HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam
Starting at 11 am PDT today, Kevin Hale and I are going to try online office hours. If you'd like help with your startup, please post a top-level comment with one or two sentence description of what you do and the first thing you'd like to talk about. We'll let the community vote, and talk to the top 5 companies.
Unless you're one of the companies we're having office hours with, please don't comment otherwise on this thread until we're done at 1 pm PDT so that we can keep a clear flow in the conversations.
UPDATE: We're going to do office hours with ismail, trsohmers, ljd, ph0rque, and dzine.
UPDATE 2: Ok, have to sign off and go do office hours with YC companies. Thanks everyone!
162 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 234 ms ] threadPitch: We're replacing congress with voting software. We are running 70 candidates in the 2016 Congressional elections on our platform, if any of them get voted into office we'll take all bills before congress and put them on our site where each voter in that district gets one authenticated vote.
Question: In your experience, what's the most effective way for B2C company to educate users that you even exist?
I know that signups and conversions are an art, but more than all of that, just telling people that you have something new that they may not be searching for but could still dramatically improve their life. We will take any demographic that will have us, so we aren't picky on that front.
We have 100% week-over-week growth during election cycles, and 10-20% when it's not, so we know the message is received, we just want to get more people in the top of the funnel.
Why do think your company is a B2C company? You're selling the software to politicians / political organizations. The consumer awareness part of this will be handled by your customers if this is part of a greater trend of voters wanting more transparency and accountability of their representatives.
Of course, candidates will adopt this only if they find out they can win elections by adopting this software/philosophy. So part of your job will be to do everything you can to help your candidates win. Basically, if you do this right, you could turn the US into a three party system.
So the education you're going to do should be the talking points and marketing materials needed by their candidates to convince voters. Think of your first candidates like a beta test of a new sales force. You'll learn from them after this upcoming elections what worked and didn't work with constituents and you'll amplify on the next election cycle.
But that to me, isn't the most important thing you should be focused on. If it were me, I'd try to get as many candidates using your software on the ballot as possible.
Do you know the best conditions are the best for a candidate running the placeavote platform? eg. does this work best for a candidate in a heavily contested race?
Good question! We're not selling to politicians or political organizations. Our PAC is running candidates that are part of our community. People like you and I; professionals in tech that wouldn't mind making $170k to do literally nothing but proxy votes for their district.
Regarding what candidates need to tell voters, we're really looking to run a very centralized campaign, where people can come to our site to find out which name to vote for. We've found ways of legally hacking the election system so that we get ballot access, and differentiate our candidates in a uniform way. So we still see ourselves as a consumer product.
Is it wrong that we are adamant about remaining B2C? I want to find the best possible path, but I don't see how turning politicians that are so used to political donations for favorable voting will decide to shun their financiers to listen to the people they were voted to represent. It feels like that is a practice in futility.
We both agree on the last point, since we've spoken, we've picked up 11 new candidates in California and 9 abroad. We are trying to saturate the 2016 ballot with candidates.
Half our team are data people (I'm an algo dev myself) so finding the best conditions is something we are sorting out with data right now.
I'd start with the true believers. People who believe this is the best way to represent the people. Those people will win races because it will feel like a revolution when you hear them talk about you. It's the best kind of sales people to have.
I'd be very worried about having your kind of people talk about your movement. No one wants to feel like they're voting for a tax mooching puppet.
I don't think you could honestly find someone that feels like they are being represented in congress. Our lobbying system is an open joke that we wish we could do something about.
Also, our PAC is funding those true believers but most people don't realize that it costs thousands of dollars to run for congress and most Americans don't have that money. We can help these campaigns with a PAC.
We're looking for people that are tired of a broken system and have the desire to make change but need a strong toolset to do that. We're building that toolset. Part of that means we build the world's most secure voting platform that's has a clear audit trail and it also means that we can't turn a blind eye to the fact that it takes money to win elections in the United States.
"professionals in tech that wouldn't mind making $170k to do literally nothing but proxy votes for their district"
This description of your first candidates is what I find cynical. They should feel like true believers. Not opportunistic passive income collectors.
2. presumably only those who registered an intent to vote (in the election) for your proxy candidate will be able to direct (with website-votes) that proxy. have you thought about what legal measures can be taken to ensure that someone voted (probably it's not legal to determine who they voted for)?
