Looking at your team (http://about.retickr.com/retickr-team/) it seems rather top-heavy. Two people have the title of "Co-Founder and Vice President" ... VP of what? Additionally, there's a CTO, yourself the CEO, a sysadmin, plus two software engineers. It's no wonder your burn rate is so high. This seems like the kind of app that would get developed by two "devops" kind of people.
Some comments on your home page: it's being dominated by a screenshot that's impossible to read and doesn't convey what the heck it does. There are a couple of teaser bullet-points-in-boxes that gives a high-level view, but I think the home page would really benefit from an in-your-face description conveying the clear benefits. At a minimum, start out by replacing the static screenshot with the video that is immediately clickable. However, this is speaking to user acquisition and doesn't address the problem you state of your 8% user retention rate.
I haven't used your app, but from the description it looks like it doesn't solve a hair-on-fire problem. The problem is that people have information overload. There are only so many things a person can follow that they quickly get overwhelmed trying to keep up. Your app looks to just throw it in their face which only highlights the fact that they can't keep up, and it does so in a distracting fashion by continuously animating the information they already have a difficult time reading. In a way, it sets their hair on fire.
A better value proposition would be to solve the information overload problem by only showing them news that is valuable in a manner that is not interruptive to their workflow. Trivially, this could be done when a piece of news is liked/+1'd/tweeted beyond a certain weighted threshold or for the infrequent news that comes from sources the user specifies as being important, like a friend's blog that is updated a few times a month. Something to the effect of "You only have so many hours in the day, but there are dozens of news sources you'd like to be aware of. Who has time to follow every single news item? Retickr lets you follow as many news sources as you want, then gives you a summary of the top three things you need to be aware of every hour. Then, just click to read the full story. If you have time to kill, our easy to use app lets you browse additional stories by source, topic, author, and many other criteria."
I absolutely appreciate your input. We have some major work to get done, and your advice provides some great directions. Personalization and delivering a user only the news that matters to them is our goal. This is great feedback, please keep it coming.
Brian
If you are interested in feedback, had a similar reaction. Many people are now more interested in reducing distraction, not increasing it. Maybe you could find a way to do that, blocking and batching feeds.
One of the most comforting realizations is when you find out no one else really knows what they're doing either and that all startup founders are on the edge.
Quick feedback, on the product - rather than the blog post.
Easy download & quick install.
I am news junkie who works for a large offline & online publisher who needs to keep tabs on stuff as it happens.
The idea of a ticker is interesting, but the usability of a scrolling feed is tough for me - I'd much rather see a series of headlines pop up, and disappear, than constant across-screen motion.
There's no way I could leave this on all day with that motion across the screen - but I could if the UI was less distracting.
Appreciate the product feedback graupel. We all feel like we are on the right track and the product has come a long way in the last six months let alone the last several weeks. We feel like we have a better understanding of what our users want now and hopefully retickr round two will provide more value..
Please change the huge PNG's on your site into JPEGs of the correct size. I shouldn't be sitting waiting for thumbnail screen shots to download. A similar thing happens on the blog gallery section - you have huge images, that just display as thumbnails, re-compress/re-size and reduce your bandwidth.
Looking through your site you really need to spend more time on your core product. You have loads of pages about who you are, your office, your mentors, yada yada yada. I see more content about your company than your product at the moment. Also, most/all of your top nav opens new tabs (on the homepage), this is just annoying. You seem to be running two sites, one of which appears to be just a fancy homepage (www. & about.).
As others have said, you seriously need to address your server count/infrastructure. It's just throwing money away.
If you start a startup, you'll probably fail. Most startups fail. It's the nature of the business. But it's not necessarily a mistake to try something that has a 90% chance of failing, if you can afford the risk. Failing at 40, when you have a family to support, could be serious. But if you fail at 22, so what? If you try to start a startup right out of college and it tanks, you'll end up at 23 broke and a lot smarter. Which, if you think about it, is roughly what you hope to get from a graduate program.
I think your landing page could use a reasonable facsimile of your product running across the top of the screen. I appreciate it might need to be in Flash or in HTML5, but it might bump your conversion rate if your main selling point, "stuff, in front of you, now," is clearly set out on the landing page.
