Tell HN: Frustrated and feeling pretty useless at this point.
Having said that, it's nothing compared to what I feel now. I sincerely, truly believed that my current startup had potential to grow but I lost the one chance I had. After failing our startup last year, we picked up on advice from HN- we started over. We finally found something we truly believed in and created our first iPhone App after 6 months. Given that we didn't have any programming or design experience, we worked like hell to really make up for all the areas we were lacking in. Were barely surviving by (we had left our jobs since the last failed startup) and working nonstop because this was THE idea we believed in.
One of the startup advice that I hear most often is to create a product that solves a problem of your own (37signals) because there's bound to be people like you who have the same problem. During our last startup, we sacrificed all the time we had with friends, family, and ignored our relationships for the most part. It was miserable and lonely but we were naive and still dreaming of get rich quick schemes. We decided to finally create Grooovy after months of brainstorming ideas and really felt a connection with it. Grooovy (http://www.grooovy.me) was designed to be a social meetup app for iphone that allowed users to meet over drinks, food or a snack within 75 miles of their current location. That was the key- it would really tackle the problem of not being able to meet people and just socialize especially when you're working odd hours and unable to meet anyone new outside of school or work. We wouldn't have to feel lonely!
We asked everyone we knew, even tried to find complete strangers to get an honest opinion. People were excited, we criticized ourselves harshly and improved on all the feedback/suggestions we got. When we were finally close to launching, we ran a series of beta tests which passed with flying colors. Everyone who had a chance to use it (Thank you again) thought it was a very valid and new way of socializing. It would be something new, a networking tool used for platonic relationships and not just dating. We spent extra time revising, bug testing, fixing whatever we could to the best of our abilities.
But then geotargeting happened. When we launched, we had about 3,xxx downloads starting the first few days- everything looked good. What we didn't expect was how far each user be from one another. A limit of 75miles is nothing when you're selling an app to the entire United States. We immediately got 2 reviews and a ton of feedback telling us that our idea was worth 5 stars but the app didn't work! The reason why it didn't work was because nobody was close to one another to see each other's events! This was a terrible mistake that we should've caught on. By the time that we launched a new revised update and let users know how many people were in their current area and fix what we needed, our app rank had plummeted to the 799th place under social networking. I'm still getting emails occasionally asking me when the app would be fixed, and it's ridiculous that I have to tell them that the App is working but there's not not enough people in their area!
At this point, I don't see much hope for recovery- We're at the end of our string and don't know what else we can do. I really needed to rant because this was something I had truly believed it, I truly worked hard for and believed that it wasn't just something stupid I created again on a whim. We tried to follow every piece of advice we were given, learned to be humble, continued to believe in ourselves but feel like all is useless now because we can't geotarget specific cities with the iphone like SF Bay Area or San Diego!
Edit: Sorry for the long rant, just had to let out some anger. Thank you.
107 comments
[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 218 ms ] threadEdit: and 75 miles is HUGE. On average I probably travel only within a 15 miles radius (max) of my house. I expect I'm fairly typical in that regard.
In a city or town 75mi would be be waay to much, and too little in rural areas.
I assume most users would come from cities and I would think that the limit would be a few city blocks - the distance I would be willing to walk to hang out with strangers after work.
Actually you don't need users to start, you just need good source of events that users might be interested in. You can make the app more functional by including other sources, such as the Meetup API:
http://www.meetup.com/meetup_api/
Then, even if no one's posted through your app itself, they can find things to do.
With startups, it's never over. That's a good thing and a bad thing! It's bad because you never really know when to quit, and there's always something else to do. It's good because there's always another chance.
Also, I've been thinking about this "solve your own problem" and "build the dream" kind of thinking for a while. I used to be a BIG supporter of this, but I'm not so sure any more. If you look at good investors, they have learned to separate what makes them excited from what the right investing decision is. I think startup founders should be a little more like this: sitting back dispassionately determining where to invest their time and energy. This is probably much more practical than trying to find the idea that makes them the most excited. Build the right thing, the right way, get traction -- you'll get excited. Trust me. Build something that turns you on, you could be in for a LONG slog of self-abuse. Startups are hard enough as it is -- for me, at least, tying my emotional self-worth closely into all that work is a really bad thing to do.