The potential market for automated micro-farming (backyard farming) is huge, but it will take a long time to to reach its potential. My question is, at what point would AutoMicroFarm (http://automicrofarm.com/) become attractive to investors (both YC and others)? Would 10% weekly growth for a year be key, or something else?
Two and a half years ago, we AutoMicroFarm founders had an interview with you, and you decided not to invest, saying it was difficult to see how AutoMicroFarm would generate the kind of growth startup investors are looking for. However, YC invests with infinite time horizon and is not afraid of risky-looking companies (http://blog.samaltman.com/new-rfs-breakthrough-technologies).
So what would YC or other investors like to see before investing?
Thanks!
However, for a company like this, I think the most important consideration is how you plan to build a monopoly. There are lots of companies proposing to build automated food growing units for families with very similar plans; what stops this from being a race to zero-margin pricing? Why will a customer buy your product in 5 years and not one of the many clones?
People refer to this in lots of different ways--Warren Buffet as the relatively benign sounding "moat" and Peter Thiel directly calls it a "monopoly". Whatever you want to call it, how do you plan to do it?
When will you have the first unit in customers' back yards?
How are you going to price it? If it pays for itself in 5 to 6 years, have you thought about going out with a leasing program? I think people almost never do enough on the financial innovation side.
To build a monopoly, the plan is to make the product open-source. On the data side, having data about all the different environmental conditions and how they affect plants and fish will also help build a monopoly.
The first unit will go in a customer's back yard in a few months. In my new-construction neighborhood of ~400 houses, I plan to find 10-30 customers; I've started talking and have several interested.
The 5 to 6 year payback period is conservative: it assuming the need to build a greenhouse to house the AutoMicroFarm for year-round production. At scale and without needing a greenhouse, the payback period drops down to 3-4 months (when compared to similar organic food).
Edit: as far as a lease program, the USDA has a family farm lending program with a low rate that we could tap into on behalf of customers.
If the product is open-source, how will monetization work?
If you can get 30 houses in your neighborhood as happy customers, that would be a great start. You should give them super customer service--ie, go around to their units and make sure everything is working perfectly. The word-of-mouth recommendations from your first customers is so important.
What do the unit economics look like? How much are you charging for the current units, how much do people need to spend a year to operate them, and how much do they save on groceries?
Another point of monopoly would be to keep up a pace of innovation that is faster than the competitors.
I am offering the first customers a sale price of just the material costs. Also, they would get 24/7 support, and the CEO's (i.e. my) cell phone number.
Currently, similar products cost $1500+. My costs are $1000 (in quantities of one), and that price will come down 10-fold once I can manufacture 10k units per year.
At the current costs ($1500), the payback time is 1-2 years. Once purchased, the cost to operate is negligible (tens of dollars yearly). So they save $1-2k in groceries annually, depending on the length of the growing season.
I strongly suggest considering other models. Why do you want to "open-source" this at all? Why not just make it hardware and software you sell, and recommendations about how to grow based off of your large data set, but very hackable?
Do you have any other suggestions on how to build a moat/monopoly?
That way, those who are willing to wait weeks/months for their plants to grow from seeds/seedlings can save money, and those who want it now can pay the extra cost.
[0] Something like this, but deeper and made of biodegradable material with mycelium (mushroom roots) growing throughout the material: http://www.koifood.net/contents/media/l_floating_plant_islan...
I like this idea.
As for the "moat", I think the product with the best automation will win at least a defensible niche within the market. I would encourage you to start upmarket and not worry about price so much right now. Get really good at making the thing run itself; you can cut the price later. (But, I'm someone with a lot more money than time, so that colors my view here.)
(Yes, I'm already on your mailing list.)
I don't think a lot of people here want to spend time gardening, but lots of us love fresh vegetables. That's an opportunity, it seems to me.
One of the benefits of aquaponics is how little water it uses (after the initial fill-up).
Celiac is a silly example, but hopefully you know what I mean! I'd definitely be looking into this because it's realistic, and could help people a lot. Another wee example is that a lot of mass-produced foods are probably genetically modified and have odd chemicals which of course a lot of the population have adverse reactions to -- using an AutoMicroFarm unit, you can make sure that the food is completely organic, no chemicals, you have a record of everything that's gone on so you know you're safe to eat it.