But second thought, haven't we already seen PointCast crash and burn? Not sure if I have the name right, but I'm thinking of the push technology that was such a buzz word in the original internet bubble.
We are hoping to be the next evolutionary step. Pointcast did news. Chirpscreen did social. We will (hopefully in a couple months) do real-time personalized content, which would include news and social..
"Take comfort in the fact that the poor start-up founder and the rich corporate CEO both go home at the end of the day, eat dinner, watch TV, and go to bed."
How do you have a burn rate of only $18,500/mo with seven (apparently) full-time employees? Is that burn rate net of some kind of revenue, or are your seven employees making an average annual salary of about $31K each? Even for TN that seems awfully low.
As a point of reference, in SV a ballpark OPEX for 7 employees in a startup would be $80-90K.
We live extremely cheaply, even for Tennessee standards. We all share a house and play limbo with the poverty line... A couple of our developers are part-time guys that have helped when needed, we currently have a full-time staff of five.
Wait, "a couple" of your developers are part-time? According to your team page you have 7 employees. It looks like 3 of those are technical (less than half... that alone is astounding), so if "a couple" of those three are part-time, that means you only have a single full-time technical employee, unless the full-time guy is the Systems Administrator, in which case you have zero full-time developers.
Sorry, but that seems like a pretty big warning sign for a software startup.
Haha yea I would agree and I am a Windows user myself. One thing that we were told very early on by our investors is to focus on one platform and one platform only in the beginning. Our current client has changed so much over the last six months that it would have been a monumental waste of time to be developing Windows alongside it. Our Mac client should be stable (design-wise) relatively soon and then if we gain some form of market acceptance proving our concept we will move on to Windows and mobile development.
This is absolutely true. Trying to support multiple platforms is a huge distraction that does nothing to teach you what will work and what won't. Multiple platforms is almost always a premature optimization.
Having learned a bit from your article, I figured I would check out retickr even though I had no idea what it was. When I looked at your site I realized that just the other day I was wishing I knew of a program that did exactly what yours does. Unfortunately I enjoy video games too much to justify buying a Mac. I agree that it seems like a really good idea to support just one platform until you are established. I just happen to think that you picked the wrong one.
Don't get me wrong, I like OS X and more than a few different versions of Linux/Unix, but that doesn't change the fact that the overwhelming majority of home users run windows.
I sincerely hope that things start to click for you in the near future. I'll probably check retickr out in VMware or something. Good luck.
There will be lots more criticism here. Either way, thanks for sharing the story in such an honest and complete way. Writing like this is rare in the startup world, and it's extremely positive to have around.
Hi there....
I went ahead and downloaded and installed the app. Really had trouble with the popup agree to terms and conditions thing. Had to force quit several times before I succeeded in registering.
Tried the wizard selecting technology news but when the ticker started, it was filled with stuff from Fox News and other stuff that is irritating more than informing.
What I was looking for, and hoping for, was a simple ticker for sites that I am interested in, such as this site, slashdot, NYtimes and WSJ technology SECTIONS, etc.
Even when I deleted my playlist, stories from 'The Beast' flowed across the screen. In sum, I had no sense that I was in control of your application. I could see myself using such a feed--if it did what I wanted--while relaxing, but in it's current form.....
Best of luck with this! I do hope you persevere. I'd suggest completely rethinking how the USER can drive this thing.
...and you might want to add a direct download for those of us who don't always want to log into apple's app store just to try something like this. Almost quit at that point.
seconded.. I was pretty eager to use this app, as it looks like exactly what i'm looking for.. but dealing with the Apple store download BS made me say, screw it..
Part-time work at a grocery store for years, and years, and years... Some retail work is thrown into that time span as well. $8/hr is high-living! I was making $6.50/hr at The Fresh Market.
We have built out infrastructure to support about 50,000 users. Premature? Sure, but fairly reasonable for the price. Most of the server capacity consists of our Cassandra cluster which we are using to personalize user content...
