would not
use such a service for sure - but I want to know why, and for those who want
something like that, i'd be really curious to hear what they imagine it like.

i'm a massive fan of iteration, so that's the easy part, just want to make
sure i'll scout the field for qualitative input a bit right now. i value your
guys' opinion a lot, so this is why i am starting out here. thanks again.

------
fooandbarify
As a counterpoint to some of the views already expressed, I would happily pay
for this. I'm planning to take my freelance/consulting business full time
starting January, and have become hyper-aware of the importance of my personal
network and meeting new people (not even for business opportunities, just to
understand a wider cross-section of people in general). I'm also planning to
travel a lot and work remotely--in other words, what you are proposing sounds
ideally suited to me.

I already signed up for your list, feel free to shoot me an email if you want
to know more (its in my profile).

~~~
mittermayr
as soon as we have pro accounts, you'll be getting one for free. thanks again,
i really appreciate early help and always try hard to return the favor.

thanks dave, is <http://blackchair.net> what you're taking full-time?

~~~
fooandbarify
That's awesome Roman (it's Roman, right?), I'm looking forward to it! And yes,
Black Chair is going to be my full-time gig, although the website is a major
work in progress right now :)

------
palderson
A speaker at a Founders Institute event, his name escapes me, spoke about his
experience starting this very business. The problem he encountered was that at
events, or any social gathering, there was typically a small percentage of
people in attendance, call them the stars, that everyone else wanted to meet.
But the stars only wanted to meet other stars, meaning the demand is not
evenly distributed across would-be users. So, if you are to go ahead with it,
I suggest you consider how to overcome this issue.

~~~
mittermayr
that is part of the core problems i wrote down. imagine paul graham is in new
york for a day and decides to meet some people in 30 min slots on a thursday
afternoon. everyone's gonna request a meeting. but it's his call to move
requests into the actual booked slots. the person arriving in a city is the
one who accepts the meeting based on the incoming requests (filterable by
haves/wants). does that make sense? would it be smarter to have locals
accept/deny?

~~~
OmarIsmail
This is the thing though, do you really think someone like pg would have
difficulty finding A-level people to meet when he travels? The thing about
A-level people is they already know other A-level people who can make an intro
in that city. And actually now they'd probably just have their assistant do
all the work and have a scheduled lined up for when they get there. So your
service is going to be for < A-listers, which nobody cares that much to meet.

Looking at the travel market more broadly you have people who travel
extensively do it for either business or pleasure, but mostly business. The
kind of person that travels for business a lot usually has a packed schedule
without much free time. Any free time on their trip that they do have they're
probably going to use to take it easy. However "taking it easy" on a business
trip is pretty crummy since you often don't know anybody.

Here's an idea - a service that is focused on frequent business travelers. Not
the A-listers, but regular professionals that just travel a lot and would
probably get along really well with other business professionals that travel a
lot.

You can integrate with TripIt as a way to have exclusivity (must go on >
threshold trips/miles in timespan) you also then have TripIt information to
know where people are going. Automatically the service can see which Trippers
are going to be in the same location on the same night (on a trip) and
automatically say "Hey, there's 10 trippers in Manhattan on Thursday night,
are you interested in an event?" Reply Yes and the service creates the event
that people just have to show up to. You as the service will make the
reservation, and handle all the logistics of notifying people. People just
have to say "yes I'm interested".

~~~
mittermayr
just first off, fucking love streak. now my response:

everything you say is true. a-listers won't have problems meeting other
a-listers. but that's not what i'm trying to achieve. i do know though that
sometimes, a-listers might be curious/open to meet others as well. couple of
examples:

lars hinrichs is running hackfwd, germany incubator, definitely a-lister. he's
a cool guy who regularly tunes in to random startups/founders and wants to
hear what they're working on. two 30 minute slots during a business trip where
he can select from 'meeting requests' would probably be interesting to him.
that's startup world though.

say you're jimmy fallon. crazy popular. he flies to london and says he wants
to meet 3 random writers who can request a meeting with him. promotional
opportunity.

or, you, the guy from streak, goes to paris, does not want to be bothered by
random 1-person startup folks but rather meet someone who might be a tech guy,
but his dad owns a french bakery and invites you to take your girlfriend there
and see what they do. probably worth that hour?

just a couple of thoughts on that.

then, for professional travelers, i used to fly a lot for microsoft and i
always had time. evenings, or sometimes late afternoons. i knew people in
cities i traveled to, but sometimes you're back in chicago for the fourth time
and feel like meeting someone you don't know yet but who shares your interest
or works in a similar sector, etc.

the frequent flyer thought is very interesting. as long as i get to keep out
the networking crazies, that'd be a perfect monetization aspect.

------
tablet
1\. I don't think people will pay for that 2\. I don't think there will be
enough users to decide how to monetize later.

I can speak from my voice only and I won't use such service.

