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Success Story: Launching my simple twitter idea early actually paid off

13 points by jhubert ↗ HN
Perhaps you recognize this pattern. You come up with an idea, do a whole bunch of work getting it up and running and then get distracted by another idea and never actually release the first one. That is something I do all the time. I'm always waiting for the last 20% to be finished or polished up.

However, I was out drinking with some old geek friends in Vancouver the other night and they inspired me to just launch one of my website ideas, regardless of how finished it was.

So I did: http://www.tweetfolk.com

24 hours later, I've hit nearly $1000 in my paypal account balance thanks to just a few tweets being sent out by friends. I now have a bit of cash and can use it towards improving the site and doing that last 20% (ok, 40-50% in this case).

I'd love to hear thoughts from the HN community about this and other simple but crazy ideas or experiences with launching early.

Edit:

Remove a line about how much I love the internet as per some HN advice.

26 comments

[ 7.3 ms ] story [ 120 ms ] thread
JohnnyBrown
Way to go man, I'm happy for you. but...

Sorry if I don't understand, and I don't mean to sound condescending - but apparently I pay you $15 for: <a href="<%= twitter_url('myName')%>"> <img src="<%=twitter_img('myName')%>"> </a>

or am I missing something?

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jhubert
JohnnyBrown:

You're not missing anything. As jolan said, it's basically the twitter version of "The Million Dollar Homepage"... minus the million dollars. :p

I'm also not saying this is a good idea or that I would like everyone to start putting things like this live.

The whole point of this post (which I suppose I understated) is that I generally have ideas that are much more interesting and complex, but their complexity causes even more doubt and I never launch.

In this case, I stopped over-thinking it and launched a very simple idea with a layout and model that I wasn't very happy with. For this, I was rewarded by getting money in my account right away and now I am watching the trends of actual paying customer and can tweak the site to meet their needs.

I know that we've all heard "Launch Early, Launch Often" and "If you're not embarrassed by your first version you're waiting too long" but it took me pushing out a really simple idea to actually get a feel for it.

The hope is that I learn my lesson and launch my real ideas faster.

Rest of Hacker News:

Do any of you have similar stories or some insight that you'd like to share?

wlievens
I like your attitude regarding this. I feel very much the same way about my own projects. A wave going from "this is awesome, I can't wait to finish it" to "oh my, this is way too ambitious, I'll be dead before it's ever complete" and back.

A small success like this can inspire you and build confidence. That's added value in itself. The site you launched is silly nonsense though :-)

jayzee
Sorry but this is lame and derivative. Good for you that you made some money but posting it to drive traffic to your site is even worse. I hope that somebody who has powers to do so downvotes you.
jhubert
Thanks for the feedback jayzee.

I didn't post this to drive traffic to the site, although I am aware that it would be a side effect. The only reason I included the URL is so that the first comments wouldn't all be "what was the site?"

Lame and Derivative: As I mentioned in my previous comment, I don't think it's an amazing idea... it's just an idea. As for derivative, isn't innovation the art of taking old things and reworking them into something new?

veb
I'm sorry, but when was the last time that you made something out of an idea everyone thought was gone for good, and made money from it, on the first day? Honestly, be happy for the guy.
veb
Awesome. That's ingenious really. Using another idea, an old idea, and making it 'new' again, by using a 'new' service.
X-Istence
What value are you giving me? Sure I get to post my picture on a web page, but I already have plenty of web pages where I have my picture posted, why yours?

Overall I find it interesting that people are willing to throw their money away at something so completely useless.

chr15
What's unfinished about it? Mind going into the technology behind it?
jhubert
From my point of view, there are a number of things that are "unfinished" about the site and they don't all have to do with technology. Here are a few.

1) Figuring out the right price to charge for the squares is something that probably would benefit from some more thought.

2) There buying process is pretty rough and there is very little text to reassure the customer as they are going through the checkout process.

3) The incentive structure is very rudimentary. People have to get it in order for them to see the value, and that takes a bit of imagination. The initial sweep of squares seem to be purchased from either the "it would be neat if this takes off" or the "i have some extra money in my paypal account" people. I could spend a lot more time working out this part of the site.

4) The design is, heh, rough.

As for the technology, I'm happy to go into it in more details but I'll summarize here for brevity:

  - Ruby on Rails 3, hosted on the free Heroku cloud stack (Ruby, PGSQL)
  - Paypal handles the payment processing and invoicing
  - Basic REST Twitter API for pulling down the twitter account details
  - Twitter OAuth is used to handle the optional account signup
  - Twitter's S3 account serves up the avatars, although I'll probably have to change that
  - Each purchased square is assigned a bit.ly URL that I use for tracking clicks and surfacing statistics to the owner of the square
  - Google Analytics for the tracking
  - Page caching is used for each of the pages to minimize server load
Total Cost: $0
duinote
it is a world to look for greater fools.
nroman
Wait a sec, on the site it says 46 sold.

46 * $15 = $690

Where'd the other $250 come from?

jhubert
The 8 large squares along the top row are now $100 each, and I had originally started everything out at $10 and $50 until people told me it was way too cheap.

So, the math worked out something like this:

(15 * 10 + 2 * 50) + (26 * 15 + 3 * 100)

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Void_
Hard to believe he made $1000, eh?
Rubyred
Just to let you know jhubert, I'm not clicking on your link because it's a juvenile headline and very spammy sounding.

The "Awesome. I love the Internet" line didn't help to change my mind either.

jhubert
Thanks for the feedback Rubyred.

Personally, I think the idea is relatively juvenile but I never intended for the headline to sound spammy. I'm just excited.

As for the "Awesome. I love the internet" portion, I'm not sure I can change that one. I do love the internet. I can't think of any industries where something like this is possible... well, no other legal ones.

I ran a large (1+ million member) community website back in 1999 - 2000 and realize that every community has their style and voice. I'm sure given more time on HackerNews I'll learn to speak with the one that's appropriate for the audience.

Roridge
I think this is great. Sure it isn't for me but neither was the Million Dollar Home Page, but it's a nice modern version.

Ignore any negative feedback (unless constructive), haters will hate ;)

The way the MDHP got press attention was with a press release, would be worth having a look at for you I think. What bothered me about the MDHP was I felt it was a fraud, he posted about having massive university debts, then as soon as he made the million he quit uni and moved to a big city to invest the money. Which makes me feel it was a bit fraudulent.

Gratz!

jhubert
Thanks for the suggestion and support. :)

A friend of mine actually bought some pixels off of the MDHP back in the day. Apparently the guy who started it even sold all of the customer details to outside advertisers for money. My friend received a bunch of spam to the email address he had used. Bad pool.

Personally, I like that simple ideas like this can be the seed funding for future projects. Not just in currency, but also in education.

[dead] mek
Nice Remake! :)