Ask HN: I am shutting down. And starting up, again? What do you think?
Today, I made the decision to shut down my business. Something I've worked on for over 2 years right after quitting an insanely well paid job at Microsoft. I am running my bank accounts dry (there's something left, no worries) and did not succeed in pushing my revolution enough.
I am starting a new project called urbanvisitor.com and I wanted to see what you guys think beforehand. Opinions are always to be treated with caution, but the last time, I was the only one who was 100% sure I'll succeed, so that didn't work out well.
So quickly: I want to build a real-time scheduling/meeting slots application centered around the idea of meeting new contacts (professionally, friendly) anywhere you go. I travel a LOT and always try hard to meet locals. Anyone I met turned out to be the absolute best experience I could have had in a particular city (I've always kept it professional, so that helps).
I want to have an ARRIVALS and DEPARTURES section for every large city in the world. As a local, you can scan the list and suggest for anyone on it to meet you. As a traveler, you can allot a number of slots (say 5 slots each 1 hour on Tuesday) available, receive meeting inquiries and can accept whoever you want and deny (in a friendly way) those you are not interested in meeting.
What do you think? Help me out guys, I value this community so much and would really benefit from any thought you might have on this. I have the man/technical-power and business experience to execute on it, it's really just a question of whether people need this enough.
Thanks again.
edit: just adding this real quick, the comments below is exactly what i value in hacker news. thanks so much. i hope this place stays like it is now for a long time to come.
55 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 125 ms ] threadSo, yeah, thanks. I really appreciate help at this point. Solid advice!
Highly recommended:
http://theleanstartup.com
http://www.runningleanhq.com/
i'm a massive fan of iteration, so that's the easy part, just want to make sure i'll scout the field for qualitative input a bit right now. i value your guys' opinion a lot, so this is why i am starting out here. thanks again.
I can speak from my voice only and I won't use such service.
i never thought people would pay for a simple twitter analytics service (i felt it would be the big guys at most), but with fruji.com (side project that made me good money, and keeps going) it's 90% regular people, 10% business paying for these accounts.
what i'd be curious about is, if you're traveling much? say, you go to new york and there's a guy from general assembly willing to show you around the local startups they host? yes/no? i'm really curious!
my main goal is to bring this service to a level where i can use it myself. just chatted with a couple of friends and they said the same thing, make it so that we can use on upcoming trips asap that and anything else is secondary :)
http://letslunch.com
basically the professional component of what i want to build, at least from what I can tell by their website. going to try this right away.
I already signed up for your list, feel free to shoot me an email if you want to know more (its in my profile).
thanks dave, is http://blackchair.net what you're taking full-time?
I'd suggest trying to prove the concept without developing any actual technology - something as simple as a shared Google Docs spreadsheet might be enough. That way you reduce the risk of wasting months working on the wrong technology, but you can still get a good idea for if the concept has legs.
He said that you should test it while dedicating minimal resources. In this case, a Google Doc spreadsheet could do the trick. It's a great piece of advice.
Why spend multiple weekends working on building a prototype when you could start testing the idea's viability (virtually) straight away?
Don't do this: Ask -> "Challenge those with negative opinions"
Do this: Ask -> Consider opinions -> ask more smart questions.
simonw and yoseph are exactly right. They are asking you, "How do you know that this is something people want?" Just because it would be valuable to you doesn't mean it's going to be valuable to enough other people to make enough money for you to live on.
You could find out if you have a market or not by throwing together something really small and simple and using that for a while, or you can find out by building a fancy website and doing everything else you're talking about to make your first presentation pretty, and then a year from now find yourself in the same position you're in now except with less money.
How many people need this?
How much are they willing to pay?
How are you going to make money?
How are you going to reach your market? (Can you partner up somehow with AirBnB or other popular travelers' sites?)
everything else, yeah, i see your point and sort of feel bad. i get what you're saying and it makes sense. i do have an attitude that was trained to challenge negative statements because there's just so much 'this sucks!' on the internet and i always want to understand the motivation behind it.
on the statement of testing viability, 100% agree. asking around here whether you guys know if this will succeed or not is the wrong approach. i should have showed up with the google docs here and asked people to use it please and tell me what i missed. agree.