Odds are you will fail. Any amount of fanciful thinking is not going to change that. So, when it happens, it shouldn't be the end of the world. Instead, you should be emotionally in a position where you go, "Interesting! These 7 things worked. These 2 did not. What can I take from this and move forward? New idea? Change brands? Pivot? Etc." Being wrapped up in chasing "the one" only makes this kind of self-analysis extraordinarily more difficult. At least it does for me.
Sidenote: I wanted try the app out but couldn't find it in the Australian or Japanese stores. Have you limited it to US only? If so that seems crazy to me. So what if there are no other users in the area?, improve the feedback/take that opportunity to get them to spread the word.
One company that has done a good job of this is Lovestruck in London. They are a dating site, which isn't really my thing, but in terms of getting their brand known they can't really do much better. They have adverts all over the tube, give out flyers at major transport interchanges, and even organise regular free events (which they need to advertise more IMO).
You're right about traction - it can get you excited even if you're in a mudane industry. That's much better than doing something "cool" that never gets off the ground.
Move forward. Get localized and make it work in one city first, then move to the next city.
The codebase is there. The infrastructure is there. The company has exercised the whole stack from prototyping through to delivery and maintenance. New brands or brand variants aren't cheap, but they might be a lot cheaper than starting over.
These folks can, in theory and provided it fits within the limits of human endurance, build a dozen variants on the idea. They can release the app that specializes in three major cities and the app that is targeted specifically at golfers looking for golf buddies and the app that's targeted at meetups among beer aficionados and throw more marketing spaghetti at the wall for the original app.
(Though obviously I have no idea if any of these things will yield profits or not.)
I would hardly second-guess them whatever they chose to do.
Your app is tricky because I can derive value from not when I install it, but when all my friends install it as well. This implies you guys should make it really really really easy for me to get my friends on it as well. Perhaps you can take my phone contact list and show all those users as my friends within your app the moment I install it, and send the other users an SMS (using twilio) or email if I try to interact with them using your app. This way you can disguise your cold start from the user and make it more useful to him from day 1.
1. Your landing page is terrible. "Create. Connect. Enjoy". Thank you. I closed the page. This makes no sense for me. Fix that. I'm interested in the App, because I don't have friends and I'm working odd hours. But "Create. Connect. Enjoy"?
2. You should have expected this. You should have known that before. Your users are dispersed across the earth and you are looking for 75Miles?
3. So you gave up? Seriously, after all the development and a proof of a good idea, just give up?
Let me tell you few things:
1. People in this situation (forever-alone types) are desperate for a solution.
2. Adsense and Facebook can do Geotargetting for you. You can target your audience with keywords (and may be some mix AI/ML to find the right people). If Facebook can let you select singles, you are done (not sure, but it would be amazing).
3. Don't spend advertising money on 30 days. Spend it on few hours. Make the app work for a single 75Miles on earth and try to get at least 10 or 15 (fairly enough). Start growing from there. Do research on the best location on earth you can boom from, and may be move their and try to connect as many people.
4. I'm interested to discuss or work on this. Send me an email or add me on Skype ;)
That's death. The lowest common denominator user needs to be able to see what this does right away.
Good point colinm,
I briefly checked and didn't see a phone app there, so maybe they could use your idea!
They even have a "we're hiring" link. That might be your vector to getting their attention. Better to buy than build.
You might even get them to buy you out...
Don't bother. Everybody tries these, and they won't get you any attention.
Unless you're Sony and you have a million dollars to blow on mindbending visuals for a product commercial, uploading stuff on YouTube is pointless.
AdWords won't do anything unless your product targets a very specific niche.
