Ask HN: We were told our idea is amazing, but our startup is failing - what now?

My immediate feedback is that you are charging too much. I can buy a travel book which details hundreds of things about SF for ~$20, used $10. I can get a Google itinerary for many places for free.

Second, this seems like an impulse buy sort of item. ( i.e. I'm stuck visiting somewhere new but haven't had time to research it.) A mobile app that allowed quick access to new itineraries via gps look-up might make for a better sales rate. But I don't see anything changing until your price-point accounts for the competition's prices.

Keep contracting to pay the bills. As you guys save up some cash, hire a designer to make the pages prettier.

So many people will disregard the praise for your site if it's ugly or they can't figure it out.

Edit: A little more food for thought - I opened the page you linked, then went to the homepage, then closed the page. It just didn't appeal to me visually. It wasn't until I saw the comment about charging too much that I even realized you sold something.

So on the cost thing - split test! Run a test between $5 and $10. Seriously. Combine a pretty product with a price that seems just barely over the limit and you will likely find that people are finding your product "re-assuringly expensive". It costs $10 and it's pretty. It must be a high quality itinerary.

$5 isn't much if you are able to demonstrate more value - example: personal safety - what are the areas to avoid? where can you find free water fountains? where are the best spots for a cheap meal along the route? You might be able to raise your revenue mix if you had sponsored content.

I think people love "the idea" of your idea. People love to imagine they're off on a vacation to Paris, and they'll have so much to think of, they'll probably want a locally-authored tour guide. So they're excited about traveling, going to Paris and finding lots of cool things to do there. But not necessarily from your guide books. When the time comes to actually go to Paris, the problem for you guys is that there's a TON of free information. You're competing with the simplest of all Google searches: "What should I do in Paris?", not to mention dozens of in-flight magazines, tourist info packets, maps, concierges, coupon books etc etc. When you're competing with so much free information, a $4.99 price point is too high, imho.

i'll have to agree with SHOwnsYou.

My first impression is not "Wow!". Your website design doesn't have that wow factor with it's design. i would highly recommend either getting a design to do some work for you or download a nice design from themeforest.

also there is no way i would pay any money to find an "itenary" because as mentioned below i can just go on google and search for "what to do in xyz?" and pick and choose the ones i like. so personally i would make it free, redo the design and try and make money from the advertisement. maybe down the road you can make deals with certain locations to add them in your itenary for a fee? sell tickets on your site for those locations and keep a commission? either way, charging for an itenary when anyone can just do a google search for it doesn't make sense to me.

Maybe you're using the wrong channels. How about reaching out to biz devs at all the various Expedia-type sites to see if they are interested in doing a little up-selling during check out as an affiliate or something? This would give you targeted users who already have their wallets opened which is perfect for an impulse purchase. I think partnerships will go along way if executed properly.

I think your business model might be wrong. As Iaks points out below, the $5 price point is not far from that of a used travel book.

Perhaps offer the content free, then work with top restaurants and retailers on the 'tours' you recommend and get them to offer coupons / deals or advertising, of which you can get a cut. People touring a city will get hungry, and if you can point them to a great place, they'll thank you.

Take heart: Without AdWords, Google itself was an idea that was amazing but a failing startup. You need a better revenue model than competing with cheap guidebooks.

Here's one idea: Give it away but include coupons for each stop on the itinerary. It's Groupon for travelers. Consider offering an app so people can easily carry it with them and it will always be up-to-date with the latest destinations and deals.

The problem is that you need to connect with the person who is traveling at exactly the right time. too soon and you lose mind-share, too late and it's no longer necessary. you need to figure out the delivery mechanism that works well. Maybe see if you can partner up with groupon travel destinations as an adder and offer them a split of it. so if groupon sells a hotel package in Chicago you should be offering your Chicago package. I think living social offers vacation packages too.

You can offer a few different levels of service too: default is web/you print at home. You can offer a full color printed version with the order if you want as well. logistically this is harder but it seems like more of a deal.

There is also the fandango way of doing it too. offer the ability to prepay for the tickets and take a small commission off the top for that. that's tougher to sell to the consumer because you don't have the trust relationship and might leave them stranded at the venue with no valid tickets. It would be slick to have this so that they didn't have to wait in line at all. make it opt in though and let them select what they want to actually go to see/do.

An iPhone app that has everything integrated would be great but it could also be as easy as just an interface for the pdf. If you got it into the appstore you would increase your visibility a bit especially if you target the "what should I do in x" queries with adwords that linked to a specific version of your app. you could also have inapp purchases that would download a new guide. cross selling in your apps is a good thing in this case.

pretty interesting idea. I'd probably buy the sf one if I go there ever but you have to reach me at the right time....

The problem is that even though you have a great idea, that's only one part of the equation. To have a successful product you have to have four aspects: the market, marketing, design, features - in that order (got that from "Start Small, Stay Small".

Everyone could say that the features in your product are amazing. But if you're in a market where customers don't pay, or if you're unable to reach them with the right marketing, then a perfect product is useless.