Though, I'm probably talking crap!
p.s. I'm into hydroponics, etc. Done a few things like this unit with Tessel and stuff so I'm excited to see where you end up.
We are building a platform that allows anyone with a mobile phone to earn a living by performing discrete tasks.
Our platform aims to break down complex jobs into easily actionable items, that can be performed easily by anyone, anywhere.
The first vertical we are applying this to is reservations. The Loft Club (https://useloft.com) is a service that makes reservations for you at amazing restaurants every month on your preferred day, saving you the decisions and the hassle. Through our platform, we centralize restaurant recommendations and assignments, before farming out the logistics of making and manging them to our agents.
Our question is: Should we work on building out the generic platform and expand quickly into other verticals, or focus on building out The Loft Club and owning this space first? We've customers paying us for The Loft Club with the mild publicity it has received thus far.
Thanks!
Zhuang and Derrick
I think that 98% of the time, the right answer is to start out and remain focused on one vertical until you take it over. Most startups expand far too early and then fade out everywhere (this is often the fault of bad advice from investors). Facebook started in an extremely small vertical (Harvard undergrads), then expanded to a still-small vertical (US colleges), and then at some point took over the Internet.
Why did you pick this vertical to start with? It seems there are a lot of services helping people get restaurant reservations. The idea of breaking down tasks into small action items and farming them out to people seems good, but this doesn't seem like the most pressing need. What else did you consider as a first vertical?
How many users do you have, how much do they pay you (and how much do you pay the agents per task), and how fast are you growing?
The other 2 verticals we considered were 1) a marketplace for on-the-ground, region specific collection of data and 2) travel planning in countries with low internet penetration, namely bookings and suggestions by locals.
With Loft, we have 20 customers paying us $10 ~ $20 a month, but we haven’t grown beyond that due to limited marketing, as we focus on nailing the operations side of platform. The agents are currently just the both of us, and we can afford $10 - $15 an hour per agent if our economics hold.
All in all, we have our vision of what the future of jobs can be. Loft is an experiment towards that which has seen mild traction, and that’s why we really want your advice!
The best companies do something either fundamentally new or 10x better than existing solutions.
As you think about the future of the world, what can't people do today that they should be able to and that your platform could allow?
I realize we might have actually gone about it the wrong way. From a consumer perspective, that’s where we were struggling to find a niche to start off with. Our long term goal is to enable people to buy services from anyone in the world, no matter how small or large (i.e. reservations, travel), and it’s on us to make it actionable by as broad an workforce as possible.
We felt we had to prove out the concept of farming out discrete tasks in a straightforward niche like the concierge-space, as opposed to perhaps a white labeled platform. That probably wasn’t the right approach, and we’d appreciate your thoughts on this.
Seems like we have quite a bit of thinking to do. Any further advice for us? Thanks!
We provide a free solution for event organizers who are tired of doing customer service to their attendees by embedding our widget as easy as embedding a YouTube video. Other conferences have already hopped in like Traction Conf, check it out in action: http://www.tractionconf.io/accommodations
Let's just say that getting more events one by one isn't hard and our next step is to partner directly with ticket providers (SeatGeek, Ticketmaster) and do some sort of revenue share deal on accommodation sales.
Could you maybe partner with them? They include it in their app as an addon and you have a rev split? Win win on all sides.
I know one of the co-founders at: https://www.hellocrowd.net/
Mail me if you want an intro.
we are Tiedots (http://tiedots.co), a networking platform that provides you tailored information about other attendees every time you go to an event. This way we unveil you the most valuable leads and also find you the best way to approach. Saving time and increasing your business opportunities
The biggest challenge so far is building a solution that can provide relevant connections. Accuracy is the key and we’re working on a web semantic solution since we’ve been testing the solution manually with around 100 event attendees.
How would you determine the relevance? any other ideas?
PS: No matching solutions. Networking is about leads no matching.
Thanks!!