~~~
mittermayr
thanks! well, one thing i've learned for sure was that there will be paid
accounts right away. one person per city or one meeting per week or something,
above it'll be paid, depending on the dynamics of the offers market.

i never thought people would pay for a simple twitter analytics service (i
felt it would be the big guys at most), but with fruji.com (side project that
made me good money, and keeps going) it's 90% regular people, 10% business
paying for these accounts.

what i'd be curious about is, if you're traveling much? say, you go to new
york and there's a guy from general assembly willing to show you around the
local startups they host? yes/no? i'm really curious!

------
hpvic03
So this is like serendipitous-travel-networking.

This seems like a small market to me. Even if you got it off the ground it
would be difficult to charge for it.

How about removing the travel aspect, and just start a serendipitous-
networking service? People sign up with their LinkedIn's and/or Facebooks, and
you connect people who would benefit from knowing each other.

This seems like a better idea, but still not a great one. Monetization will
likely be difficult.

~~~
mittermayr
i wanted to do that first, for conferences. but there were some really good
providers out there doing this and i wanted to see if they can get it off the
ground for conferences... so i looked into the travel-associated aspect ...
but it's really just another tie into your life. meeting is the core
transaction, whether you do it at a conference, lunch or in a new city you're
traveling to, i feel.

and yes, agree. market is small. very small compared to building another
service on top of twitter's api ... people just flock to this stuff... so
yeah, true that. 100 million dollar business? not sure ... i just really want
this to work for me, for now. i'd use this everytime i go somewhere.

------
bryanh
I definitely echo the thoughts in the other comments: is this solving a real
problem? I can imagine a traveler wanting this, but the locals? Maybe tour
guides could get into this, but the traveler + tour guide combo seems like
something you aren't going after.

There is _a lot_ if money in tourism, but I am not sure this is an especially
fruitful angle to get at it. It could be a starting point though.

Goal #1: get someone to pay for it!

~~~
mittermayr
i agree. with my other projects, i tried the free and the pay from day 1
models and the paid models performed much much better. it's just another more
direct form of validation. and those paying will definitely help shape the
service.

and the locals will definitely be the harder group to build up. i have a
favorite restaurant here in vienna and i love going there as much as i can.
i'd be open to take someone flying in there once a week and hear about their
life and plans.

it's really a matter of communicating the 'why' for locals. i don't want
anyone to make money off meeting people, that's the wrong direction. i'd
rather charge for other things (pro members can do more, ask for meetings in
certain premium lists or whatever)

------
mittermayr
Oh, and quick follow up: I am trying to make sure that marketers (and hardcore
networkers) are identified as such and that say, a certain Mr. Graham could
travel without being attacked by 500 crazies (like us) randomly. He gets to
pick who to meet based on certain criteria. Vice versa.

------
pknight
Your ideas have some similarities with a site that was recently pitched on
UK's Dragon's Den <http://www.eatwithalocal.socialgo.com/> might be some
inspiration there

~~~
mittermayr
yes yes yes, that! not necessarily focused on food as main scenario, but
message-wise, that's the idea.

what was the feedback like, remember?

~~~
pknight
The pitch wasn't great as the 'dragons' had trouble seeing enough scale to
warrant investment. They liked the idea - and their site does have quite a few
members when you consider the people running it aren't business or tech savvy.
I think it's a good indicator that their is a sizable market out there for
this kind of thing.

Deborah Meaden was probably the most qualified investor there for this idea
and she anticipated it would be hard to monetize and the budget required to
obtain traffic would be substantial based on her experiences with another
online membership type business.

To be honest I think they have a decent life style business potential there,
they just need more business savvy and tech savvy on their side. If you have a
subscription model you know what kind of targets you need to make the business
viable, it's just a matter of doing the calculations.

------
mittermayr
just adding a little comment myself here: the only thing that worries me a bit
is the lack of major services offering this already, there probably is a
reason... so far, people suggested:

[mingle: close, but not tied to a certain timing/travel aspect]

[vayable: focused on activities, like gidsy]

[gidsy: focused on activities, like vayable]

[letslunch: very close, focused on lunch]

[eatwithalocal.socialgo.com: close, but focused on lunch]

------
hnwh
I live in paris.. why on earth would I want to take time out of my day, to go
meet some random tourist out of the MILLIONS who come every year?

~~~
mittermayr
can i ask what you do for a living? i'm really curious, i assume tech-focused,
student or full-time working? would there be any type of person on earth
(probably from the tech community) you'd be happy to meet for an hour (and
probably pay you lunch) or so when they come to paris for few days? what type
of person would that be? totally understand if you are not interested in
meeting strange foreigners, you're french after all ... HA :) no please, i'm
from austria, i wish I could live in paris and speak french, i'm not kidding.
i envy you and everyone else in that city everytime i visit.

