

Ask HN: We have an app. Now what's our niche?   - ehsanul

The website: http://jellly.com/<p>Many web apps are heavily dependant on network effects, and are completely useless without a decent user base already in place. When faced with this issue, the common wisdom is to target a small niche at first. Over time, you can branch out to other users. There are many examples of this, such as Facebook starting with just Harvard students for example.<p>The strategy makes a lot of sense, but the question is what niche should one choose? In our particular case, we need to sign up people who browse many of the same web pages. This is necessary because our app, Jellly, is meant to suggest related links as users browse the web, so there better be other users who saw some of the same web pages earlier and already suggested related links.<p>The “hacker” niche, as represented by this community, may be a good choice here, but I’m not sure. We had thought about targeting bloggers, as they are often all looking at the same blog posts and articles; they provide free marketing and they could get into an app like this (it’s much better than using track-backs for sure), and they’d be happy to get some traffic out of it too by linking their own posts to other relevant stuff on Jellly. But the overall blogosphere is huge; the target needs to be more focused than that at first. Hacker-bloggers?<p>To better understand Jellly and our problem, you could take a peek at our FAQ. It may be more instructive though to see the crappy demo app I threw together in a few hours for our (failed) YC application, as long as you don't consider it to be characteristic of the actual app. It really just demonstrates how it might work for finding content: http://prettyobscure.jellly.com/
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javery
I think it's a very interesting idea, but I definitely see your problem of how
to get initial content. I think a good niche would be programmers of a certain
language, maybe ruby, javascript (or even just jQuery). Try to hire a couple
of the more popular bloggers in the space to start seeding it with data and
promoting it some and I think it would take off. If I was looking at a certain
rails plugin it would be really interesting to see a list of links to
tutorials for that plugin as well as some competing plugins that I should
checkout.

~~~
blalajah
I agree with you. Programmers and bloggers are definitely the way to go.

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AmberShah
Do you have any beta sign ups? If there is a recurring theme that might make
it easy to select a niche. Another thing you can do is select a niche, any
niche, that you are already active in, like gaming or cooking or something
like that.

Hacker bloggers is not a bad place to start if you are already active on HN
and other places. The only thing I would caution is that hackers tend to be
much more critical than the average person. Like some are willing to be early
adopters but others expect everything to be perfect. Expect to hear a lot of
"You should fix this bug/implement that feature - it should be EASY!" I think
that tech-savvy but non-hacker people might be more open to "Is this useful?"
discussions.

As a side note I find your logo to be really unclear. Honestly I think you
should change it if you want it to really catch on, but if you're not willing
to do that, then you might put "jellli.com" text underneath it.

~~~
ehsanul
We just started telling people about the site two days back via
Facebook/StumbleUpon and I guess HN now, and we have just above 40 signups so
far. Conversion is pretty low, but that's expected without any real content.
Need to fix that, add the demo perhaps. Part of asking what stuff people are
into is to try to find a recurring theme, so I totally agree about that.

I think your comments about hackers are on target mostly, but I don't mind the
criticism. It's really better than having friends tell you how great what you
made is.

The logo was not worked on too much, and I'm not exactly good with graphic
design. I'm definitely going to get a professional to redo it in the future.
I'm not sure it would make a huge difference to whether people sign up for
beta, but I can see how it might.

------
kes
I'm going to take a leap here, but I'm pretty sure that -- on the internet --
hacker/blogger/programmer/designers are not a 'niche'. There are numerous
communities for all of these people. Instead you should focus on groups of
people who have a hard time connecting. There are plenty of communities that
have no real internet equivalent. A small list of actual niches:

\- UrbEx (Urban Exploration) \- Board Game Enthusiasts \- Cooking (This could
be a big one. Food blogs are really popular, but disconnected.)

There are a lot of people out there, and if you can focus on long-term user
acquisition (which rules out the 'try every new thing and then drop it a month
later' tech crowd), you'll be a lot happier.

~~~
ehsanul
Very interesting. I think it would be difficult to help create an internet
presence for those who don't already have some, whether in a community or not.
But in the case of disconnected blogs and other content, where a presence does
exist, there may be great potential to help unify all the bits spread all over
the web. I'll look into this more, but I may have a hard time finding
appropriate niches.

By "niche", I had really meant a group of like-minded people. There may be a
more appropriate word. I don't want to stick to a particular niche forever,
but expand to all possible topics eventually. The "niche" is just required to
make sure there are network effects. People who try a new thing every other
month are ok with me, as long as they help bring in others who are more likely
to stay. Besides, some tools are rarely dropped by the tech crowd if they are
truly useful, and I would hope that my application fell into that category.

------
javery
Site - <http://jellly.com/>

Demo App - <http://prettyobscure.jellly.com/>

clicky clickable links

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fezzl
I think that it's a great idea. One thing that I'd like to comment on:
crowdsourcing > algorithms, especially with social going mainstream now.

The demo was great, but I much prefer that it's a bookmarklet instead of an
inline frame. "Related sites" is not something that I need to see all the
time, and it takes away vertical screen real estate, which can be annoying to
some users. If you're set on using a widget, use the side of the screen to
maybe house a button, expandable on click.

