

Ask HN: When to pivot/optimize and when to abandon ship? - sendos

I recently finished the beta version of my website (soundkey.com) and started attracting visitors using Google AdWords, just to see how "sticky" the website is and to get some data on users' behavior (using Google Analytics to track usage patterns).<p>The results, while prelimnary, have been quite dissapointing, and I wanted to know from the collective experience of HN readers, if this is something I should just learn from and soldier on, or take as a sign that I'm not offering a useful service and abandon or at least scale down this effort.<p>Stats: There were about 2,000 visitors over several days, with about 1 min avg time on the site and 2.3 pages/visit, which may or may not be decent, but only had a handful of submissions (less than 10).<p>It's likely that AdWords is not the best way to attract my initial user base, but even so, I expected at least some non-negligible user involvement.<p>Have any of you had experience with web apps that you put up, and initially got negligible traction from visitors, and then, after the right steps had that increase significantly?<p>I could hire a professional designer to improve the look, do customer development, find and target early adopters, pivot &#38; adapt the product, do marketing, PR, SEO, etc, but I'm concerned that if out of a couple of thousand users only a handful found it useful enough to use (for free and without the need for registration) maybe I shouldn't be trying to "put lipstick on a pig".<p>What do you guys think? Am I being too pessimistic, or realistic?<p>How do you know when it's time to pivot &#38; optimize versus abandon an effort?
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spokey
I'm not sure how you'll monetize it (ads, I guess), but I think this is
actually a pretty interesting idea. You may need to pivot a bit to find a
better market fit, but FWIW I think you're giving up too easily. (And
actually, 2.3 pages per visit seems pretty good as a first pass, but I don't
have a lot of experience running adwords campaigns.)

My guess is adwords are probably the wrong way to reach _contributors_ to this
site. No one is searching google thinking "I know how to pronounce this word,
if only had a way to tell people". You may get some exploratory clicks but
you're probably not addressing the problem they went to google to solve. I
think you should be spreading awareness (virally?) among content creators, so
that they keep you in mind when the problem your are solving occurs to them.

~~~
spokey
Also, I meant to add this:

> Have any of you had experience with web apps that you > put up, and
> initially got negligible traction from > visitors, and then, after the right
> steps had that > increase significantly?

Yes. Moreover, I'd guess this is the most common case. That's what this whole
release early/iterate thing is about.

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staunch
Copy imgur. Don't require a title, description, tags and all that. Don't even
put it there, it just makes it seem too complicated. Copy imgur's flow
exactly. Make it a simple front page. Give back a URL.

Don't bother with browse and all that, at least not until you've got a lot of
recordings.

Change the URL. soundkey.com/key=so9m6u is lame, make it soundkey.com/so9m6u

No one needs an account. Don't even let people register yet.

Honestly though. I'd give up. People _really_ want to upload videos and they
_really_ want to upload images. The number of people that want to record a
sound is far far smaller.

This is not likely to ever be all that popular. I'd turn it into a much
simpler site, then stop thinking about it. Chalk it up as good experience, and
then work on something else.

~~~
sendos
Thanks for the frank feedback. Maybe in its current form it doesn't have much
of a future. When this all started, my grand vision was the following:

Imagine that soundkeys are common-knowledge and familiar to everyone. Then,
you could have soundkeys on wine bottles, menus, in magazine articles, books,
business cards, basically anywhere.

Anyone can take their smart phone and take a picture of the soundkey (or enter
it manually), and instantly know how to say the name of the wine, how to
pronounce the items on the menu of some French restaurant, how a bird
mentioned in the magazine sounds, how a car explosion in Iraq mentioned in the
book sounds, how a potential client's name sounds, etc.

It would bring alive static pieces of paper (like menus, books, magazines,
business cards, etc) : You see a soundkey anywhere and you know that you can
hear a sound related to that thing.

So, to start things off, I started the website. Maybe instead of focusing on
consumers, I could focus on talking to companies to start incorporating this
into their products, books, etc. Of course, there needs to be a general
awareness of soundkeys before companies use them, so there is a chicken-and-
egg thing that needs to be addressed and which I thought that a consumer-
facing website (i.e. soundkey.com) could address if it became popular.

~~~
staunch
What makes you think people want a soundkey on their business card, magazine,
or restaurant menu? I'm guessing almost no one _really_ does, even if they
also agree its a neat idea.

I understand how easy it is to convince yourself that a neat idea is a great
business idea. That's what it seems like you're doing.

~~~
sendos
If you don't mind my asking, is your name easy or difficult to pronounce?

[In my talking to people, I have found, statistically, that people with easy
names (e.g. Bill Smith) think there is no demand for this service, and people
who either have difficult names or work with lots of people with
difficult/foreign names tend to think that this is useful and that there is
demand for it.

Also, people who deal all the time with customers (e.g. sales people,
realtors, etc) tend to think there is a lot of demand for it among their
colleagues.

Of course they could be wrong. And even if they are right, this may not be a
good business idea. But I have seen sufficiently high levels of interest in
the idea, which is why I got started on this]

~~~
staunch
My name is definitely easy to pronounce.

------
jwegan
I'm not sure I can give much advice, but it might help for people to know what
you think your target audience is and also what keywords you were using and
what your ad text was.

To me it seems like you just aren't reaching the people who have a use for
your site. I think you need to reach people who have a need that is met by
your site and will instantly realize the value. For instance, just an idea,
but maybe you can find hard to pronounce names and use those as a keyword and
have the ad be something like 'tired of people mispronouncing your name?'

------
coryl
I don't think you're targeting the right markets. I don't think anyone would
ever want to use something for the purpose of explaining how they would
pronounce a word. Its educational in a way, but not really "fun".

You need to adjust your product so that anyone can use it. Maybe think along
the lines of music/singing/mp3 upload sharing.

~~~
sendos
Well, I do try to explain on the site that it's not just for pronunciations,
but for any sound whatsoever (funny sounds, etc)

It's like TwitPic but for sounds. You Record/Upload your sound and share on
social media like Twitter, just like you upload pics to TwitPic and share on
social media like Twitter.

Maybe I should de-emphasize the pronunciation angle and emphasize the "record
any sound and share" angle?

~~~
spokey
"like TwitPic but for sounds"

I wouldn't use that verbatim, but that sounds like the right angle to me.

~~~
sendos
Can you guys think of a way to say that without using the word TwitPic, which
I guess gets into trademark issues?

~~~
spokey
"SoundKey lets you share sounds on Twitter"?

I'd focus on the benefits of you service rather than the comparison. Most
people probably won't know what TwitPic is anyway.

For that matter, personally I'd stay away from aligning too my branding
closely with Twitter too, although that's certainly a use case I'd support.

Maybe:

"SoundKey is the easiest way to share [short?] audio [online|on your blog]."?