The problem: our focus is divided on two types of customers (we’ve even created two landing pages for each type)
1. Product/Engineering teams - they get asked a new question every day that attempts to keep tabs on the health of the project. Questions are a combo of “post-mortem” style questions (but asked as you build product) and around prediction markets (larger n make better predictions) (https://www.getsubcurrent.com/product)
2. HR/Employee Engagement - users get asked a well researched question every 2 weeks. Instead of long, annual surveys, you now get to keep a pulse on morale and culture. Participation is higher since it only takes a single click in your already existing tools to respond. (https://www.getsubcurrent.com)
We have a number of customers using our free beta - most are using it for option #2. A very small number have connected with #1, and while we think it has a lot of promise, we haven’t talked to enough people to know how it might need to change to achieve product/market fit. We are at a crossroads of needing to pick one to focus on, because the distraction is making it difficult for both to progress.
Coincidentally we started sending out beta invitations last night to the first group of people on our list before a planned public launch next month. Our recommendation engine is built on Google App Engine, which should (we hope) allow us to scale. My office-hour question for Sam and Kevin would be: What advice do you have for us at this stage?
For example, I wanted to try it out. Couldn't. 1 user lost. You will struggle your entire startup's life trying to get as many people to use you as possible. It's not like you don't have bugs after you launch. If you're a decent startup, you will be agile and you will change and fix things as they come in.
Since this is a news recommendation engine, no one is going to die or lose a ton of money if your app isn't perfect out of the gate. So make it easy for people to try it out, recommend it to others, and get as much feedback as possible so you can make it better.
If you're worried about growing too fast...well, you should consider that winning the startup lottery. Chances are that's not going to happen and you should be so lucky.
Good luck launching!
Again, thanks for the advice, and I plan to follow it as quickly as possible.
Today, this market niche is fragmented with high search costs for consumers. My marketplace will make it much easier for consumers to find and buy the products this this niche. Once off the ground, the marketplace will be a key source of customers for the merchants.
Consumers like the product, but the merchants are difficult to get on board. I find that the prevailing view is that the status quo is 'good enough'; merchants are conservative, and very few are early adopters.
Things I'm doing to address this:
1) Price for growth -- pricing based on a small flat fee that the merchant pays per transaction to align with value delivered, with first X transactions free (obviously I would prefer to charge a % of revenue, but that's a very, very hard sell with these particular merchants).
2) Provide the merchants with tools that help them run their business (i.e. give them reasons independent of the marketplace to use the app)
3) In-person visits to merchants. These are valuable for many reasons, and are only partially a sales call. These visits will always be something I do, but it doesn't scale enough to create a marketplace.
What strategies and tactics do you suggest to get merchants into the marketplace, to build up the supply-side?
it's positive that customers like the product, is it an app or website? if you have enough users you can convince merchants that you'll bring them more business by showing them the numbers you currently have
Brief overview: I would like to market local, weekend yoga retreats to professionals in the oil and gas, energy, and finance industries. No long absences from work or family, and no long-distance travel. The startup is set up in Houston, but can operate in any city in the USA. Lots of different marketing and advertising methods are being tried (online groups, directories, online forums, linkedin, etc.), but I am pretty much throwing things to the wall and seeing what sticks. Any suggestions are appreciated. Thanks!
startup: bodyhugs: hug your body with movement and care
website: http://www.bodyhugs.org/
local health and wellness retreats in the USA
I think yoga and meditation in a local, relaxed setting (not in a traditional gym or studio) may be truly beneficial to those who work long, stressful hours, particularly in industries that are sensitive to oil prices and environmental conditions.
We are about to finish building a table reservation system (think OpenTable or SeatMe but on steroids). Although it's a "Me Too" product, we will offer features that our competitors can't or won't, e.g. bigger API control for restaurants, various hooks to extend the service such as food delivery, pre-paid reservations, and ticketing for tables to name a few. Essentially, we will offer an iPhone/iPad app for restaurants to manage their reservations/orders, while their guests can use an iPhone-app/Android-app/Search-Engine/Restaurant's-Website to make those reservations.
I have a question about a launch/pricing strategy:
- Is it sane to do a freemium model for our product? For example, restaurants would be able download our Manager app in App Store for free but it would have limited offline features. If restaurants want to accept online orders, then they must get that feature via in-app purchase. If restaurant wants to incorporate discount cards, then it's a different in-app purchase. This logic applies to all different features.
- Or should we go through a regular sales process, i.e. sign up restaurants one-by-one, charge them via check/credit-card/etc and escape Apple's 30% cut?
