

Ask HN: How can we pivot our startup? - fezzl

I have submitted a previous thread on HN (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1711585), basically describing our no-traction situation. Our idea mixes social with ecommerce, and we work with retailers to introduce social throughout the buying process. However, we're not seeing adoption because -- and we guess -- people just don't want to shop that way. But we don't know for sure, as we don't know if it's a "marketing" problem.<p>We are in public Beta, but it's been one month. We have an okay number of sign-ups but actual adoption and usage have been very poor. We have repositioned and reiterated the product multiple times and have not seen much improvement.<p>HN has always been my go-to source for inspiration and good ideas, so I was wondering if anyone has a pivot suggestion for us. We don't know if this idea has legs, but our experience so far has been discouraging. Any feedback/quick thoughts would be tremendously helpful.
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secret
Some quick thoughts:

1\. I went to the demo page and even though I read the instructions, it still
took me longer than it should have to notice the FB stuff. Without
instructions and specifically looking for it, I would have never noticed it
was there. I guess placement can vary by store design, but the demo would
leave me with that worry.

2\. From the merchants perspective, I could see the benefits of having users
talk about my products on Facebook, but I don't know if distracting a shopper
when they are closer to making a decision is worth the trade off. In other
words, is the expected value of the links worth the diminished likelihood of
purchase? I can't see this increasing the possibility of a sale to the current
user. I could be completely wrong and in that case, any data/statistics you
could provide merchants would go a long way to convincing them to use Zuupy.

3\. To combine 1 & 2 and suggest a potential pivot: As a guy, I am highly
unlikely to ever talk about or seek out advice for a general run of the mill
purchase. I may seek out the help of, for example, a photographer friend if
I'm going to buy a camera, but that may be the extent of it. Maybe I'm just
more introverted than others, but going by my FB feed, I've haven't seen it
happen much. Judging by the background graphic on you widget, you seem to
agree that the target users are women. From my highly unscientific
observations of my wife and her friends, they like to show off purchases they
are proud of (say they discovered some new fashion and got it at a huge sale).
So, what if instead of allowing users to chat with friends before making a
purchase and possibly deterring it from occurring, users are presented with a
big widget right after the purchase to share and discuss with their friends.
You still get the free links plus a stronger social endorsement (this person
has just made a purchase) and you don't ruin the conversion funnel. If I was a
merchant, I could definitely see myself signing up for something like that
(bonus points if it just plugged in to existing shopping carts).

~~~
fezzl
1\. That was actually the result of one of the changes we made. Quite a number
of retailers have expressed concerns about how the widget was too "obvious."
As per the placement in the demo, we are trying to mimic exactly how it would
be shown in their own stores.

2\. Our hypothesis has always been that we optimize the sales funnel by giving
buying confidence, reassurance, social proof, etc. But having tested it out
with several retailers, we don't think that's very much the case. We thought
that getting numbers to prove an inaccurate hypothesis would be difficult,
thus we are looking for pivot ideas.

3\. I think that's a great idea, and I have seen many of my female friends
parading their purchases to garner comments. We are afraid, however, that
something like that might be too replicable. We aren't sure if retailers would
be willing to pay $30/mth (our current price point) vs. pay a one-off however-
many-hundred dollars to hire a consultant to build it.

~~~
secret
That's a good point on #3. Just to toss out an idea- what if the service
offered tracking of the referral and could provide some sort of analytics to
help retailers optimize their social campaigns.

For example- I complete a purchase on Retailer A and I am presented with your
widget and: maybe I get a rebate on my purchase, or a coupon for next time if
I share on Facebook, or maybe the rebate goes into effect if a referral
completes a transaction. You could use something like bit.ly to track the
links. Ultimately, one of my friends sees this on his feed and goes to
Retailer A and makes a purchase.

The retailer would be: 1. incentivizing the user to share and 2. be able to
see some sort of stats analyzing which campaign is preforming better.

I think I would definitely be tempted to pay for something like that.

------
fookyong
Disclosure: I am a director of one of Japan's largest luxury ecommerce sites,
so I feel fairly qualified to give feedback about this :)

Firstly, ecommerce + social is a really attractive combination for us. In that
respect, don't give up on the problem you're trying to solve - I think there
is tons of value there.

Secondly, I will echo the comments of the poster "secret" - from the
merchant's point of view the risk of distraction is not one that I take
lightly. I'm very unlikely to pull the trigger on implementing something like
this without a lot of data to back it up. You need to work on building case
studies that I can see, with statistics that show an increase in some kind of
metric I can get behind - facebook activity, sales, etc. Work with some
ecommerce partners or even start selling stuff yourself as an experiment, then
you'll really start to understand the pain-points that you can concretely help
with.

Thirdly...

I don't think the current implementation adds enough obvious value. A stream
of Facebook comments is very difficult to derive ROI from. If I were to pivot,
and had to keep the overall theme of ecommerce + social + facebook, I would
build a set of plugins with _specific use-cases_ that work with my store and
facebook. For example:

1) a plugin that allows a user to create a "shopping list" on facebook from
the products in my store. Make it fun, like a game - perhaps I set myself a
budget on facebook and then my friends can vote up or down on the things in my
wishlist that they think I should get.

2) a plugin that facilitates a "buy me this" feature. A user picks a product
on my store and can send it to their boyfriend / girlfriend / mum / dad on
facebook (maybe with a nicely formatted letter-style message) asking them to
buy it for me. Maybe the purchase is incentivised somehow, with a discount if
you get someone to buy it for you.

Make a set of these types of plugins, then I think you have a business. Give
the most viral one away for free, and charge shop owners a monthly fee to use
the whole set.

Boom.

~~~
fezzl
Hi, thanks for the elaborate reply.

We clearly have had feedback from retailers that they are concerned that our
widget may be too "obtrusive" or "distracting" when they were test-driving it.
We are keen on building up case studies, but I think some small pivoting in
the product focus is needed or the marketing/sales process is going to be
tough.

About your suggestions for pivot, I honestly like both ideas, this is what I
set this thread up for. We have trouble focusing on creating experiences that
shoppers would enjoy because, frankly, we are not online shoppers ourselves.
Perhaps we will come up with one or two plug-ins, as suggested, and we will do
some customer development from there.

Thank you for your comment.

------
patio11
Have you talked to your users about this? Try it. Also, prospects other than
your users.

~~~
fookyong
I 2nd talking to your users about it.

sorry to plug my app, but I just added the free plan back to my survey app -
use it for free to gather some feedback :)

<http://goodgecko.com>

------
michael_dorfman
One thing that complicates your situation is that your customers are not the
users; your customers are the e-commerce sites you sell to-- the end-users are
_their_ customers.

This makes "Have you talked to your users?" a bit more complicated.

My pivot suggestion: "e-commerce mixed with social" is a great niche, but I
don't think your MVP has nailed it, yet. I'd move away from the emphasis on
real-time, and think, rather, about "How can I leverage social networks to
support the sales process?" Note that one of the tough nuts to crack is the
chicken-egg problem; the more content that's produced by end-users, the more
valuable the service is-- but you need to prime the pump somehow.

As I mentioned (via email), I'd love to talk to you in more detail about
possible ways to do this in my particular sub-niche (online bookstores), but I
imagine that a lot of the stuff can generalize.

~~~
fezzl
Hi Michael,

We are also starting to think that the "real-time" factor may not really
appeal to both the retailer and the end-user. We are therefore still hunting
for a specific use case or experience that we can focus our product on. We
have been seriously considering game mechanics, for example.

I'm keen to learn about your sub-niche suggestions via email.

