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So you launched your startup here first (last week, month...). Now how is it doing?

37 points by rokhayakebe ↗ HN
Several startups were launched here and usually users provide valuable feedback to founders. If you launched your startup here last week, month, year, Can you please share how you are doing now? What were your major obstacles? etc...

Thank you all,

36 comments

[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 231 ms ] thread
davidw
Squeezed Books isn't getting much traction, unfortunately. I've moved on to other things for the time being, and revisit it every now and then to make tweaks or otherwise improve it. Even the contest I'm running hasn't had any takers... ok, a free book isn't the millions of dollars Google can offer, but a free book for typing a sentence or two is still a good deal.
nike
Have you seen getabstract.com? They are pretty successful from what I've heard, but their model is different from yours.
davidw
Yeah, I've seen most of the other sites doing similar things. My idea was to try and 'fly under the radar' by having something that's probably not as high quality, but far more open. Hopefully this would facilitate discussions of the book in question, which is something I think that could be just as educational as the summaries themselves, even high quality ones.
mooders
I posted bzplnr as a Rate My Startup, more as a beta program than an acrual launch, and I must say the feedback was terrific - detailed, honest and even a bit brutal, but without exception encouraging. I've made some changes (it's now http://www.fourthirds.com) accordingly and it's slowly starting to gather a few users who are tentatively having a go with it.

Aiming for a re-design and enhanced featureset soon, so I'll be back for more HN honesty!

midnightmonster
with that redesign, you should work on making the site look like there's an actual product. It looks 100% like a generic-template blog right now.
axod
I first put up Mibbit here...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=83660

It's growing pretty well now, handles around 10,000,000 messages a day. As you can see from the original post, I started out having a telnet app, irc app, and game app (Multiplayer jigsaws!). The biggest decision I made was to focus on one. I chose IRC for obvious reasons. The feedback I got was that people didn't really know what it was etc - hence the decision to focus on one app.

To be honest I was pretty gutted about the feedback, and was about to give up on it. I then decided to post it to reddit anyway (nothing to loose) a little later, and got a few people using it there. I then found ircatwork.com which I bought pretty cheaply giving me some users to start with. I naively thought I suppose, that posting to hacker news and reddit would lead to users. It didn't. Sure, a little spike in users that lasts a day or so, but it's not long term.

The biggest obstacle so far is probably getting to a state where you can make money. Premium accounts, targeted ads etc all take time.

Also in my case, dealing with IRC networks has been an eye opener. Quite a lot of the older networks are completely opposed to anything like Mibbit... "But then anyone could connect!" they say. Most are friendly now though, and at peak times we have 350 or so connections to freenode, and about 2,500 IRC connections open in all.

It's growing well, but that means it's costing a little more to run, and not yet making money. But I'm sure it'll sort itself out :/

I think the main thing is to grow and get user feedback, and that seems to be happening ok.

maxklein
I think I'm one of the most critical critics of most of the startups here, but I love mibbit. When I'm stuck in my C++ work, I click my mibbit button, it auto connects me to the channel and I ask the question. And intelligent informed answers come immediately. That's the real value of mibbit - not the IRC per se, but the ability to use it to instantly get a reply to a specific problem. Consider that in your plans for expansion.
axod
Thanks for the feedback. That has been the driving force so far, to keep things dead simple, and just have the rich feature set there if people want to delve further.

My own usage is mainly to go ask questions etc - one of the great strengths of IRC is getting help, so any features that help people get there are always on my mind - integrated pastebin etc...

Feel free to mail me if you have any ideas/gripes.

shawndrost
hey, mibbit rocks! I was just using it tonight, and earlier today.
utnick
I use mibbit as my irc client now. Great service.

Have you thought about charging money for an account that can handle irc File transfers? Like allow dcc file transfers to your server, then I can log in and pick up all of the files I have dl'ed from anywhere

Might be some legal implications wrt illegal file sharing though.

peakok
Awesome app. This is the best web based IRC client that I've seen so far.
rob
Why haven't you tried putting any ads on it like AdSense? I'm not sure if you'll make decent money that way since most of your users are probably technical oriented, but it's worth a try. If you get enough pageviews, you can also try applying to a CPM network like ValueClick where you get paid based on pageviews.
axod
It actually has advertising which is now also matched to the chat.

Go in a channel and talk about apple or iphones etc, and the infobar above the chat will likely change to show an advert about apple.

The challenge at the moment is getting enough volume of adverts and keeping them current. I may end up dealing directly with advertiser like stumbleupon for instance do.

SwellJoe
I didn't see it the first time around. Pretty neat. I like the built-in paste bin. I probably won't be leaving XChat behind immediately, but there's certainly value in having IRC always available from anywhere.
davidw
> having IRC always available from anywhere.

I use it as a way to direct people to #hecl from the home page of http://hecl.org. I suspect there might be other ways to use it as a sort of cheap support system, especially if it were possible to pay some money and get branded versions... stuff like that.

jrsims
It's a great app and I use it primarily to access IRC networks outside the corporate firewall. Trying to remember where I first heard of it and I believe it was Hacker News (recommended in a comment).

To be honest, though, I would probably stick with irssi or Colloquy if it wasn't for the firewall limitations at work. I think it'll be difficult to compete with the responsiveness of a native client app, but maybe people like me who run into firewall restrictions or people who can't install software on their work computer will be the types of people you could market freemium accounts to; essentially, tech savvy business users. And if its techies you're after, I imagine you will have a tough time making money off of ads; most of us just don't even look at them (however, give a look to how Pandora serves up ads). So freemium may be the way to go here. For paid accounts, you might also consider offering a searchable and downloadable transcript log (IRC clients offer this already, but I'm sure you could differentiate by making these logs more accessible).