Thanks in advance and I hope it will be helpful for other startups that are in a similar position.
Now, as a startup, I wouldn't start by competing head to head with OpenTable's salesforce going after their customers. That sounds expensive. Also, getting people to switch providers is always way more difficult. Plus, I think people value OT not because of their features but because of the network effect they bring. Don't get me wrong, you'll definitely still be going one-by-one and converting users, but I don't think you should start with those using your competition.
Instead start with new restaurants or those not using anything. To them, you'll feel like a miracle.
The reason you want to maximize distribution of software and engagement (having something that even the free plan is worth talking to people about) is because going freemium is not unlike investing in startups or building up a portfolio.
You invest in your customers in mass (with free features not money) and you hope a small grouping of them will make back that investment many fold.
Like investing, freemium works best as a long term strategy. So when you look at your upgrade triggers, be sure not to cripple that free plan so much that you're optimizing for conversion rate for users as SOON as possible. Convert them when they've grown to be successful. So they can say you were a key part of their success.
I think MailChimp thinks about this really well if you haven't read their ideas already: http://blog.mailchimp.com/going-freemium-one-year-later/
Good luck!
1. We definitely want to start with countries, which OT hasn't penetrated yet.
2. Since we will start with restaurants that do not use OT (or similar service), we may consider having only paid plans. And maybe convert to a freemimum model once we are ready to compete with OT in USA/UK.
May be a bit out of your area, but I'm curious about your thoughts. Even though we are in "Silicon" Valley, there has been very little when it comes to new semiconductors investments. I'm the co founder and CEO of REX Computing (http://rexcomputing.com), a new semiconductor startup working on a super energy efficient processor architecture. We've actually raised seed funding, and I'm interested in what you think about the semiconductor space in general (and its future in the valley), plus ideas on how we can thrive as a very low level hardware company in a primarily software world.
Thanks!
Edit: One other thing I should note is that we are also big on software! We're utilizing a lot of open source projects to help build up our compiler and other software tools. Obviously hardware without software to run on it is pretty useless.
I think extreme energy efficiency is a great thing to go after for a new semiconductor company. It fits the "surf someone else's wave" principle well. Big companies are of course trying to do this to, but focused startups beat big companies all the time.
Don't worry about being a low-level hardware company. It's a feature for you, not a bug, that there aren't many startups doing that. You can look a lot like a software company that produces a piece of hardware.
When will your first chip be ready? Who is going to manufacture it?
Who will be your first customers, and how much better will your chip be than whatever they are using now?
How much money will you need to get that first chip to market?
We're looking at having full simulation capabilities (with physical verification in progress) come the end of this year, with a shuttle run (prototype) tape out in Q1 next year. It's about a 3 month turn around, so we are expecting to have our first 100 prototype chips in the ~May-June timeframe next year. From there, we'll be putting together 20-25 evaluation units (consisting of 4 of our chips put together), and selling those... we have 4 order commitments already, which almost cover the cost of getting the prototypes made (though we are not reliant on that, as we now have outside funding). We'll be using TSMC (the largest pure-play semi foundry) and their 28nm process (with the very slim possibility of going down to 16/20nm if the price is right at that point).
Right now, our connections are primarily in academia and government, so they are the people we have talked to the most and have said they will put money up, and we do have some government grant funding. I do not want government and academia to be our primary focus though (Any thoughts on that?), although early non dilutive funding is nice. For the applications we have specced out that they care about, we are showing around a 10x efficiency increase for dense matrix applications (over top of the line CPUs and GPUs currently used), and even enabling some applications that were not really practical on existing systems. I can't go into too much detail on those publicly, but can talk about them offline.
When it comes to our best application space, and what I would like to target, is the signal processing and mobile basestation space. Our best performance and efficiency (25x the best CPUs, GPUs, and DSPs at the moment) comes with FFTs, and we're capable of doing next generation large FFTs better than the best DSPs are at doing the current generation types. The few people (mostly academics in the field) I have talked to in this think this is a big game changer for that industry, and the problem we have is that we don't really have any connections in the industry itself. My idea has been we should try to build up as much evidence before talking to more people in it.
While I have talked about two areas, our architecture isn't really limited to any one, it just performs exceptionally well for those... but planning for wider market adoption is I think too far ahead of us at this point.