There are 500,000 apps on the iOS and Android app stores, so app reviewers get far too many review requests. If you get any feedback, it will be from a shady review site who wants you to pay for the chance that your app may be looked at.
Rebrand, regroup etc but jeep going if users find you valuable. If you need to get a job to tide things over then do so.
If you need some inspiration, have a look at this:
Quora.com/startup-inspiration
Because the whole 75 mile radius thing suggests to me that you a limited view of the world. That distance has very different meaning in many places, depending on population density, culture, transportation etc. "Near" and "far" are not universal constants, and understanding that was pretty central to your app.
There are many other variables like that, many of which are especially relevant to both mobile apps and social networking, both of which are heavily influenced by context.
You're also stuck with the chicken egg problem which is hard to solve: You have no users so you're not useful. I'm familiar with how tough the geo chicken-egg problem is since I built a foursquare app 4 years before foursquare came along and it also didn't fly because of the wide distribution of users. It's still online here: http://geojoey.com/
My advice to you is to walk away and chalk it up to a learning experience. Then go and build a paid application that solves a problem people have and that isn't being solved by anyone else. Make sure the problem you're solving is worth money to users, that they have money to spend and that they're the type of people who spend it. Usually this means the people who use your app get some kind of direct or indirect ROI from using it. Also try to do it in a space that is under exploited. The app store is massively crowded and very noisy.
Don't write a social app. Don't make it free. Don't ever plan to get funding. Don't give away shares in your business to anyone. Don't feel compelled to take on a co-founder or partner. Don't use bleeding edge tech for your business. Don't bother with incubators. Don't surround yourself with other entrepreneurs all day long. Don't think you need constant input from advisors or mentors. Do your own thing, be an individual, create real value. Find a problem that you yourself have and that you would be prepared to pay for and don't accidentally persuade yourself that you have a fictitious problem - find a real one that no one else is solving that that is costing you money until it is solved.
Money talks. Build an app that makes cash and it will change your life. Sitting on a balcony drinking a mochito at 5pm as your settlement email arrives telling you you've settled $2k today because people paid for software you wrote is a feeling few developers experience in their lifetimes and there's nothing like it.
"Then go and build a paid application that solves a problem people have and that isn't being solved by anyone else."
Sometimes that's not always the best approach. If no one else is solving it, it may be that the people with the problem won't pay, hence no providers. If there's solutions out there, it does validate a market/problem/idea.
The trap I see some people fall in to is what you just advised - trying to come up with something "totally new/unique", when often there's no demand. And when they see demand for X, they say "oh, XYZ is already solving that". The trick is determining how well they're solving it, finding customers they won't/can't serve, and going after that.
But yeah, don't make a social app, don't give away free stuff, etc - all your "don't"s - great list. And yeah, making money is a good feeling. It also gives you a much stronger position to explore new ideas from, rather than from a position of "oh crap there's only 4 boxes of macaroni left and I'm late on my rent".
EDIT: the 'great advice' really was meant to be 'great advice', not sarcastically spoken. I think pretty much everything in that post was great, except for the one line I called out. :)
Regarding the failure of this launch, this should not have come as a surprise, the marketing solution to this should've been in your business plan from day one. And maybe, if you _would_ have surrounded yourself with founders maybe one of them had actually paid attention to the stories at HN and warned you about the launching deficiencies in your plan. I think it's too early to stop now, even as it feels you've lost your only chance. You build a product people actually want and you've only tried launching it once thus far.
The idea was to provide an app that would schedule people to meet up over coffee or lunch, but with the purpose of having an interesting debate or discussion, so the app would offer a list of debate topics and you could say which side you were interested in taking, and it would match you up with someone who wanted the other side.
Topics could include things like: Republican_X vs. Republican_Y, Republican_X vs. Obama, vim vs. emacs, pro-life vs. pro-choice, Edward vs. Jacob, Newton vs. Leibniz, Python vs. Ruby, Protestant vs. Catholic, Should Marijuana be Legalized?, Legalize Gay Marriage or not?, controversial state or local ballot issues and initiatives, and so on.
