Ask HN: Just finished coding my new startup; need ideas for getting traction

You will seriously need to expand on these points to get customers. Looking at the idea blind, I can't see how it can be any of these things. No pretty UI stuff will be needed until it's a viable business, and addressing these three concerns strikes me as paramount.

1. What would you charge someone for postage? It would have to be less than UPS etc., otherwise there's no point not using them.

2. What would a driver earn for carrying a package? Some amount of money not greater than the postage charge (otherwise you'll go broke).

3. For what amount of money would a driver think it is worthwhile to pick up this package, or several packages, and deliver them to where they need to go? Surely more than just a few dollars.

4. What are the extra costs of your business, such as insurance?

I don't know the answer to any of these questions, particularly postage (I don't live in the US, so I don't know what the cost of sending a parcel is there). But you might want to think about it.

I'd solve the initial chicken and egg by finding a few shipping companies and promising to find them business for free. Get some packages posted on the site. Get them delivered. Get some shipping companies some ratings. Rinse and repeat. Start charging.

Obviously you can't have people who fly do this as the air carriers prevent bringing packages which you did not pack.

1. If you need to ship a package across the country, don't you think it would be much faster to go with a major carrier because they can ship your stuff by air?

2. Would people really trust just any person with a car to deliver stuff that might be important? What if it got stolen by the driver? What would you do then to make the situation right?

3. Would you provide tracking information for packages that are shipped? What about day estimations on delivery?

4. How would it be profitable for the driver? Usually the major carriers are able to use economies of scale to spread out the fixed costs over many packages. If your driver had 3 packages to deliver and their delivery addresses were in different parts of town, wouldn't your driver lose money on gas and the time it would take him to drive around town to deliver the packages?

I don't know if this is economically feasible, but something to think about anyway.

Seems like there would be an accountability problem, in a big shipping company the drive would lose there job taking anything, to much risk for them, here if someone takes something what would be the repercussions?

Use your friends and family or your "extended network" first and see how / if people use it, if they like it, what is missing, etc. Sorry if this comes off as negative, it's not meant to - I can't tell you how many times I've written a web-service that does X, only to find out it needs to be implemented differently to do Y or realize the bigger challenge is in reaching my target audience or even finding who that audience is.

Customer discover and development is just, if not more, important than product development imho.

Also, take a long, hard, and honest look at your proposed business model and make sure it makes sense (using your friends, family, and extended network can help provide some data around this).

I'm sorry but you are approaching this from the wrong end. A project like yours is 99% a business effort and 1% technical. I am not even sure the market for something like this exists. There are convenience issues, there are trust issues, there could be regulation issues (google for a recent car sharing project and how it got shut down because it went against taxi licensing bylaws). You are effectively asking for help building a business plan, while all you have is a very basic undeveloped idea.

First, there's the problem of paying the couriers. I can't speak for others, but I would never carry a package in my car for $5 -- it's not worth the hassle. I might carry 10 at once for $50, but even that payout is very low for my time... not to mention that the likelihood that my route intersects with 10 different packages being shipped on the same day is extremely low. Drivers working for shipping companies make a relatively low wage, and they ship lots of packages. You'd have to pay couriers per-package, and at a much higher marginal rate than shipping companies pay. That means additional overhead, which means your prices will go up.

Then you'll have extremely high overhead with respect to fraud, insurance, etc. UPS/FedEx packages are handled by professional drivers, and I'm certain that their insurance costs are still astronomical. This means more overhead, which again means higher prices still. In fact, I'm willing to bet that even if you could find an insurance agency willing to underwrite your operation, the cost to insure each package would be higher than the overall cost UPS/FedEx charges their customers to ship.

Finally, you're going to have a hard time convincing customers that your service is reliable and safe. That means even for the customers you will get, your cost per acquisition will be much higher than UPS/FedEx. That won't hurt you too much right now, but it will be a major barrier to scaling -- and scaling is the only way you're going to compete with the shipping companies.

Maybe you can compete on some other way than price?

http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/06/how_...

His idea to connect people with GPS is something you could use. His screening idea's are something you could also incorporate.

To make this an succes I would create a social networking site so that everyone who wants to participate can be publicly hold accountable. If all my personal data is known to you I would think twice before I'd steal a package. A scoring system would bring up the most reliable people to do business with.