~~~
hnwh
Sure, I was a student.. . now i'm a tech-focused entrepreneur. I work on a
flexible schedule, usually at nights. Enjoy the day exercising, being with my
gf. I can't think of any one in particular i'd like to just meet offhand, but
usually when I do have free time to go out, I'd prefer to spend it with
friends I know. I'm pretty sure most people here would feel the same..

------
RossDM
Are you familiar with Let's Lunch? They do something similar.

<http://letslunch.com>

~~~
mittermayr
oh cool, i like that! i was trying to locate something similar but had a hard
time producing results through google. that's very helpful thank you!

~~~
mynegation
There is also <http://www.joinmingle.com/>

~~~
mittermayr
oh i remember mingle i think... always felt it's like a dating/hookups
platform.

basically the professional component of what i want to build, at least from
what I can tell by their website. going to try this right away.

------
zoneinfinite
I like the idea. I imagine it may have some similarities with "vayable/gidsy"
those kind of local-travel experiences startups?

~~~
mittermayr
yeah, i was always very curious on the local activity type of businesses, but
while i wished more individuals would start offering activities, i guess
nobody really felt they were up par with what was expected from someone
offering local experiences professionally... so it stuck with professional
tour guides and such mostly, i'd assume?

but i believe that these local cooking classes in barcelona and such things
are going to take over more and more of vacation planning.

------
madamepsychosis
For what it's worth, I would pay to use a service like this. Obviously the
chicken and egg problem is the tough part here.

~~~
mittermayr
thanks! yes, definitely. although i think it'll be a bit harder to get the
hosts excited to meet incoming folks. i'll probably start with the
entrepreneurial community, they're used to meeting people a lot, as well as
couchsurfers.

my main goal is to bring this service to a level where i can use it myself.
just chatted with a couple of friends and they said the same thing, make it so
that we can use on upcoming trips asap that and anything else is secondary :)

------
true_religion
What are you shutting down? Twentypeople.com

~~~
mittermayr
wow, thanks for looking it up. so, in a nutshell: i hate how recruiters make 5
grand a hire and employers constantly struggle to find talent. so i built a
site that focused on being hired/hire through your skill graph. i hate job
boards, i hate monster, i hate recruiter fees - guess what, after a while, i
had to add a job board, and i offered recruiting services and i made 5k a pop.
the site itself produced over 2k active users, but that was it. companies
asked me to charge for job board listings, not for my self-recruiting credits.

i just couldn't disrupt an industry that keeps using advertising little
entries in long lists and making lots of cash with it. as well as recruiters,
like real estate agents, another industry that needs to be redone on the
social web better.

i started fruij.com as a side/weekend project and people came in from
everywhere, i had no plan, no direction, no marketing, but it kept making me
money. people just bought pro accounts without me telling them why it's
important to have one. they just flocked to it. so that was a bit of an eye
opener.

~~~
geekfactor
Why not build on fruji vs starting anew? How long ago did you launch it? What
kind of growth could you see if you focused on it?

~~~
mittermayr
so fruji is interesting. everytime i shut it down (database issues, twitter
api changes, etc.) and turn it back on, people start flocking to it
immediately after, and it grows from 10 signups a day to 150 a day quickly.
that's awesome. payments are coming in as well, drafting new (more expensive)
account types for corporate users looking good and so forth.

but i've had a couple of really popular a-listers sign up, won't name them
here, but you all know them. and after i had to tell the 5th over 1M+ follower
person that it'll take more than a few days to scan their account (run
analysis) based on twitter's api rate limits, it just feels terrible.

i thought i'd just lock out people with accounts over 500k (can you
imagine?!), it'd make a lot of things easier.

twitter has been very responsive and i've been able to submit a couple of bugs
with them successfully. but i'm really worried this one gets shut down and i
do not even have the tiniest chance of doing anything about it.

i'll keep going with it. but it just runs all by itself now. a very smart,
distributed system, i just receive payment notifications.

edit: one thing about twitter: i can not spend any of the payments i receive.
if twitter shuts me down tomorrow (they likely won't), i have a lot of people
who paid me for a yearly account and it's money i need to refund. so that's
locked up credit at this point until the year expires.