I'm curious as to what others think about this.

axod
Bear in mind that half of the users are using the widget - embedded in someones website - so these users aren't quite as tech savvy.

I think the most likely outcome will be premium accounts for techies, with extra features - scripting, etc, and advertising supported for other users. Also a premium widget for websites that don't want the ads...

Lots of options open.

ashu
Mibbit has become my de-facto IRC app now. Does it support XDCC, etc.?
shafqat
We launched the NewsCred private alpha via HackerNews a couple months ago, and the last 8 weeks have been a whirlwind of excitement.

The feedback here was very positive. We listened and made some changes immediately and then reached out to a few bloggers. TechCrunch, Mashable etc covered, and we received some decent reviews (nothing fantastic). It was still exciting to see your baby up on TechCrunch!

Traffic that comes with these reviews was good, but I hear it used to be a lot better before. We got a thousand new users from the TC post, nothing crazy. Mashable was a mere blip. Other less known blogs sent a LOT more traffic. We reached out to a lot of smaller bloggers and niche sites for feedback and that was quite fruitful.

We have daily users who love the site. That gives us hope and makes it all worthwhile. We've pushed out a lot of new features, and are gearing up for our public launch (although sneak preview available now).

Our main thing is to get the daily user count in the thousands every day. We now have some days where its less, some days where its a lot more. But we're aiming for consistency. Considering we are about to officially launch publicly, we're very happy with progress.

Its all about marketing and user acquisition now!

r7000
Growth for FlashcardDB was slow and steady for the first few months, but found some real traction this past month for some reason (July). It is getting about 40-50 new users per day and just passed five thousand card sets, 3500 users and just under a quarter million flashcards.

The most recent change was adding support for the Supermemo/Mnemosyne-style Spaced Repetition algorithm:

http://flashcarddb.com/graded

http://flashcarddb.com/blog/8-feeds-font-sizes-and-a-new-srs

Since using the Leitner System is also an option, I hope to have a real set of data eventually to compare whether or not one algorithm is truly "more efficient" than the other.

pongle
I was just playing with this. Boy I wish I had it when I was trying to learn Japanese!

Thanks for the pointer.

r7000
No problem - thanks for checking it out!
SwellJoe
Awesome idea. Most of the existing tools in the space are kinda ugly desktop apps for Windows. And education is a pretty good field for premium web services...I've heard from several web-based startups that they've gotten good uptake among teachers, even when the app wasn't originally targeted to teachers.
r7000
Thanks! You have a good point. Some days I get 100 card sets all nearly identical and feedback messages saying "u suk, I hate my teacher! lol" :)
SwellJoe
Speaking of which, you probably want to work on dealing with card sets. Search works...by some definition of "works", but it looks like things are getting a bit out of hand with repetitive sets. One of the cool things about Supermemo and imitators is that there are big, maintained sets for a lot of common tasks. You might want to make a "Featured Sets" page, that gives props to the folks who make awesome sets. Allowing folks to rate sets might also be cool, since quality varies so wildly...but, be careful not to clutter up the page too much. It's nice and clean right now.
r7000
I agree. I am happy to have the problem. I am thinking of some sort of "Flashcard-Rank" that rates the quality of the card sets by using metrics such as number of times studied, number of users who have saved the set, more than X number of cards and maybe a simple user rating system.

The "featured card set" on the home page was a start of the "Featured Sets" idea. That was ok when there were less sets to choose from. But, yes, it is time to expand it now. Good examples and how-tos can really help.

Thanks very much for sharing your thoughts.

NoBSWebDesign
I posted RateMyStudentRental here a week ago (even though we actually launched to our school about 6 months ago), and the feedback was great. Of course posting here didn't really lead to repeat users, since our site is aimed primarily at students, but it was nonetheless encouraging. Since last week, we've launched a redesign and continue to chug along.
mbuchanan
I previewed Microspaces 'Nested GUI' technology on HN (http://www.nestedguis.com)... and based on the feedback made a few changes. I haven't launched the sites I've built on top of it yet. but very soon.
timcederman
We posted asking for feedback on our Facebook application - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=171712

Last week we got acquired by Monster for 72.5 million. Coincidence? :)

jbyers
I'm sure the other six years of hard work and $18M in funding had nothing to do with it. :)

Congratulations on the acquisition. For the curious, the company in question is Trovix.

jlogic77
What do you mean launching your startup here? I'm new to hackernews, how does one do that? Is it just a comment like this or submitting a press release?
tstegart
Yes, people put up a post asking for feedback or announcing they've launched. Usually its takes the form of "Ask YC: What do you think of my start-up idea?" or something along those lines. It helps not to be spammy about it, and sticking around to answer questions is always a good idea. So is having a tough skin, because people will question your every move.

Some recent examples: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=267640

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=267049

pedalpete
I posted a 'rate my start-up' for HearWhere.com a few weeks ago. The feedback I got was brutal, but awesome! I've made some minor changes as a result, and have been working on a major release. Of course I saw a small increase in traffic as a result of the post, which dropped off quickly, within a few days.
herewego
I launched socialpredictor.com a couple days ago. I got pretty good feedback, mostly good but some bad, from the people who took the time to actually use the site. I was more than pleased!

I've found that unless you have a largely technical startup, HN is probably not the best place to launch. To get feedback, it's great, but to stir up PR, not so much.

Now it's time to start the PR push and get that critical mass which I think is going to be by far the hardest part. We'll see...