You have to determine the most profitable segment of your market. And find the cheapest way to market to them. What's the expected lifetime value of a user? Is it less than the cost to acquire that user through Adwords/Facebook? Then run through some ads. And invest some time in learning to optmize the ads.

What are some keywords that people are searching for that would lead users to your product? Are there many people competing for those terms? It might be worthwhile to invest time/money doing SEO. It seems you have a lot of content that might be worthwhile.

You've solved the hard part of having a good product. Now you have to figure out how to market it well.

I travel a lot and wouldn't use this. Shanghai costs $5 and I don't have any idea what might be in there. My travel book was $15 and already has itineraries for most popular cities in China.

> how is it possible that everyone thinks our idea is good, > but we haven't managed to gain momentum?

Because you haven't achieved product/market fit.

For example, you're trying to charge individuals who are traveling - have you explored charging travel-related companies? I could see your app being very compelling for travel agencies, travel book publishers, neighborhood merchant associations, Chambers of Commerce, and businesses that want to advertise to travelers.

I don't think offering more information, or charging less, would solve your problem. If I had wanted more information, I'd buy a guidebook. As SHOwnsYou mentioned, it's about having (good) itinerary decisions made for me. The value isn't in the amount of information, but the judgment that went into filtering and digesting the over-info out there in other travel sites/books.

To complement that value, your design needs to give a sense of 'here's the distilled gem about this city' - it should just 'hit me'. Instead, I am presented instead with a rather drab plain page, which feels like it'd take forever to get through to gratification.

I'd echo suggestions to look into redesigning the page to make the visual impact, fast.

There's little chance you'll make enough to survive selling $ itineraries... I suggest just pivoting and becoming a consumer travel website ala TripAdvisor, or GogoBot.. if you're not going into the ticket space, you need content, and lots of free content.

You also need to learn more about the amount of traction it will realistically take to make a good amount of profit. Even 1000 daily visitors won't do you any good with your current business model. How are you gonna get visitors? You can't just sit tight and wait.

Have you tried promoting on Adwords, go for long tail keywords, optimize, optimize, optimize? Have you done A/B testing on your landing pages? Have you thought about installing an affiliate program?

persistence. a better UI. and community feeling - invite users to signup for itinerary authors - and have a subsection of such 'community written' itineraries at a reduced rate. authors get a %. that would ^ word of mouth among travel and expat forums, blogs, social.

I had a similar idea sometime ago. I think you can try a ton of things before deciding that it's failing.

Let users create their own guides, which they can share with others for free. User generated content can be a huge driver of traffic. Then your business model becomes freemium. Normal users' guides are free, but you pay a little for "expert" guides.

Get professional tour guides on board. For example, in the UK we have blue badge guides who are certified. Getting them on your site will add some credibility.

Make some deals with existing tour companies, either to offer discounts through your site or just a cut of ticket sales.

Have you considered selling your existing guides as ebooks on Amazon or other platforms? Even if you have some awesome guides, I don't know about them because I've never heard of your site. I do go to Amazon to buy travel guides when I'm travelling. If I see your guides show up in the search, I will at least look at a sample on my Kindle. You could do both - have some free guides for promotion and have some cheap ones to make some revenue.

Have you considered selling hard copies of your guides? Most people don't have a way to read a PDF when they are travelling.

Use the Foursquare API to show a "hot destinations" chart on the homepage. Show where people are checking in and link to your guides for those places.

Use buysellads or call businesses directly to place very targeted ads on the site. Affiliate links for tickets and hotel bookings may also work. AirBNB has an affiliate program - ride their success wave.

There are lots more things you could try. The important things I feel are generating lots more content and being creative about distribution channels.

I looked at the 2 itineraries available for my city and it was the typical tourist attractions. Like others have commented they're already widely recommended online and in print guidebooks. If I made an itinerary for a friend i'd recommend specific niche places the locals go relevant to their interests.

What if you bump the price up to $20+ per itinerary then offered more value by having each itinerary custom made to match each customer's personal interests. Maybe also have the 'local experts' who made the guide ranked like a restaurant on yelp to build up trust.

A question for you: Why did you decide to offer these travel guides worldwide instead of concentrating on one city first?

It seems like you should test out your ideas on one city (which is much easier to market), then once you find a successful model, start branching out into other cities.

You could spend some money on PPC ads on keywords such as "San Francisco tours", "San Francisco golden gate bridge", etc, and test out different landing pages and different types of guides.

I also think something like this would work better if the information was all free, and people get to rate the quality of each tour. The ones with higher ratings will be shown higher up - maybe offer prizes to authors who have highly rated tours.

Court the traffic gatekeepers who reach your target audience by pitching them via email. In my experience asking a single direct/focused question elicits a response at least 50% of the time.

Inbound link juice from being featured on a site that's old, trusted and authoritative is 90% of the SEO game. Getting traffic is all about courting and pitching traffic gatekeepers at progressive levels of difficulty/reach, so you might as well start refining your approach.

For an inspiring read on growing your traffic check out "Crush It" by Gary Vaynerchuk, and start getting your content and community hustle on!