

Show HN: We decided not to apply to YC so we could try Kickstarter - iamjonlee

Hey everyone! We spent the major part of the year preparing an idea we had for the YC application. At last minute, we decided not to go through with YC.<p>I mean, we've had our fair shares of failed startups and this was one of those make it or break it scenarios. We took everything we've ever learned and strived to make an app that we were proud of. We spent so much effort into making this app that we couldn't bear stopping short and applying to Y Combinator. (Mind you, there's nothing wrong with YC.) We didn't want to apply to Y Combinator at the last minute because if we had really gone that far and really poured our souls into this time, we might as well go all the way and instead ask for funding from Kickstarter. This the app that we've always dreamed of making and we're finally getting close. We've spent inch by bloody, paintstaking inch working on it and it seriously feels good to finally let if off our chestslana del rey by showing off what we learned during our time as entrepreneurs. Thank you for your time!<p>Persona is your autobiography in graphic novel style. It's everything you are, in pictures.<p>http://www.prsna.me
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ruedaminute
I think there might be a good nugget at the core of this, however I've already
spent a minute on your site and watching your kickstarter video and am still
unclear on exactly what it is the app does. And especially, why it's different
from any other photo gallery out there. I think you guys need to work on
communicating your product-- maybe talk to a copywriter friend or something,
have them clarify your ideas for you. The good news- I like the design of your
site. And the tagline -- graphic novel of your life -- is appealing to me. But
it does not yet translate from what I can see into your product. Good luck!

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davidcann
The design is good and the app sounds interesting, but the rewards on
kickstarter are lackluster. $60 for an ebook, a sticker, and 5 business cards
isn't very enticing, so I'd suggest reworking the rewards, if possible.

~~~
iamjonlee
Thanks for the feedback! I get what you mean but I see it a bit differently.
I've pledged on several Kickstarter projects that offered absolutely no
incentive besides sending me a thank you email. I do it for the same reason
that I donate to charities, for the sake of hopefully seeing an awesome
ending/finished product some day. I understand this kind of thinking might
seem naive, so I do want to expand on this a little bit further. We chose the
rewards carefully because we simply don't have the resources to do much more.
Kickstarter + Amazon payment gate way take 5-8% of your pledge money. That
money is taxed as income. We're realistically looking at roughly 30% of the
pledge money to be taken off from the top before we even consider the rewards.
The unspoken rule that Kickstarters seem to follow is that they offer all
previous pledge rewards with each reward tier.

This means that the sticker, 5 business cards (after paying for shipping of
cards to my house) shipping of those items to you and including the hours it
will take me to write the ebook,we're barely left with enough to pay for
development costs. Having to need to create fancier, and more seemingly
valuable rewards will definitely attract more users, but require more time
from us because we'll need to do most of the work by ourselves. This
ultimately cuts down from our development time and time is money. I would
technically have more money to contribute to the app than the $60 pledge if I
worked by the hour. The only problem then is that I wouldn't be working on the
app, which in turns makes the whole project pointless.

I would really love if I could do more for the people who are helping out and
supporting my cause, but I just have my hands tied. I sincerely appreciate
your honest and open feedback because it really helps to let me understand
what people's first impressions are and it'll help me try and figure out at
least some kind of solution to this problem. Thank you!

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bira
Cool. What problem does it solve?

~~~
iamjonlee
I guess Persona is still a pretty enigmatic topic. We're trying to build an
app that focuses on you rather than your friends. In other words, it's an
about me page, in pictures.

Through pictures, you're able to learn hundreds of things about a friend that
you might never think of asking. What's their favorite color, their allergies,
what do they like to do on the weekends? Rather than a timeline, Persona
encourages users to post photos of anything that makes them who they are.

Persona asks people "What does this photo mean to you?" because when you
answer that, it's no longer just a photo sharing application. It's become an
intimate bond that people can connect to. Do you like eating cold pizza? I do
too. what other things do you eat cold? I think cold rice is disgusting
though. It's at that moment that I can feel a more personal connection towards
a stranger that I've never met by talking about the idiosyncrasies that make
you who you are.

