My Start-Up: 3000 unique users a day, only 3 offers?
My YCombinator Applicants Video page ( http://wikitorrents.org/wiki/ycombinator_applicants ) got over 3000 uniques in a single day, many from domains of "very big name" companies here in the Bay Area.
I moved to Silicon Valley this summer to find angel funding and/or work. With me practically begging for angel money and/or work in the page comments, I thought for sure somebody would say "Hey, Patrick. You did all this basically by yourself. Obviously, you've got some sort of talent. We'll definately help you out." Instead... nothing. I got a total of 3 legitimate inquiries, all of which I responded, none of which I've heard back from a day later.
My question is... with all the deep pockets and easy start-up money I hear about, what's it take to get somebody to actually commit to some angel money?
Patrick Keys
citizenkeys AT gmail DOT com
75 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] threadI also indicated I was looking for work. If I had some outside work, I could self-fund my ventures. With all these deep silicon valley pockets, I'm surprised nobody offered me any sort of work.
A website where people can only type 140 characters at a time in a little box? Forget it.
A mobile app that lets you take one picture and post it online? Been done already.
A video sharing site that may never be legimately profitable? No way.
You've bought into your own hype. I've been to your site, I have no idea what it does or why its useful. It looks like a bunch of wikipedia scraped articles thrown together. It doesn't solve any problems or make life easier or fun for anyone.
Don't try to cite examples like Twitter or Youtube, they are freak chances and you CANNOT simply replicate patterns to success. So humbly, and as politely as I can say, I suggest you wake up and stop bullshitting yourself. Stop whining, step away from the computer, and either change your project or kill it.
You can start by actually getting realistic data on:
1) Time to get angel investment
2) Number of people with 3000 unique in a single day that hit front page HN.[I reach front page only for a brief period and had 2k unique visits, twice]
We were lucky enough to be accepted to YC a couple batches ago. It took us about 2 months of constant pitching and investor wrangling to close our seed round after demo day.
It is great that the original post brought you some initial visibility. It is not clear to me that you have done much to proactively capitalize on that.
What exactly should I do "to proactively capitalize" my "initial visibility"?
I just looked up your LinkedIn profile and you have a contact that is connected to 5 entrepreneurs that I happen to also know who have raised seed funding. Have you tried reaching out to that person to get intros to those entrepreneurs (4 of which have raised money in the last 3-6 months)?
Seriously, What other suggestions you got?
The good news is that entrepreneurs typically really like helping out other entrepreneurs with advice and connections when they can. But, entrepreneurs also tend to very, very busy running their startups. So, leaving it up to someone else to take the initiative in order to secure the outcome you want may not be the best course of action.
Bottom line is that neither job offers or angel financing will come to you as a result of you indicating that you need it in a comment on a web page. You need to talk to actual people (yes, to their faces) and tell them what's in it for them. It's not about them helping you, it's you offering them something valuable.
By the way, if your site has nothing to do with torrents, maybe the word torrent shouldn't be in the name? To not confuse people.
I also agree that the idea "needs a little work", probably more than a little. That's what seed money is intended to address: keeping a roof over my head while I work on the idea.
To paraphrase Paul Graham, for the third time in this thread, the final product tends to look very little like the initial idea.
Yes, I agree the site probably needs a name change. The very initial idea in this case was user-created lists of bittorrent files, "Wikipedia meets BitTorrent", if you will. I've modified the idea to include links to videos that are not bittorrent files, including youtube, vimeo, posterous, and justin.tv. So yeah, the site probably needs a name change, which I've considered for awhile.
Thats a pretty big leap from my initial suggestion of asking one of your existing LinkedIn contacts to introduce you to one of their existing LinkedIn contacts that may be able to help you out.
You've got some good food for thought and advice from others throughout this thread. I'd suggest taking a time out, coming back and reading through the 30ish posts here with as objective an eye as possible.
I looked at your link, but it seems like it's just a collection of videos. I went to the main site, but it seems like it's a blog.
"User-created lists of downloadable videos" may sound simple, but it's deceptive simplicity will make it the twitter and/or instragram of its day, I am entirely certain of it.
How do you plan on getting traction?
What are the legal implications?
How much have you personally invested both in terms of time and money into this project?
What previous projects have you completed?
Can you get a friend to co-found this with you?
Show us something that would indicate you punch above your weight class, eg Academics, Social, Hacking.
Traction is people creating lists. Yes, the ycombinator list got 3000 uniques a day. But ANYBODY can create a very particular list of videos that draws that many uniques or more. More traffic equals more traction.
