
An honest Postmortem for Klipboardz.com  - Readmore
http://www.klipboardz.com/klipz/comments/1636
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nostrademons
I'd really like to see more of these - postmortems for sites that _didn't_
succeed. There's a big survivorship bias in the accounts you hear - nobody
writes about their failures. We'd have a more accurate picture if we had more
information about things that didn't work.

Come to think of it, I wrote a postmortem for FictionAlley a couple years ago
that I ought to share...

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mynameishere
Not sure why you're giving up. The fundamental problem with your website is
that it has (by now) been done to death. You aren't going to get away from
that particular problem with this:

_Its a new site that will allow you to keep all of your day to day
information online, so you can access it anywhere._

Just some honest advice here, coz' I'd hate to see somebody spend months and
months to do something so unspecific and, well, done-to-death.

Did you notice that news.yc became reasonably popular almost the second that
it started? Well, Paul Graham has a built-in audience, and that's how it
happened. reddit is popular for a similar reason: Both pg and Joel Spolsky
gave it some promotion. So, you know, you can't expect a similar trajectory.

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nostrademons
I dunno about that: "Write Yourself a Scheme in 48 hours" became popular
within 48 hours after it was published, and I have no built-in audience. I
posted it to the Haskell-cafe mailing list, someone _else_ posted it to
Reddit, and when I woke up the next morning it was on the front page of both
Reddit and Delicious. It's now the top Google result for "haskell scheme" and
on the front page of results for "haskell tutorial".

I think the secret to getting widespread publicity is to build something that
people want _and are eagerly awaiting_. I wrote "Write yourself a Scheme..."
because I'd seen complaint after complaint about how there were no Haskell
tutorials that build a practical project or deal with IO, so I started with
some practical IO in the first chapter. When the tutorial appeared, it merely
fulfilled a niche that everyone wanted to be filled.

FictionAlley was the same way, though I wasn't around for its birth.
Basically, everyone was complaining about how Fanfiction.net sucked and the
servers were always down and they eliminated the forums and arbitrarily
removed stories. So eventually, some of the leading members of the HP fandom
said "Well, let's start our own site then." And since everyone was already
dissatisfied with FF.net, it spread easily through word-of-mouth.

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mynameishere
Two differences:

1\. Your example is _extremely_ specific, and so will match up closely with
the needs a particular (small) percentage of people. A news aggregator is very
general. The whole reddit audience could shift to klipboardz tomorrow with
little effect. That "little effect" is actually a bad thing. Little bad
effect, but also little good effect.

2\. Your example is a document, and not a service. In short: There are many,
many more websites that make it to the top of reddit or digg, than there are
reddits or diggs.

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drop19
Maybe there's a whole category of apps to be built like this: they don't make
money themselves, but they educate the creators and connect them to things
that will make money (he mentioned three new opportunties).

Also, this shows an impressive ability for self-assessment; I'm curious to
know whether he thinks we would have done better by quitting and jumping into
it with both feet.

~~~
Readmore
It really might have helped if I had jumped into it completely but I really
just couldn't make that move financially. I'm sure that it would have made a
difference though because the need to eat is a great motivator for success.

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eljefe
Idea two sounds like GMail/GCal's got it covered, you're just suggesting a
different input mechanism. Not that it wouldn't be a good programming
exercise, but... mynameishere has a point.

Your proposed dynamic input mechanism does, however, sound like the right
granularity for IM/SMS. As in, an IM/SMS to your service with the contents
"contact: Paul Graham pg@ycombinator.com" updates your address book. "money:
9.48 Quiznos" updates a ledger. "note: news.yc needs UTF-8 meta tag" sends a
note. Twitter's taking off; a context-aware Twitter seems like a cool idea.

Just don't give it a name that implies Chester Cheetah should be skateboarding
all over your site. Radical.

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amichail
I think it's possible to succeed in one of two ways:

(1) come up with a radically new idea (e.g., human computation)

(2) apply existing ideas to a specific domain in a novel way

You will probably have a much easier time with (2), particularly as people are
already familiar with those ideas (e.g., tagging, social networking, etc.).

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ph0rque
The idea at the end sounds very similar to <http://stikkit.com/.> How will
this be different?