With our current funding, we'll be able to get through making 100 (16 core) prototype chips, build those into evaluation units, and test them with customers... from there, doing a full tape out and getting the full 256 core chip to market will be another $10 to $15 million, and we expect to be able to tape out and go into mass production in the first half of 2017.
Question: Do you think the Thiel-style monopoly approach would work in our case? I initially imagined we would be able to enter and do very well in the High Performance/Supercomputing area, eat up market share from the big guys (Intel, NVIDIA, etc) who don't care about the "small" HPC market. From there, expand to large business data centers (Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc) and mobile basestation systems, and so on until we hit mass market devices. Do you think this is a decent (although very simply described for brevity) plan for the 3 to 5 year timeframe?
I'd focus less on academia and government. They are usually difficult investors and difficult first customers. Non-dilutive funding is nice, but dilution is not so bad in a binary-outcome situation, and venture investors are usually far faster and more helpful.
I think taking over the "small" HPC market first is a very good plan.
One more question: I'm an engineer at heart, and I want to stay involved in engineering at some level, but don't want to give up control of the direction of the company. Do you think it makes sense/is possible to be CEO and still be involved in doing day to day engineering/design work, and if so any tips on balancing that? If not, at what point does it make sense to bring in a "professional" CEO?
Thanks for the feedback! Would love to grab coffee if you're interested... feel free to send me an email.
http://www.bhorowitz.com/why_we_prefer_founding_ceos/
http://www.bhorowitz.com/why_founders_fail_the_product_ceo_p...
I don't know the numbers, but suppose for example that there are 100,000 base stations that currently use 100 watts each doing the DSP. That's 10,000,000 watts total, costing about $10M/yr at $0.12 / kWh utility rates. If you can save 80% and capture 1/3 of the savings for the first 2 years (typical of efficiency improvement sales), you make $5.3M. If it costs $15M to design the chips, that's a bad business.
To have a good business doing energy-efficient chips, you'd need to target applications burning a billion watts from the grid, so you can make a fraction of a billion dollars.
The mobile device market values energy efficiency much higher than $0.12 / kWh. That might be a better domain to target.
Although mobile device market is certainly better target as a market.
This would require a radically different marketing strategy, but what if they partnered with artists and sculptors and the advertising departments of the companies whose property the base stations would be located on? A mobile base station is usually designed to be as inconspicuous as possible; what if they flipped that around and turned a bunch of them into public art installations? The sales pitch to companies would be "Show your customers that you care about the planet, and get them talking about your brand." That's an advertising business, where they could charge way more than the power savings business.
The biggest problem for hard technical problems is the storytelling. I went through your site and I couldn't find the sentences I would need to make someone else excited about what you're making in a conversational way. It should feel like you're making something science fiction a reality through your technology alone. That storytelling is what you'll need to convince/inspire customers, investors and future employees.
Thanks! I really need to update the website as it is based on our (unsuccessful) fundraising pitch... thankfully, we had some great feedback a couple of months ago on storytelling, and it really improved our pitch and we were able to close a round. I'll make updating our website a priority this weekend.
Right now, it is best for signal processing applications and dense matrix (although it is not limited to that). To give you some actual applications, think mobile base station processing (Everything from your wifi router to big cell antennas, small cells, etc), computer vision/image processing, video rendering, machine learning (both convolutional neural networks and recurrent NNs), plus a bunch more to long to list. The new abilities that we are providing is that we can fit the performance of a high end system with ~300 watt GPU (which also needs a ~100 watt CPU attached to it), for say machine learning, in a 4 watt power budget.
The simple story that we've come up with is this:
30 years ago when existing computer architectures were designed, the power cost of moving data and processing it were roughly equal, but things have changed. Today, it takes 100 picojoules to do a double precision floating point operation, but 4200 picojoules (42 times!) more energy to move that data from RAM to your registers. We're solving that (among many other problems overlooked by the rest of the industry)problem through a new design rather than a radical new technology in order to achieve over a 10x energy efficiency increase over existing systems.
I typically have a more succinct oral pitch with accompanying presentation... hopefully this came through clearly. Any feedback would be apppreciated!