I have invested a year of work into this project. Self-funding is my development time and hosting costs.
I don't have much in previous projects worth showing off.
Why do I need a co-founder?
Maybe that is part of the problem.
If I were an investor (which I'm not - no experience or skills in that area) I would be interested to hear your answer on that. What would plan "B" be if something like that were to happen?
What are the unique page views from other pages? Or the entire site in general? Why should someone use this site as oppose to something like facebook or del.icio.us? Aside from combining two buzzwords together (wiki and torrent), I can't actually tell what the site is really about (and there's nothing that would point me to some description...) or the value it would provide. Also, I don't really see what it has to do with bittorrent except for a banner on the right side.
Hope this feedback helps.
The idea is simple: if you can come up with a good, unique, specific list of videos, then you can translate that easy into lots of traffic. Traffic = traction = money.
I think my point is that it's not enough to just make something that's already been done (a website of a list of stuff...). Your solution needs to solve someone's problem... say if you had some algorithm that could generate these interesting lists of videos w/o user intervention, or some automation to aggregate videos of similar content.
Other people look at the bowl and say "this bowl is empty. How useful to have an empty bowl that I can fill."
I'm a member of the second group. The site has little to do with wikis and/or torrents. The value of wikitorrents.org is the lists of videos, not the simplicity of the site. One good list of videos, regardless of the topic, can generate an exponential amount of traffic that find that particular list useful. If you had seen the traffic from just that one specific list of ycombinator applicant videos, you would understand the potential.
The idea now is a working prototype of a site where users can create lists of videos. That's all the idea is supposed to be. Right now, it's very rough around the edges with lots of usability issues. That's why I need seed money to work on it and make it user-friendly, add features, move features, etc.
If I may paraphrase Paul Graham, implement an idea that the founder himself needs. In my case, it's lists of videos I can find all over the Internet. To quote Paul Graham again, release early, release often, and surprise your users by constantly listening to them and revising the product.
You've obviously got belief and vision for the project, which are great traits to have. But consider yourself being an investor. How do you calculate the ROI? Will giving you $500/week (peanuts) generate a future return of $1,000/week or $20,000/week, or maybe just $10/week? Investors are business people, so they need some way to guesstimate a ROI. If I sponsor you, then how can you convince me that I will at least break even on the investment within the next 2 years?
Most often, they play shows. They tour. They put out their own releases. They make money. Success attracts attention.
When they have demonstrated value, the big money is attracted. So far, I don't see any value in your site. I think you need to articulate this better, and, you know, actually make some money.
If you can't make any money, why should anyone invest?
Don't give up, but also don't expect people to throw money at you for making something. If that were true, everyone on HN would be millionaires.
That's about minimum wage to pursue a technical idea that might payoff big. $500 a week is nothing by silicon valley standards.
Now, I gave you encouragement and a legitimate suggestion on how to take what you have and spin it into something that would probably generate some money. Others have done the same in this thread. You responded with a delusional claim that people should provide money for you just because your idea "might" pay off big. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence on HN that speculative words like "might" are pretty worthless. If you think your idea is that good, commit to it, prove us all wrong.
It is however counter productive to complain to fellow HNers, who are most sympathetic to the frustrations of trying to build products people want, about some bias against you because no one wants to give you jobs or money for your talents. That is not how it works.
One trait you'll find in any successful entrepreneur is the ability to have a thick skin and be open to feedback from others, even when it isn't what they want to hear. That doesn't mean you need to act on or even agree with others' advice, but if you really want to increase your chances of success you need to be able to at least hear others out in a respectful way.
The value proposition of WikiTorrents.org is that you can easily find a continually evolving list of videos about whatever topic you're researching, no matter how specific or obscure the topic and no matter what sites actually have the videos.
I know you might feel like you're getting beat up in this thread, but every comment I've read has been constructive criticism. Take it in stride and don't discount anything offhand. I can almost see your vision for WikiTorrents; it has merit. You're certainly passionate so I believe you can do it.
Lets say you go to google, find a search result, and click to leave google. If you do all that within a coule seconds, then google was successful even though you spent almost no time on google. This is similar to that.
Remember, too, to paraphrase paul graham for at least the fourth time in this thread, that the yahoo directory started out as jerry yang's personal collection of bookmarks.
jerry yang's multibillion dollar company bought out paul graham's viaweb and made paul graham into a millionaire.
so consider all that, let it all sink in, and then decide whether you want to tell me that my idea is bad.
They also have great timing. They did it in Jan. 1994, only a few months after the first few search engines. So lots of people not knowing about their other options and a great need for a 'directory' of the relatively unsearchable web made their company very popular.