How about a really simple form that just adds people to a mailing list? "I am in [town]. I would like to receive an email when a visitor is in my area. [subscribe]" ... coupled with, "I am visiting [town]. I'd like to meet people. [send]"
If it stays small, you can manage this manually with little effort, and you'll know that it's probably not a service that lots of people are looking for. If it gets big, you won't be able to manage it manually anymore, but now you'll know whether or not people are interested.
If people have enough of a pain point, they'll happily use a google doc. Look at Craigslist. It's god-farking-awful (worse than a google doc), but people still use it to find apartments...
Let me ask you a question. What is the number one thing you need to test to prove the viability of this idea?
i'll think a bit more about the viability question, it's a tricky and essential one ... the google doc + google form thing could be worth a test...
what was the feedback like, remember?
Deborah Meaden was probably the most qualified investor there for this idea and she anticipated it would be hard to monetize and the budget required to obtain traffic would be substantial based on her experiences with another online membership type business.
To be honest I think they have a decent life style business potential there, they just need more business savvy and tech savvy on their side. If you have a subscription model you know what kind of targets you need to make the business viable, it's just a matter of doing the calculations.
but i believe that these local cooking classes in barcelona and such things are going to take over more and more of vacation planning.
i just couldn't disrupt an industry that keeps using advertising little entries in long lists and making lots of cash with it. as well as recruiters, like real estate agents, another industry that needs to be redone on the social web better.
i started fruij.com as a side/weekend project and people came in from everywhere, i had no plan, no direction, no marketing, but it kept making me money. people just bought pro accounts without me telling them why it's important to have one. they just flocked to it. so that was a bit of an eye opener.
but i've had a couple of really popular a-listers sign up, won't name them here, but you all know them. and after i had to tell the 5th over 1M+ follower person that it'll take more than a few days to scan their account (run analysis) based on twitter's api rate limits, it just feels terrible.
i thought i'd just lock out people with accounts over 500k (can you imagine?!), it'd make a lot of things easier.
twitter has been very responsive and i've been able to submit a couple of bugs with them successfully. but i'm really worried this one gets shut down and i do not even have the tiniest chance of doing anything about it.
i'll keep going with it. but it just runs all by itself now. a very smart, distributed system, i just receive payment notifications.
edit: one thing about twitter: i can not spend any of the payments i receive. if twitter shuts me down tomorrow (they likely won't), i have a lot of people who paid me for a yearly account and it's money i need to refund. so that's locked up credit at this point until the year expires.
[mingle: close, but not tied to a certain timing/travel aspect]
[vayable: focused on activities, like gidsy]
[gidsy: focused on activities, like vayable]
[letslunch: very close, focused on lunch]
[eatwithalocal.socialgo.com: close, but focused on lunch]
This seems like a small market to me. Even if you got it off the ground it would be difficult to charge for it.
How about removing the travel aspect, and just start a serendipitous-networking service? People sign up with their LinkedIn's and/or Facebooks, and you connect people who would benefit from knowing each other.
This seems like a better idea, but still not a great one. Monetization will likely be difficult.
and yes, agree. market is small. very small compared to building another service on top of twitter's api ... people just flock to this stuff... so yeah, true that. 100 million dollar business? not sure ... i just really want this to work for me, for now. i'd use this everytime i go somewhere.
Looking at the travel market more broadly you have people who travel extensively do it for either business or pleasure, but mostly business. The kind of person that travels for business a lot usually has a packed schedule without much free time. Any free time on their trip that they do have they're probably going to use to take it easy. However "taking it easy" on a business trip is pretty crummy since you often don't know anybody.
Here's an idea - a service that is focused on frequent business travelers. Not the A-listers, but regular professionals that just travel a lot and would probably get along really well with other business professionals that travel a lot.