Persona is everything you are, in pictures.

~~~
mbylstra
I think this 'problem' is already being solved pretty well by Tumblr and
Pinterest. Tumblr is mainly used (by teenagers) to post images of things they
think represent them (an activity that is very popular with teenages - the
same reason they like to put up band posters in their bedrooms). I think
Tumblr was meant to be a blogging platform, but this has become its main use.
Pinterest can be seen as an extension of this but with more features (ability
to group things rather than just having a single stream). I think a great deal
of the success of Tumblr and Pinterest can be attributed to their extreme ease
of use: to build up an online persona all you need to do is browse peoples'
profiles and click 'reblog' or 'pin' - no need to even pull out your
smartphone camera. My advice would be to make your app integrate well with
these two services (offering an easy interface to upload photos from your
phone) and try to slowly ween users from these services.

~~~
iamjonlee
I get what you mean and where you're coming from but Persona's concept is
still pretty different. People do post images of things they think will
represent them, but that doesn't say much about who they are. Anyone can post
photographs and upload them, but it's the meaning behind the photograph that
creates a bond. For example: If I take a picture of Hot Cheetos and post it on
Tumblr or Pinterest, people who view it will normally associate me being
interested or liking Hot Cheetos. But the truth is, nobody cares because
millions of people like Hot Cheetos as well. On Persona, we focus purely on
things around you that make you who you are; when you post an image, we ask
you "what does this mean to you?" If I were to post Hot cheetos on Persona,
I'd say "Hot cheetos are musthaves for me when I'm programming." That might
not mean everything to everyone, but for the people that can really relate to
it, it becomes an intimate connection. It's all the small idiosyncrasies that
describe who you are.

It's difficult to fully depict the differences because all apps of similar
nature have some sort of overlapping. For example, most people still can't
fully explain why Path is so different from Facebook. I use Path but I can't
seem to tell people why it's different, aside from the fact that you have a
private network vs a public one. If you're asked, "How is Tumblr different
from Pinterest?", you'd have just as hard a time answering.

From what I see, Tumblr and Pinterest users don't answer the question of why
they post something. I use Tumblr for the sake of killing time and just seeing
what pops up and reblog and share things that I think are cool. When I post on
Tumblr, I don't think "how does this relate to my life?" I used to ride a
motorcycle so I like reblogging nice bikes on Tumblr but that doesn't mean
anything to anyone. It doesn't tell the story of how I saved up money to get
my first motorcycle, the first time I dropped my bike, or how upset my parents
were with me buying it. For me, Tumblr is just a great, mindless way to kill
time.

Pinterest for me, is a better way of organizing my bookmarks. I share links
and photos from other sites because they interest me. Like with Tumblr, I
don't necessarily stop to think why I'm putting a photo to my board- it's just
a great way to visualize all the things that interest me and my friends on one
page. I have a section for recipes, a section for funny stuff, another section
for just cool arts and craft stuff. I browse Pinterest by categories just to
find something cool/interesting that I want to go back to afterwards. It's a
great service because I've use my browser bookmarking feature a lot less now.

Here's a question I asked myself for Tumblr and Pinterest: "Can you figure out
what your friend would want as a practical gift for her birthday?" I wouldn't
be able to; my friend shares everything from recipes to pictures of dogs to
wedding gowns. But truth is- she's doesn't cook, is allergic to dogs, and is
already married. It wouldn't make sense to buy her a dog or kitchenware right?
Knowing that she doesn't cook, that she's allergic to dogs would be the prime
examples of the kind of personal understanding you'll have of someone on
Persona. It's not about what you're liking, reblogging or upvoting. It's about
the real side of you, the one where you parents and only close friends know
about.

Thanks for the feedback!

~~~
RuggeroAltair
Why did you take off your kickstarter? Are you trying different ways of
getting funded? I almost thought you gave up since the kickstarter page
doesn't say much about the cancelation.

~~~
iamjonlee
Hey! Thanks for asking. We got about $4.2k in funding in 3 days. While this
was a pretty good start, we realized a few factors.

1) We weren't going to make our Kickstarter goal at the rate we were going
because at the rate the pledges were adding up, we would be short by a large
sum of our initial asking $48,000. A good part of the pledges were actually
from friends and family so it further adds to the possibility that the
Kickstarter goal wouldn't be reached anyways.

