

Show HN: I was curious to see what's happening around me, and I created an app - atudoute
http://theyhq.com/ICU/

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smt88
Looks like you have recreated one of the most notorious failures in the recent
history of venture capital:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Labs](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Labs)

I don't think Color failed because of the idea. Their marketing was flawed,
and they were trying to create a social network. So are you. I think they
eventually tacked their service on top of Facebook, which might be a good
idea. I haven't really thought it through.

What's going to be your hook for getting users? I'm assuming the app isn't
very useful unless other people are on it, right? Or do you have content from
somewhere?

~~~
atudoute
Thank you for the feedback.

Some peoples told me about Color, but we are a bit different. We don't want to
include social stuff like messaging between authors and comments. Keep the app
simple, and see what users wants.

We have a new feature is coming. Imagine you are an event hoster, you create
an event on ICU and you get an ICU link, people take picture with the app on
your event, and in live you will see all the pictures on the link. The cool
thing is that peoples would like to retrieve their photos, so they need to
have ICU installed.

You're right if nobody is around you, the app isn't very useful. We have
couple of cities like Montreal, NYC and Paris.

~~~
smt88
> Imagine you are an event hoster, you create an event on ICU and you get an
> ICU link, people take picture with the app on your event, and in live you
> will see all the pictures on the link.

I spent a year working on a startup doing exactly that. We failed.

The problem we ran into is that it's cool, but Twitter (and others) already
accomplish the same thing with hashtags. People just don't like to add new
channels to their everyday lives.

Beyond that, it was impossible (for us) to monetize, even though we had
connections to creative agencies and large companies that were marketing
events. The problem is that we weren't reducing pain points or adding
operational efficiency, and thus paying us was never urgent. Meetings would
get pushed off by weeks at a time, and it was hard to get anyone to make
concrete moves forward.

To give you an idea of what we were experiencing, imagine that you're selling
your car. Which is a higher priority, getting a scratch fixed or having it
waxed?

It's very possible that you'll make your money back from the waxing when
you're able to sell it for more money, but that's only a possibility. You're
going to first spend your money on the repairs and then on the appearance. For
the business world, increasing operational efficiency is like the repair,
while marketing/social media is like the appearance.

People in the business world just don't like to pay out for something that
MIGHT have ROI. That's why creative budgets are some of the first to get
crunched in a recession.

~~~
atudoute
Nice feedback about your experience and thank you for it. Are you guys stop
your app ? or is still live ?

~~~
smt88
We did a prototype app and discovered that it's almost impossible to get
anyone to download an app. User acquisition costs for apps are astronomical.
I've been on a B2B kick for a few years, so I haven't seen recent stats, but
it's brutal.

We then moved to being purely social-network driven. There are a bunch of
people in this space. Users submit photos on social media using unique
hashtags or whatever, and there's a nice organic sharing effect.

That product (which, again, is available cheaply from various companies now)
is great. Every event organizer should use it, since most events, including
weddings, will try to have a unique hashtag these days. Why not harness all
that content that people are posting?

Our service also supported republishing via a JavaScript and/or REST API, so
the content could be used elsewhere.

All in all, it was a useful, simple product. The problem was that ideas (or
even finished products) don't mean anything if you can't get some early,
paying clients. We had a co-founder who had lots of connections to social-
media executives, but he just couldn't sell.

The software (native and web versions) now exist only as private repos on
Github.

~~~
atudoute
The fact, if you have users and events why you would like to sell it to an
investors ?

Keep it like that and start iterate on it as people post feedbacks

------
jnorthrop
It's a neat idea, but I hope you've done some sort of privacy assessment on
the concept. If I understand the app right, you share with everyone, but only
if they are within a 1 mile radius of you. Maybe I'm being oversensitive, but
when I see the picture of the baby or the girl in the club I think that is
exposing too much information to potentially unsavory characters -- and they
will be within a mile of the subject.

~~~
atudoute
Thank you so much for your feedback.

Almost right cause your pictures not following you, but they stay where them
were taken. So you will see only pictures of clubbing in zone of clubbing.

------
spamprotecti0n
Awesome concept. I've seen an other app top that's trying to do almost the
same lately, roundio.com. It's based on a map, though, but the concepts of
nearby activity is very similar.

~~~
atudoute
Thank you.

I saw the same as you, but we are a bit different and we ask people to
describe what they see with this sentence : "What do you see ?" It seems to
create great new content.