There is way more competition now. Listen to what people are telling you.
You remind me of myself a couple years back. If you're willing to give it a shot, I could probably save you a lot of time and hassle...abrandt@bradley.edu
Here's what I'd like to see:
1. A list of every video related to Gary V, Seth Godin, Alexis, etc, on the web. Start with big names and then tag these videos.
2. Now that they are tagged you can start to search for SaaS and I can watch everything ever said about SaaS on the internet.
I like this idea, but the website is less than ideal. You need to focus on a niche and get acceptance there.
Nice. And you wonder why you are not getting funding?
3,000 uniques in a single day doesn’t validate an idea, let alone a business model. The influx of visitors you had is equivalent to the traffic any blog receives when one of its post hits the HN front page. Yet, none of them is complaining about not having gotten a lucrative book deal.
That being said, the idea of a torrent of videos is interesting. I’m much less convinced about its implementation. Not to sound rude, but a bunch of links on a wiki, that's it?
Maybe you could look at XSPF? It’s a shareable playlist format. See http://www.xspf.org/quickstart/ for more info. Since you are sharing links to videos, distributing them into a standard format could be a good idea for instance.
Or hook it to the YouTube API, to provide more info about each video. And most of the time, it takes a while before things get off the ground, so be patient and keep working hard on it.
Good luck.
The point with the ycombinator video page was this: theoretically, if you had 365 lists, each able to generate that much uniques each day, then you'd have over a million uniques a year just with that traffic. A million uniques is a good size of traffic and potential traction.
Stop watching TV (seriously, unplug it and put it in a closet). Stop playing video games (same deal). Stop going out barhopping. Devote your evenings and lunch breaks to working on your idea. You have plenty of time that you're not utilizing. You'll find that most startup founders - especially new entrepreneurs without a previous "win" - don't start by getting seed money thrown at them for an idea. They toil in every spare moment they have to produce a product that is worth investing in.
pg says "Running a start-up is like being punched in the face repeatedly" and it's true. You get to bust your ass 24/7, bend over backwards, wear sixteen hats at any given time, and learn at least 3 new major skill sets for no promise of reward, and a better-than-even chance of failure. If you're not willing to give it all you've got, then honestly, entrepreneurship probably isn't for you.
To paraphrase paul graham (yet again), you can't realistically run a start-up and work a day job. If you do, then you're not really running a start-up. And if you don't work a day-job, then eventually you're likely to run out of money until the start-up gets profitable.
pg's right - you probably can't successfully run a full-tilt startup AND work a full time job. You don't have a full-tilt startup yet. You have an idea, and it's a lot of blood, sweat, and bleary-eyed mornings to get to the point where you'll need to put 100% of your time into it. "pg said I have to have seed funding first" is a pretty lame-ass excuse for why you can't work on your product.
If you think the only two states you can be in are "Working at a desk job" and "Being given a bunch of seed money to quit your desk job", you're misunderstanding the whole process, and cutting yourself way short.
Good luck with your startup. I hope everything works out for the best.
It's a full-time job itself to get a job. Call people. Start blogging and be active in forums like HN so people see how smart you are. Search every little possible job you ever can get. If you're not famous noone will ever GIVE you a job. It's something you need to work for.
If you don't have neither a job neither seed capital for your startup, you have some serious work to do. Search 5 or 10 jobs a day minimum, every single day. Call every angel in the Valley and see if they are interested in meeting you. Go to free parties and events to meet more interesting people. Ask your existing network for tips, help and recommendations. A comment on your own site was a start but don't think it solves your problem. Hard work do.
Be awesome. Work hard. Don't give up.
http://hackerne.ws/item?id=1870473
Let's compare and contrast.
1. They have at least a somewhat clear and professional design. One that's focused on just the one problem they're solving. (I do have to criticize the horrible kerning between the "W" and "o" of their name though.) Minor quibbles like that aside, your site design is awkward at best.
2. They have a video that explains the problem they are trying to solve; and you only need to watch the first fifteen seconds or so to understand that they are an online outlining tool. Does the world need that? I don't know. But it seems they are definitely solving a problem. Your site is unclear and lacks this kind of focus.
The second is this. Lists of videos are a Google search. On any topic, and up to date within minutes. If I want to maintain my own list then I can make a playlist or use Delicious or browser bookmarks or StumbleUpon or dozens of other services.
You need a much, much, much stronger idea, a calmer approach and a much better measuring stick than 3k visitors from HN.
As someone who has been down this road (and yes I was turned down by Ycombinator tuesday too) I know that hardly anyone succeeds the first time they try something. The idea itself may succeed in the long run, but the implementation must change for it to work. You NEED to know that.