This kind of startup is very high risk, as it has numerous "problems", such as chicken-and-egg, being dependent on the app store rankings, saturation in the app store, saturation in the social space, etc. Also, as you said "we didn't have any programming or design experience", no funding, no accelerator program. In other words, your chances were very slim to begin with. If you have good friends [+], they probably said something along those lines to keep your expectations close to the ground.
So, your idea was most likely to fail and that's what happened. On the other hand, you learned a lot! You learned about programming, design, releasing apps, and all the countless real-life issues one encounters when trying to launch a new product. That is invaluable.
You're still young, so no worries, you have lots of room left!
As others have pointed out, if you want to push on with this idea, just pull the app from the store and relaunch a rebranded version in a smarter way. (Can't you geo-target by calling the app "XYZ for San Francisco" and "XYZ for San Diego"? Once you have enough traction, you can unite the apps, don't worry about it now.)
Or you can do something else. If not having an income is an issue, perhaps you can do some consulting work on the side, like 37signals, the company you cited.
Or if you had enough for now, take a job and chill for a year, there's no shame in it!
Best of luck!
[+] A true friend points out your mistakes, even at the risk of losing your friendship.
Pivot, re-brand and definitely as I read on most comments above - start with one high density city first. Then scale to another high density city. And go by gut feel now, rather than too much advise.
So searching your local existing user-base for nearby other users is the easiest way, and if you limit yourself to that, the only way. But since you really just need other people's information, you can just steal that information. Monitor places like meetup.com, public tweets, public facebook posts, craigslist, etc. Direct your Users to the results. Possibly solicit other people on behalf of the User. (There are a lot of "Anyone at Hotel X want to grab a coffee?" posts at conventions, for instance, often with hashtags you can set followup monitors on.) Sign up with the top competitor and route some queries through their network.
> During our last startup, we sacrificed all the time we had with friends, family, and ignored our relationships for the most part.
So you're not doing this any more, right? Good. Especially for your case, you should constantly be thinking about how you meet other people and how you signal your desire to meet other people, strangers or not, and work on figuring out how to assimilate the data and the action into your app.
But I gotta tell you man, the copywriting on the website is bloody awful. Some of the worst I've ever read.
Nonsensical cliches like "breaking barriers" and "in the driver's seat" look amateurish and discredit your app. You didn't think to get a Copywriter's opinion?
Rewrite the page, or better yet, contact someone who can for a decent rate.
My email is in my profile if your interested (I'm a copywriter).
Instead of harshing on the OP, making him find your email, and beg for help, don't you think a more proactive approach would be more valuable to the conversation?
Like the following, for instance.
-
"As a copywriter, I see quite a few common mistakes on your landing page. I took a few minutes and made a first pass at cleaning it up. (Find a before/after article on my blog here: [link] )
I'm happy to help you improve your (or any HNer's) site copy. Drop me a line to discuss. Email's in my profile"
-
This more proactive approach is far more likely to actually help someone. Based on others who have offered non-programming services/advice on HN, it seems likely to lead to some freelance/consulting work should you desire some.
Make it clear that you only spent 5/10/15 minutes on your draft. That sets expectations about quality, while still showing people how much better things could be with help from a real copywriter.
Food for thought.
I appreciate your suggestions nonetheless.
The best advice from the thread already target a specific city. Lock down that city then move on (I wouldn't choose SF as already so many geo mobile startups targeting it, also SF users maybe don't represent the broader market).
Also leverage existing API's. Or hell become an API combining all other sources and let other people build the apps (seems to me the real problem, billion people connected to different networks). If I look on meetup maybe I'm missing out on great events from other sites, but I don't have time to search them all.
While I understand that choosing SF may have a lot of competition, most of the advertisers I've talked to don't have good stats on any of the surrounding cities. I'll look into this and see if there's a better alternative.
Your API idea is pretty interesting, I didn't think about using other APIs because our focus was so different.