This is a fascinating observation. As one of pg's essays asks, "what do you know that know that no one else knows?" [quoted from memory]. It sounds like this is your answer. Interestingly, it's not literally that no one else knows it -- it's that no one else (AFAIK, of course) has factored it into their designs, as doing so probably requires more-or-less a clean sheet.
We’re MinoHubs (https://www.minohubs.com) and we build commercial and community tools for software projects. The barrier to building a successful software project is high - apart from writing the code, you need to build a community and potentially set up some commercialisation (backing, licenses, support etc.) which isn’t an easy task.
We provide customizable hubs that give projects:
Commercial tools
- Paid support - ability to offer on-demand consultation to businesses and developers.
- Licensing - ability to sell one time and recurring licenses to businesses and developers (coming soon).
- Backing - monthly contributions. In return, backers get more visibility in Discussions.
Community tools
- Powerful discussions with voting.
- Announcements - emails and notifications to project followers.
From Kevin’s initial feedback (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9746206) we understand that we need to be better at:
1. Leading the user through things to do after creating a hub.
2. Showcasing the benefit of using MinoHubs.
We’re working on those right now.
Our challenge is that, as Kevin also pointed out, we have a lot of features, but we’re also trying to appeal to an audience that would use different combinations of features; open source software, commercial software or projects that want to just use community features.
How do we reconcile that users want a wide variety of functionality with the issue that this might present too many features for us to convey concisely?
For you guys, the only thing people need to know and remember is that MinoHubs helps me get funding and make my software projects successful. That's the core of the idea.
The feature usage of an actual product also tends to follows the Pareto Principle. Most people use a small fraction of the features and a handful of features will be the most used by a wide margin.
Usually you market those most used features, but sometimes those features are different from the features that are best for getting them to sign up or even converting into a customer.
Office Our provides a portal for investors to interact with their top 5 potential investments. "Separate the wheat from the chaff."©
At Office Our an investor creates a post (or "bulletin") inviting the community to pitch their startup. Users vote on the "wheat" and the top 5 earn the right to receive a response. The investors can then manage their bulletin and follow-up outside of our platform.
For this we charge a simple, flat $5 fee to each investor per potential investment per month on an annualized basis in the form of credits which are distributed by each of the user's votes in batches of baker's dozens. "Investing - simplified"©
I look forward to your feedback.
We built a prototype last week and went to stores and a retail conference this week. We are having problems convincing stores to adopt out product as they are very concerned with shoplifting.
Thanks, Rohan
I'd like to discuss two things:
1- Signal vs Noise in online communities: Since you've been heavily involved in Reddit (Sam), I'd like to know how what your opinion in curating content vs. having an algorithm sift through the noise. We see companies like netflix and ph (allegedly?) combining big data with human curation and having a lot of success, so my question is: Should online communities invest in curation or big data? Is there a trend towards one or the other?
2- Monetisation: I'm having a hard time monetising this community. Since I'm looking to bootstrap it, its crucial that I get monetisation right so I was wondering if you had any tips on monetising communities?
Help needed - We think that either the government or certain enterprises will pay for this data (since they already are spending money on such technology). What is the best way to validate these channels?
We built ObjectiveFS, it's like Dropbox, but for servers. We have users running our shared file system in production, and are getting great feedback.
Our current challenges are user growth and upcoming competition from Amazon EFS.
We would like your feedback on what we can do on our website (http://objectivefs.com) or additional things we can do to get more people to start our free trial and to address the Amazon EFS competition.
Thanks!
"Like Dropbox but for servers" doesn't seem like it's quite the right pitch. Because you also say, use this on your laptop. Maybe you want something more like, "Dropbox for teams of software engineers". Or just, "NFS that doesn't suck".
I like your suggestion on the pitch, especially the "NFS that doesn't suck". :-) We will work on improving our pitch. Thanks again!
Hey guys, Our platform unbundles apps' and websites' most essential features and transforms them to interactive Cards. Similar to Google Now Cards. However the entire architecture is designed to be an open platform. Meaning anybody could come and build these interactive cards using our Language, REL. We believe, by unbundling Applications/WebService we can seamlessly start connecting different pieces of the web together, and create a more fluid and unified internet experience. An experience with an intelligent fabric that grows with our needs, preferences and expectations to help us make the right decision, at the right time. I'd love to hear your thoughts on Relevant. Thanks!