You can integrate with TripIt as a way to have exclusivity (must go on > threshold trips/miles in timespan) you also then have TripIt information to know where people are going. Automatically the service can see which Trippers are going to be in the same location on the same night (on a trip) and automatically say "Hey, there's 10 trippers in Manhattan on Thursday night, are you interested in an event?" Reply Yes and the service creates the event that people just have to show up to. You as the service will make the reservation, and handle all the logistics of notifying people. People just have to say "yes I'm interested".
everything you say is true. a-listers won't have problems meeting other a-listers. but that's not what i'm trying to achieve. i do know though that sometimes, a-listers might be curious/open to meet others as well. couple of examples:
lars hinrichs is running hackfwd, germany incubator, definitely a-lister. he's a cool guy who regularly tunes in to random startups/founders and wants to hear what they're working on. two 30 minute slots during a business trip where he can select from 'meeting requests' would probably be interesting to him. that's startup world though.
say you're jimmy fallon. crazy popular. he flies to london and says he wants to meet 3 random writers who can request a meeting with him. promotional opportunity.
or, you, the guy from streak, goes to paris, does not want to be bothered by random 1-person startup folks but rather meet someone who might be a tech guy, but his dad owns a french bakery and invites you to take your girlfriend there and see what they do. probably worth that hour?
just a couple of thoughts on that.
then, for professional travelers, i used to fly a lot for microsoft and i always had time. evenings, or sometimes late afternoons. i knew people in cities i traveled to, but sometimes you're back in chicago for the fourth time and feel like meeting someone you don't know yet but who shares your interest or works in a similar sector, etc.
the frequent flyer thought is very interesting. as long as i get to keep out the networking crazies, that'd be a perfect monetization aspect.
I think for this to work you have to really define your community. Exclusivity will help, something like asmallworld.com (an invite-only social network).
Off the top of my head, I can think of two groups who'd use something like this:
1) people like us, ie entrepreneurs, and others in the startup world (investors and so on).
2) partyers, who want to find the cool places that aren't yet in the tourist guidebooks.
I think both groups would like some exclusivity. I mean, in any local startup scene, the most interesting people are oversubscribed - all the founders of no-traction startups want to grab coffee with the guy who just raised a $10 mil Series B.
When the $10 mil CEO travels to a new place, he'd probably like to grab coffee with founders at a similar level to talk shop. But those guys don't necessarily know who he is or why he's worth talking to.
If you can get people to say "hey, this person messaged me on urbanvisitor.com, he must be worth meeting" - then you'd have a decent business.
Despite people thinking he's an awkward nerd who got lucky, Mark Zuckerberg is actually very good at this.
There is a lot if money in tourism, but I am not sure this is an especially fruitful angle to get at it. It could be a starting point though.
Goal #1: get someone to pay for it!
and the locals will definitely be the harder group to build up. i have a favorite restaurant here in vienna and i love going there as much as i can. i'd be open to take someone flying in there once a week and hear about their life and plans.
it's really a matter of communicating the 'why' for locals. i don't want anyone to make money off meeting people, that's the wrong direction. i'd rather charge for other things (pro members can do more, ask for meetings in certain premium lists or whatever)
I too have the problem you are talking about. I'm very interested in the people in places I visit and taking part is "local activities". I've used resources such as local mailing lists. reddit etc. to find interesting people and places to go to at my travels. I've had major success with that, for example I had the pleasure of going on a huge bike ride with someone from the NYC Reddit mailing list from Central Park to Kony island. I had a 12 hour connection and I don't think I could have spent those 12 hours better (I also visited relatives, so my schedule was super tight). This is still one of my best travel experiences.
I hope by now I've established I'm a perfect audience for your startup. I would love to have a few meetings with local startup people at places like Berlin for example. But I would feel VERY bad about the experience if I needed to pay money for it. I would love to reciprocate by giving someone a place to stay in Israel, paying for a drink or lunch (or both) or tweeting something good as long as I actually enjoyed it. But paying for it with cash upfront would make me feel like this isn't a genuine human experience and interaction, but more like bought time.
I'm not saying that is something everyone feels, it might just be me, but all I can offer you is my personal opinions and experiences.