~~~
ehsanul
I agree about crowdsourcing > algorithms, obviously.

Yeah, I'm planning to have a bookmarklet, iframe and browser extension UIs all
available. The final UI is in no way set, and probably won't look exactly like
the demo. Lots of people don't know how bookmarklets work, but they'd know how
to use the toolbar. And many people are wary of installing extensions still,
so a web-only version is good to have. Only problem is the confusion having
multiple interfaces may cause some people. Will have to A/B test and see.

BTW, do make sure you sign up, haven't gotten any more signups since a while
back :-)

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jheriko
I think you've done this backwards... problems that need solving tend to come
with their own niche - the people who want the solution.

Don't get me wrong, this is an interesting app, but I don't see a demand for
it (people are more than happy with Google mostly), and I'm curious exactly
how you'd expect to turn a profit with it as well? Adverts and mass adoption?

~~~
ehsanul
_I think you've done this backwards... problems that need solving tend to come
with their own niche - the people who want the solution._

I actually intentionally worded it backwards from the usual as a minor form of
headline bait, which failed. The app really should have broad appeal among
people who frequent the web in general. That group of people is just too
varied and spread out to help each other find links through Jellly. Hence the
need to focus on a smaller, more closely knit group.

Not all apps fit the "solve a pain point" model that paid web applications go
through. While pain killers are great money makers for sure, sometimes you
don't know you'd want to use an app till you've tried it and see why it would
be useful. These apps have a lower chance to succeed I guess, but they can be
great when they do.

I know there's nobody dying to have this service. But Twitter comes to mind as
another application that people thought was mostly useless. That is, until
some of them used it (I know most people still think it's useless, but many
obviously don't).

Advertising fits perfectly here, since the service is there for relevant
links. The advertising would consist of relevant text links, similar to search
ads. Mass adoption would be necessary for large profits, but I believe it's
possible to break even much earlier, using advertising networks to start
advertising early on.

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webwright
Why not do "Hacker News Readers" as a niche?

I'm just one data point... But, while I think I grok what you're doing, I'm
not sure I grok why I should want it. When I read articles, maybe 1 out of 10
makes me want to explore further. When I do want to explore further, there's
usually a pretty natural way to do it-- the google search box in my browser.
Google uses the link graph to find stuff related to the keyword. You're
proposing to have users do it, right? The Google path doesn't seem to be
broken to me... Other than the rare time that I can't think up the right
search phrase to get good results.

~~~
blalajah
I'm sure you sometimes click on hyperlinks besides those that show up in
search results. The point is to make navigation of that manner via related
hyper-links better, which is somewhat orthogonal to search we think. Sure, you
can search and find anything, but it's not quite the same as just browsing by
clicking links.

 _Google uses the link graph to find stuff related to the keyword. You're
proposing to have users do it, right?_

I'm proposing to have users create a new link-graph, separate from the web's
own inherent link graph. Keywords have nothing to do with it. :) - Looks like
my home page isn't as clear as I thought.

~~~
webwright
I'd suggest a screencast on how to use it. Is it a separate site? An add-on
that allows me to explore/suggest sites based on what I'm currently viewing?

~~~
ehsanul
I think I'll be adding my demo to the home page soon, once I polish it.
Otherwise, it can be pretty confusing.

There is probably going to be more than one way to use it, but the main way
would be a browser extension. A web toolbar is also going to be there for
people who don't like installing extensions, to get them started fast. You can
see the demo of that (only shows you how you might browse through, had no
functionality to add links): <http://prettyobscure.jellly.com/>

Let me know if it makes any more sense after trying the demo :)

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bdickason
How about music bloggers? They generally are always looking for 'new artists
like this one' or 'new blogs like this one.'

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iterationx
I vote for web design community. Graphic design / photoshop / ajax tutorials
are all over the place.

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DanielStraight
Seed with Google related site search?

~~~
ehsanul
I might if that didn't suck so bad. It's probably not allowed by them anyways,
robot.txt and ToS.

~~~
notahacker
seed with something hacked out of the Delicious API... see moreofit.com for an
excellent example of what might be possible

~~~
ehsanul
Yeah, I had looked into their API before and it's a good option. Using tags to
figure out the related links could give decent results to start off with. The
results will be suboptimal though, as any automated approach would be, since
"relevance" is more complicated than simply having a few matching tags. I
hadn't seen moreofit.com before, seems to give pretty good results, so I may
have been underestimating how far you can take tag analysis.