I have a solid engine, nothing launched yet.
My question is: why would you not fund this project right now? What could I do to improve my odds of getting funding?
Thanks Kevin for getting in touch. Yes I am. I've bought 2D graphics on the web which I think are enough good to get say 200K players. I also have a friend I've worked with recently at a game company which has started to help on the design (units, skills). I've talk to numerous players on reddit, that help for the design too. Here is what it looks like (please note this is an old video, a lot have changed since, even the name of the game): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNIFd6jxQbY
edit: oh also, you should look at the following FAQ that may answer some questions.
FAQ:
Q: Why don't you make a mobile game instead?
A: Ordinary game developers think there is some kind of a "game industry" which embodies the promess that if they make some cool content, copy some cool features and drop some names, they can make a profitable product.
Smarter people knows that a tiny fraction of softwares makes all the revenue. There is no exception to that rule, not even for games. Here is the proof: https://thinkgaming.com/app-sales-data/
If you look carefully, you'll notice that the 10th grossing game on iOS make 10% of the revenue of the first one. The 100th does 1%. And so on.
But smarter people think that games are like cat pictures: you can't predict which one gonna make it up to the top. Some top rated HN users think that, I have the names :)
I believe this is true about games on mobile platforms. Success on mobile is, well, just luck in my opinion. The proof is that it simply doesn't exist a single company right now which has made multiple hits which gross at startup-level (unless it's clones of the first product or others products, even then, the ratios are not the same). Another way of telling this is: I love flappy bird, it's an amazing game really, I've played it a lot, but no one ever would have predicted it would be a success. Same for angry birds.
It is false on the PC platform however. The proof is that some companies succeed to make multiple, if not only, hits which gross at startup-level (ie. blizzard, valve etc.). It is important to add that their games have high skillcaps (more on that later) and they never die: players keep playing them. This is true games like chess and poker and these companies achieve to conceive many of them. That proves you can think rationally about games and make some predictions.
Q: Why don't you make a facebook game then?
A: Beside poker, I've never seen a game on facebook, do you? I'm sure there is some but what I've seen the most are what we call in french attractions. That is roller coasters. So here is how it works. You put some cool banner on facebook. People click on it of course. Then, you put the people in wagons with a cool theme and you run the roller coaster in loop. At some point, you tell them it can go faster if they invite some friends. So do they. Since the friends of a random person on facebook is likely to click on a banner too, it works pretty well. Fine, I've no problem with this. But this is a very special kind of game if that is games at all. Real games have high skillcaps. It means that you can be better than your friend - subtancially better. Great games have even very high skillcaps, which means that you can dramatically beat your friend, also find someone who dramatically beats you and another one who dramatically beats the one who beats you and so on.
So here is the thing: Facebook offers a real nice feature which is the social graph. But it doesn't mean a game has to use it to be an interesting project to invest on.
Q: All right, but what I want to say is, your game is too big to be done by a couple of guys isn't?
A: I beleive this is false. The traditionnal way of shipping a game is to build all of it a...
Here is a video of the product: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNIFd6jxQbY
I've proved in the past (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQLiANnRPBU) I can get plenty of traction with a minimal game done by a couple of guys. Moreover, since the RTS is competitive, I can get a feedback and growth loop by organizing tournament with prizes. If the core gameplay works and the updates are substancial, players will come more and more numerous each time.
Here is a video of the RTS (January): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNIFd6jxQbY
My strategy thus far has been to find startups that need help doing their devops and help them automate their deployment using Tasqr. Finding customers this way has been slow, but I've gotten to learn quite a bit about how the product fits within a continuous integration workflow. I am starting to feel a little financial pressure to change my approach and scale my outreach, though my existing users really like my "do things that don't scale approach" unsurprisingly :-)
What are some signs that it's the right time to scale and chase bigger chunks of the market?
Background: I'm building freedom.biz, which is currently a course for retail business owners who'd like to take their business to the next level. I sent out a survey to those on my interest list, and it became clear that I couldn't personally fulfill all their needs. However, I know people who can.
I'd love to build a company that connects vetted experts with the business owners who need them. I've seen startups in this realm, but they all feel generic and unfocused. What do you think would be a competitive advantage in this realm? What would you like to see that's not out there right now?