If you are dead set on your ideas working as is you will probably never have them actually work.
Keep in mind that everyone feels that their idea is wonderful and it will succeed, I believed that so much to the point that I took jobs selling cars on the weekends and working at geeksquad at night just to pay my bills while trying to make it. Ultimately I did so, but I would argue it was the tenacity I had that made my success a reality (I was also very lucky like most entrepreneurs). If you are not willing to do anything and everything it takes to succeed including eating cans of soup 1/2 can at a time in order to stretch meals out for several days and sleeping on your bedroom floor because you sold your bed on craigslist to pay your server bills chances are you are not the kind of entrepreneur anyone is interested in investing in.
Listen to some of the stories of the guys who made it but just barely. My recent favorite is Brian Chesky who is one of the founders of AirBnB ... truly a teriffic story where they believed in their idea enough to sell CEREAL to make a software company stay alive.
That my friend is wanting it and THAT is the kind of spirit and tenacity that the "deep pockets" in SV are looking for.
Seems similar to what you're going for, and they appear to have been around for a while.
Checked their compete.com stats to get a rough idea on their traffic, and it doesn't look good. From 1600 uniques about a year ago down to 467 a couple months ago.
And their execution is not that bad.
So given their traffic, similar idea, and length of existence, it doesn't give much confidence that this idea can have a large audience.
Not raining on your parade. Just want to offer this little bit of research and my take on it. I think you may want to push the idea even further given the non-success of this similar execution.
p.s. i feel like you could use a free awesomenessreminder, contact via email and i'll hook you up
1. You're being abrasive, defensive and confrontational in your comment responses. This is partly why you're getting downvoted and you're not being taken seriously. It's difficult to take someone seriously when the help being given (in some cases from people who've done a lot more than you have) is being flung back in their face.
2. Nobody knows whether your idea would work or not, but your execution needs a lot of work. Have you researched the market? What's the market for a list of downloadable videos? How will you monetise? What separates you from other torrent or video list sites? How will you stop the MPAA from shutting you down? Why is it that when I go to the front page I get a blog and not the top videos? Why should I stump up money to support this?
Now for number 2, instead of being defensive (and I can tell you're angry about your YC rejection, but it's not all of us that are trying to help you that rejected you) look to answer those questions. You need to work out not just if this is viable but how viable this is and what type of return an investor should expect based on investing X (where X is a range of different amounts of cash that you need) and how that money will be spent.
You have what appears to be an MVP, I'd suggest you work on pitching for investment in order to grow traffic and improve usability and organic SEO.
You need to go out and find investors, they're not going to come to you. Be pushy, be tenacious, ring everyone up in the valley if you have to. Someone will invest in your idea if it has legs. You just have to work on putting your idea into a structure that sells well to an investor.
Things that stand out:
Why is the front-page a list of blog posts written by you asking for funds? I can't think of a worse way to welcome users to your site. Not to mention I haven't a clue what I'm looking at..
A "we need money" page. Begging for money is hardly a way to get someone interested in funding your company. This page is highly redundant and the Paypal donation button is also extremely tacky.
An @gmaildotcom email doesn't exactly come off as being professional. It doesn't take more than a couple seconds to setup an email for your own domain and IMHO just looks much more professional.
The big sidebar links on the right. What are they? Popular links? Favorite links? I've still yet to figure that out.
Overall I'm having a hard time seeing exactly where all the hard work and effort towards this site is going. Not to be rude, but it's certainly not towards the design and usability of the site. The site itself is something I could throw up in a day with any decent CMS (drupal comes to mind immediately). It seems most of your effort has gone towards convincing yourself that you have something amazing on your hands and trying to convey that through... begging?
Upon visiting your twitter I was greeted with the message "http://wikitorrents.org/ for all your BitTorrent wiki needs." That really doesn't mean anything at all. Not to mention it looks like this site has been around for over a year now. I'd expect there to be at least some signs of growth at this point. Why would someone invest in a year old site that hasn't more than a few pages of content? Maybe I'm missing something here?
But more importantly, there's really no necessary correlation between traffic and value. (examples: wikileaks, geocities, cuil, somafm, and, well I mean just browse through TC's deadpool)
Can you instantly answer what your business model is? How much revenue you expect to have in the next 6 months? What your competitors are doing, and how your service differs? Who your users are? And what the next iteration of your product will be?
If you have to think about those things, you're not ready to be acquired.
(disclaimer: I'm talking out of my ass based on what I've read not what I've learned.)