Is there a particular reason why you decided to purchase 14 physical servers instead of spinning up virtual instances (or even co-located servers) for easy scaling? As you've discovered, it's hard to estimate what kind of load you'll need to handle, and the up-front cost is impossible to recover.
Also, I'd recommend spending some time looking at your architecture, as you should be able to handle 50,000 active users with a lot less metal. The extra infrastructure can often be more expensive than a well-designed architecture.
I understand that you are located where you are and that is how you ended up with the lampost group but I have to say that I don't see in any way how these investors and this incubator is the correct support group that you need for what you are doing.
If you look at the experience of the leadership of Lampost it simply doesn't appear knowledgeable in things that would be important to a company such as yours. Read the bios. It seems like a "me too" from a bunch of guys that saw The Social Network and decided to give investing in internet startups a whirl.
While there is probably little you can do about this now this is something for others to keep in mind before they take an investment and end up waking up scared.
"Basically, we are spending my entire life-time earnings every four weeks"
What the hell, did I seriously just read this? So this guy hasn't even made $18,000 in income in his entire life yet he is funded for a startup at approximately $216,000 per year. Thats great that he can get funding given his complete lack of real work experience but thats just a bit unsettling and scary, are we really going down the dotcom bust road again?
I'm similar in age (26) and have made well over 18,000 in my lifetime earnings (anyone who works as even the juniorest of junior dev's should blow that number out of the water in half a year even), work as a dev and I don't think I would even dream of taking any amount of money in funding anytime soon, what ever happened to working for a few years, learning from more experienced peers and then maybe trying it on your own (once you actually have some real financial stability of your own)?
I realize everyone thinks they have the next big idea but if you don't have solid dev experience (without any oversight) you are going to mess up on something, probably something that matters (and won't be realized until later down the road) and this is best prevented by working with more experienced developers early on
We think that funding young people and their ideas is an important thing to do. And frankly, $216k is a reasonable amount for what retickr is trying to accomplish (cutting the noise out of social media overload). Will they fail? probably. Is it the job of venture capitalists to fund that failure? We damn sure think so.
Is $216k a year a smarter initial investment than $41m for an experienced team of entrepreneurs? (see Color). Or $30m for a wiki based company that pivots into gossip? (see Wetpaint).
For the money that was invested in Color (and any number of other startups run by "experienced" management teams), we could theoretically start 80 retickrs (assuming 2 years of burn rate for retickr). Or over 1,000 YC companies.....
Retickr is making mistakes, some of which we, their investors, warned them against. But a good investor doesn't dictate to entrepreneurs, we mentor and guide. If we wanted to be the CEO of a startup, we would do that. We’re trying to leverage our experience. And assuming a de facto role as CEO at each of our portfolio companies is the exact antithesis of scaling. At least until we figure out cloning or consciousness replication....#ss11
Btw, thanks to the whole community here, you’re doing an amazing job of creating a healthy environment where crazy people like Travis who are willing to put themselves out there in the open can get honest and productive feedback. Kudos
I just look at it from an engineering perspective, having worked for some companies where the code base was just "hacked" together, in an unmaintainable way and I just sometimes think it would be better for the tech community as a whole if everyone and their mother didn't try to start a company with little experience ( a few years down the line, sure go start one, no problems with that), sure they may have some minor success but it just exacerbates bad development practices and these young companies usually hire more unexperienced developers and the effect just snowballs. I am talking from my own experiencing working with "post-startup" companies that were a few years old to where I am just glad I have continued learning on my own (reading online, reading books, etc) as anti-patterns and bad practices that can occur without experienced dev's on a team can really cause problems.
In the interest of full disclosure, before I got really into software development / programming, I too had a lot of ideas, wanted to start my own companies (even tried to do so with some small ecommerce stores, etc) but overall I'm glad I didn't succeed with that because it forced me to learn development and realize just how hard and involved making a scalable web app really is and if I ever go on to make a real serious attempt at creating a new company (not for a few years at least) I think I would be in a better position to make a real contribution and make something that is technically sound and viable.