Now after you understand how they work, do you understand which of their customers don't need to pay for that? Can you identify a group of folks currently shipping through FedEx who can switch to "eventual, best effort, may not actually arrive" delivery? An addressable group? A big addressable group?

If not, scrap the idea and do something else.

P.S. I think you are missing the "last quarter mile" problem, too, although it won't be a quarter mile for your implementation. I assume that in any given day there are a lot of packages going from somewhere in LA to somewhere in New York, but not one single package going from "somewhere in LA" to "somewhere in New York". They all have to go to a specific address in New York -- which means you need to find someone going to that exact address.

I have two suggestions: First, start with deliveries that need to be made within a certain territory. I could maybe see something like this working in a big city like NYC since there are millions of people moving around and your chances of finding fairly precise matches for delivery routes is much higher.

Second, I think you would need some sort of drop box system where shippers check in their packages and deliverers check-out the package, deliver the package to the closest drop-box to the destination, and the customers pick up the package from there. I know this second point adds a huge layer of start-up cost to something like this, but it's the only way I could see it working. When the delivery person checks out a package, their account would have to be liable for damage deposit, lost/stolen package/etc and when they deliver successfully, their account would be credited whatever fee you pay them. If you had a network of redbox-like machines in public places for drop-off and pick-up then maybe something like this works.

I know what I've just described is probably a completely different idea, but when people are in their cars going somewhere, they've budgeted almost an exact amount of time they need to get where they're going and delivering a package to an unknown destination that may only be a little bit out of the way could completely throw a wrench in that time budgeting.

* Start with a niche like used books and perhaps partner with a book swapping site (e.g. bookmooch or bookcrossing or something) to get the initial tests done on something people don't mind losing. Other second hand material would be good, too.

* I think you'd also do much better with such a service if you treat your site more like a craigslist for "package hitchhiking" and reverse the process. I.e. travelers post where they're going on their next road trip and they say they're willing to take a few odd things. So you'd get a lot of random trip listings perhaps all on your front page until there's enough to break them down. People browse the site when they have something to ship (especially second hand stuff, etc) and if they see someone going the way they need, they make a bid/offer to the person going that way.

* On the security angle you might look into the "friend of a friend" and "church group" organization like http://www.goloco.org does. Targeting widespread organizations or friend networks may make this more palatable to people worried about trust.

* Posting some examples of "what people shipped" on the page, with a constant stream would help people feel more comfortable.

* I assume there will be ebay like ratings and reviews, etc?

* Overall, I'm not sure this "disrupter" is going to work unless you can plug it into the thriving secondhand market as an extremely thrifty for low-value items. Positioning yourself initially would do you a lot of good.

* Finally and not most importantly, the website (unless owned by craigslist) will need a much more polished design to make people thing this is a "real deal" enough for them to try it out. I don't think that alone will help you, but your traction issue isn't going to be helped by your current design (usability and visually).

Best of luck-- regarding the other comments, sometimes the naysayers on Hacker News are wildly wrong and harsher than they used to be, but they often have very good points that will let you adapt your vision and save it. Take all the advice with a grain of salt. You're going to learn the best from your users once they start giving you feedback, so testing your idea and site is far more important than our responses.

Edit: To that end, give something like feedbackarmy.com a try a few times and see what random people think about the idea and see what percentage you could get to say they'd give it a shot.

These are the fundamental questions that I would ask you and addressing them might help you in getting more ideas in achieving traction.

But the bigger point is to identify a particular sort of customer who you can serve.

Start ups are actually businesses that are starting up, not software applications or websites. The way to test this is find 1 customer.

You're probably also incurring a lot of liability just by contracting the individual shipper to take an action on your behalf. Say your person is dropping a package that's just off their route to wherever they're going. They pull off the freeway, and BAM get hit by a semi. Congratulations, you're going to be the recipient of a huge lawsuit.

Easy to dismiss that as, "Well how often does that happen?" Accidents happen, on average, one per every thousand driven hours. So if you've got a thousand en route today that are taking more than an hour, you get to have this problem once a day, on average (v weak extrapolation, I know).

Some things can't be done as a lean startup. Some things cost major money before their first day (e.g. airlines, long-haul data services, auto manufacturing). You managed to pick a non-lean industry.