2) With the feedback we've gotten on HN and other sites, we've realized that
we really really need to cut down on our description and go over it again with
the copywriter to rewrite it so that it's absurdly simple to understand how
our product is different. Nobody is going to read 5 paragraphs of how why
you're different and if people keep asking us why we're different, we're doing
something wrong with our copy.

3) People are interested in the product but not willing to pledge. I got an
email from a few people that it sounds like an amazing app but they don't want
to pledge because they needed more information (our fault again- our video
only showed a very basic view of the app because we had just finished a quick
prototype without any features when we shot the video) and so they wanted to
see if they could have a beta test or more screenshots of the app before they
pledge. If they have to request this of me, again, we're doing something
wrong.

I've learned a lot with the whole Kickstarter deal in the 3 days it lasted-
we're going with an even better marketing plan. For now, we're looking at
alternative funding and have actually applied to YC late. As you said, it's
not just about the funding. We lack advice and guidance in many other areas.
We also lack the connections that YC can offer you with the tech community. If
need be, then we'll do Kickstarter again when our point is clarified and
people understand what we're about.

Meanwhile, we're just improving, revising, and making our overall product
ready for launch. It'll be amazing.

~~~
RuggeroAltair
I agree with everything you said. I hope you'll make it into YC. Good luck
guys!

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RuggeroAltair
Honestly I don't understand from your post what the reason for not applying to
YC was.

~~~
iamjonlee
You're absolutely right. I never actually stated what my reasons were. Sorry,
we had been up too many hours by the time we wrote the earlier HN post so we
left out our reasons entirely.

Like a lot of the other startups here on HN, we're boot-strapped. We have
basically no funding besides our own personal savings and a dream that we'd
like to persue. When you're in that situation, you're forced to really get
down and dirty and try to do everything yourself. Nobody will miraculously
jump out and offer you a hand, so you're forced to learn everything and try
new ways of entering the market by yourself. From each time we've failed a
startup, we always learned something new. We took that experience and used it
to build what we have today, Persona. It's like riding a bike, you keep
falling and injuring yourself but eventually you learn. That's how we feel
about Persona. We're confident enough that this is the app that's different
from all the other times we've tried.

So back to the topic, because we've gone so far doing everything hands on
ourselves, we wanted to try and get funding ourselves without having to rely
on YC. We get that YC is a fantastic program and they have exactly the right
connections to put you in the spotlight, but if we join YC now without trying
ourselves the very last step (getting money to continue), we'll regret that
decision for the rest of our lives. Because we'll never know then if we would
have been capable of making a dent in the startup community we live in. It'll
answer the question "Are you able to successfully grow your userbase and
product without relying on VCs or Angels?". Thanks for the heads up!

~~~
bira
Have you already watched DHH's "How to Make Money Online" presentation
([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY&feature=player_embedded))?
If not, watch it ASAP.

If you go down the bootstrapping road, you must have profits coming in, to
fund and further the development of your product. Sooner or later you will
have to make money and since you don't seem to have a lot of funds laying
around, the sooner the better.

Moreover, have you validated your idea(s) (included the previous, failed
attempts to excute them and build a viable business)?

Are you sure that there are enough people out there with the burning desire to
throw money at you for this app to make it worth the hustle?

(assuming you want to sell your app, which would be the best and most simple
way to make money)

As PG says, the worst mistake one can make trying to build a company is
building something THEY think is NEEDED by their customers and not what the
market actually needs. Listen to your audience.

Do the people need an iphone app to "truly define us"?

Creating a kickstarter campaign was a good move, by the response you'll get
you'll understand if you are solving a real problem or not.

To expose more people to your app (and validate it or not with a wider set of
data) you can use an adwords\facebook voucher and create a campaign (just
search for them).

Link to your homepage, track how many visitors opt in vs how many of them just
land and bounce away, not interested.

Ask questions on Answers sites, open threads on forums your ideal customer
hangs out, the more eyeballs the better.

Best wishes

~~~
bira
BTW I liked your previous headline more. (thanks to Google cache)

"It's everything you are, in pictures" is clearer and easier to understand
than "your autobiography in graphic novel style".

I still think you miss something unique and diverse at a feature level (what
your app can do that other don't) and not on a concept level ("IT'S ABOUT YOU!
NOT YOUR FRIENDS OR FAMILY, BUT YOU!").