Your jobs page brags that you have 14 servers on your site. WTF? I've run 15+ hardcore porn totally dynamic websites taking millions of hits on just 3 servers and two of those were just for redundancy! Seriously, I've never heard of your company and you are burning through that much cash? I'm sorry, but this really just sounds like a case of 'doing it wrong'. It really sounds like time to hit the reset button before you are completely broke.
This got me looking at the careers page as well. "really nice office" isn't one where you can't stretch your legs forward without banging them to a fellow employee. Seriously, you have space, use it wisely.
Cut your costs down to just rent plus servers. Keep only the technical people plus yourself. Have everyone work for free in exchange for equity until you see traction. The ones that believe in the company and the idea enough will do it.
The lack of a professional graphic designer in a lead role is a fatal oversight. It's the reason your user experience is lacking and the reason your website sucks.
The lack of a professional graphic designer in a lead role is a fatal oversight. It's the reason your user experience is lacking and the reason your website sucks.
48 comments
[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 99.9 ms ] threadSome comments on your home page: it's being dominated by a screenshot that's impossible to read and doesn't convey what the heck it does. There are a couple of teaser bullet-points-in-boxes that gives a high-level view, but I think the home page would really benefit from an in-your-face description conveying the clear benefits. At a minimum, start out by replacing the static screenshot with the video that is immediately clickable. However, this is speaking to user acquisition and doesn't address the problem you state of your 8% user retention rate.
I haven't used your app, but from the description it looks like it doesn't solve a hair-on-fire problem. The problem is that people have information overload. There are only so many things a person can follow that they quickly get overwhelmed trying to keep up. Your app looks to just throw it in their face which only highlights the fact that they can't keep up, and it does so in a distracting fashion by continuously animating the information they already have a difficult time reading. In a way, it sets their hair on fire.
A better value proposition would be to solve the information overload problem by only showing them news that is valuable in a manner that is not interruptive to their workflow. Trivially, this could be done when a piece of news is liked/+1'd/tweeted beyond a certain weighted threshold or for the infrequent news that comes from sources the user specifies as being important, like a friend's blog that is updated a few times a month. Something to the effect of "You only have so many hours in the day, but there are dozens of news sources you'd like to be aware of. Who has time to follow every single news item? Retickr lets you follow as many news sources as you want, then gives you a summary of the top three things you need to be aware of every hour. Then, just click to read the full story. If you have time to kill, our easy to use app lets you browse additional stories by source, topic, author, and many other criteria."
Easy download & quick install.
I am news junkie who works for a large offline & online publisher who needs to keep tabs on stuff as it happens.
The idea of a ticker is interesting, but the usability of a scrolling feed is tough for me - I'd much rather see a series of headlines pop up, and disappear, than constant across-screen motion.
There's no way I could leave this on all day with that motion across the screen - but I could if the UI was less distracting.
Just my 10 cents - good luck with your product.
Cut your burn-rate until you've figured out what it is that you are doing. You will need that money badly later on.
Looking through your site you really need to spend more time on your core product. You have loads of pages about who you are, your office, your mentors, yada yada yada. I see more content about your company than your product at the moment. Also, most/all of your top nav opens new tabs (on the homepage), this is just annoying. You seem to be running two sites, one of which appears to be just a fancy homepage (www. & about.).
As others have said, you seriously need to address your server count/infrastructure. It's just throwing money away.
If you start a startup, you'll probably fail. Most startups fail. It's the nature of the business. But it's not necessarily a mistake to try something that has a 90% chance of failing, if you can afford the risk. Failing at 40, when you have a family to support, could be serious. But if you fail at 22, so what? If you try to start a startup right out of college and it tanks, you'll end up at 23 broke and a lot smarter. Which, if you think about it, is roughly what you hope to get from a graduate program.
But second thought, haven't we already seen PointCast crash and burn? Not sure if I have the name right, but I'm thinking of the push technology that was such a buzz word in the original internet bubble.
Dinner, maybe.
The other two are not guaranteed.
As a point of reference, in SV a ballpark OPEX for 7 employees in a startup would be $80-90K.
Sorry, but that seems like a pretty big warning sign for a software startup.
