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Startup Hypothesis: Do users want to be social with coffee?

3 points by sdwrage ↗ HN
So I started work on socialatte.com as I noticed a ramp up of users who love to post about their coffee experiences on Twitter. Being that I love websites that leverage currently large social networks, love niches, and myself love coffee I thought I would test out the hypothesis that users want to share their coffee experiences with other users in a coffee niched social environment. I set out and built the current prototype for socialatte.com from Ruby on Rails (one because I knew the framework and another because it is good for quickly getting something up) as well as used twitter bootstrap for responsive design (needed it to work in mobile browsers). Took about a couple days of work but got it to where it is today.

I had added instagr.am support and now, as of today, ios6 users have the option of file uploads where they can take a picture from there directly. Now all is said and done, I have been trying to market this via social networks and having very little luck drawing in users. My analytics report is getting an average of... 10-20 users a day?

I am doing something fundamentally wrong marketing wise or my hypothesis is proven invalid... which I think that is far too early to tell. I am sort of stuck on where to go from here. My hope is to eventually get coffee related vendors on board to advertise with us, get an app going, and maybe eventually sell the website to someone who wants to take it over but that is thinking far too far ahead.

Any advice would be beneficial.

16 comments

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sherm8n
What makes you think your hypothesis is invalid? How often do your current users share their coffee experiences?

I would do more customer discovery and see if you can gain anymore insight. Go to a coffee shop and ask people what they think of your concept.

mgkimsal
That's exactly what I told sdwrage to do last week - go to the local coffeeshops and chat with people! :)
sdwrage
Yeah that is why I said it is too early to tell that it is. As for going to a coffee shop and asking people, how do you think I should go about that. I wouldn't want to go sit down at a random table and be like "Hey you, what do you think of this idea". Maybe my head is in the wrong place as far as customer discovery is concerned :) Thank you for the advice.
mgkimsal
that's exactly what you do!

2 things:

1. Check with the owners - ask if you can do a few customer surveys. Tell them you'll stop after X hours or if anyone complains.

2. Buy some gift cards from the shop and give them out - $5 gift card for... 10 minutes of their time. Have a survey of set questions, but go open-ended as well.

sdwrage
Great idea! :). Don't know how far I would go with the $5 gift cards but definitely getting users to interact a bit more formally.
sherm8n
Go to a highly trafficked coffee shop, grab a latte, and just start talking to people around you. You'll just have to get over the awkwardness of talking to strangers :)

Have a set of questions you can rotate through. Sometimes you can ask 1 or 2 questions before they get annoyed. Other times you can have hour long conversations. Use your judgement to see how engaged they are.

sdwrage
Definitely. Thanks for the help :)
alid
Hey man! I take pics of all my coffees :) You've hit on a trend - the key is to nail an incentive for people to use you over simply uploading it onto Facebook/Instagram. Why would users use SocialLatte? To see what the coffees at particular coffee shops are like. To network with other coffee lovers. To find gourmet blends. To find cosy coffee shops to catch-up with friends.

Just putting my marketing hat on here, but I suggest you refine your value proposition - e.g. on your homepage replace 'Sign in and start sharing' with something more value-laden, like 'For coffee lovers' or 'The ultimate coffee guide' or 'The world coffee hub'. For PR, the press love lists, e.g. 'Top 5 coffee shops', and you can do thought-leadership pieces on coffee habits and culture. Hope this helps!

sdwrage
Definitely helps, thank you :) So maybe more than just sharing coffee pictures. Maybe links as well :) Possibly rendering/generating a screenshot of the website as the image itself would do.
alid
Sweet! Yep more than just pics, I can see you positioning yourself as the world coffee hub, connecting coffee lovers globally. This then becomes an attractive proposition for advertisers of everything coffee (coffee bean brands, coffee machines, coffee making courses etc) :)
sdwrage
Definitely. I could watch the posting trends and build categories off of the postings. e.g. users post a lot of recipes thus I would create a recipe category.
lacker
Sounds like you're just getting started. Time to focus on execution.

1. You have "sign in with Twitter" but not "sign in with Facebook". That's an obvious feature if you're focused on viral growth.

2. It's okay to do nonscalable things at the start. Convince a dozen of your friends to post on socialatte every day, by any means necessary. Then listen to their feedback and implement their suggestions.

3. When someone declines to sign in via twitter, they go to a 404 page. Fix that.

4. Drop that donate and sponsors junk. It's taking up real estate, looks crappy, and you're never going to make a noticeable amount of money before you get big anyway.

5. Let me sign in with an email and password.

6. Build an iOS app. It makes a lot of sense to post a picture of coffee from your phone. More sense than a website.

7. Find a cofounder. The biggest problem at this stage is that you are likely to give up before putting enough effort into it. A cofounder will keep you working.

Keep working - you have only just begun.

sdwrage
Thank you for the advice :) It is deeply appreciated. As you guessed, I am just starting out. I felt out what I thought might be a good idea and trying to allow it to grow into its own. Actually a few people have already stated that they would like facebook login so I may need to rework my account model. I don't really have many users right now so this might be a good time to pivot.

As far as donations and sponsors, I agree with you on the donations but confused how I will be able to generate revenue at the start. I currently am a freelancer and funding would allow me to work on this full time but, again, this may be too early in the idea to think about so you may be right on both of those fronts.

I am currently looking into Appcelerator's Titanium for the mobile app at least for a prototype. As for co-founder, my brother has a stake in the idea and is a bit of a designer/illustrator and has presented quite a few good ideas that we coalesced into what the site is currently.

As for scalabilities sake, we were going to look at Node.js as a technology as we may have a lot of realtime features on the website but, again, I didn't want to work that far ahead as I knew there would be some pivoting of my strategy.

Thank you very much for your insight :)

sdwrage
If anyone else has any advice, let me know. I thank everyone that has already given me advice :)