Don't get me wrong, I like OS X and more than a few different versions of Linux/Unix, but that doesn't change the fact that the overwhelming majority of home users run windows.
I sincerely hope that things start to click for you in the near future. I'll probably check retickr out in VMware or something. Good luck.
Tried the wizard selecting technology news but when the ticker started, it was filled with stuff from Fox News and other stuff that is irritating more than informing.
What I was looking for, and hoping for, was a simple ticker for sites that I am interested in, such as this site, slashdot, NYtimes and WSJ technology SECTIONS, etc.
Even when I deleted my playlist, stories from 'The Beast' flowed across the screen. In sum, I had no sense that I was in control of your application. I could see myself using such a feed--if it did what I wanted--while relaxing, but in it's current form.....
Best of luck with this! I do hope you persevere. I'd suggest completely rethinking how the USER can drive this thing.
...and you might want to add a direct download for those of us who don't always want to log into apple's app store just to try something like this. Almost quit at that point.
Also, I'd recommend spending some time looking at your architecture, as you should be able to handle 50,000 active users with a lot less metal. The extra infrastructure can often be more expensive than a well-designed architecture.
This strikes me as a stunningly stupid thing for a _CEO_ to admit to in public, and should give any potential investors pause.
If you look at the experience of the leadership of Lampost it simply doesn't appear knowledgeable in things that would be important to a company such as yours. Read the bios. It seems like a "me too" from a bunch of guys that saw The Social Network and decided to give investing in internet startups a whirl.
http://www.lamppostgroup.com/lamp-post-leadership/
Look at the other companies that they have invested in and you can clearly see what their focus is on.
http://www.lamppostgroup.com/company-roster/
While there is probably little you can do about this now this is something for others to keep in mind before they take an investment and end up waking up scared.
What the hell, did I seriously just read this? So this guy hasn't even made $18,000 in income in his entire life yet he is funded for a startup at approximately $216,000 per year. Thats great that he can get funding given his complete lack of real work experience but thats just a bit unsettling and scary, are we really going down the dotcom bust road again?
I'm similar in age (26) and have made well over 18,000 in my lifetime earnings (anyone who works as even the juniorest of junior dev's should blow that number out of the water in half a year even), work as a dev and I don't think I would even dream of taking any amount of money in funding anytime soon, what ever happened to working for a few years, learning from more experienced peers and then maybe trying it on your own (once you actually have some real financial stability of your own)?
I realize everyone thinks they have the next big idea but if you don't have solid dev experience (without any oversight) you are going to mess up on something, probably something that matters (and won't be realized until later down the road) and this is best prevented by working with more experienced developers early on
Is $216k a year a smarter initial investment than $41m for an experienced team of entrepreneurs? (see Color). Or $30m for a wiki based company that pivots into gossip? (see Wetpaint).
For the money that was invested in Color (and any number of other startups run by "experienced" management teams), we could theoretically start 80 retickrs (assuming 2 years of burn rate for retickr). Or over 1,000 YC companies.....
Retickr is making mistakes, some of which we, their investors, warned them against. But a good investor doesn't dictate to entrepreneurs, we mentor and guide. If we wanted to be the CEO of a startup, we would do that. We’re trying to leverage our experience. And assuming a de facto role as CEO at each of our portfolio companies is the exact antithesis of scaling. At least until we figure out cloning or consciousness replication....#ss11
Btw, thanks to the whole community here, you’re doing an amazing job of creating a healthy environment where crazy people like Travis who are willing to put themselves out there in the open can get honest and productive feedback. Kudos
In the interest of full disclosure, before I got really into software development / programming, I too had a lot of ideas, wanted to start my own companies (even tried to do so with some small ecommerce stores, etc) but overall I'm glad I didn't succeed with that because it forced me to learn development and realize just how hard and involved making a scalable web app really is and if I ever go on to make a real serious attempt at creating a new company (not for a few years at least) I think I would be in a better position to make a real contribution and make something that is technically sound and viable.
What is everybody else on your roster doing? Cut some fat. And if your devs are pulling 80h weeks, why are you watching TV at night?