http://weavesilk.com is a side project of mine for many years. I put out a brand new version of the iOS app this month and am thinking about developing it further but find it very hard to decide what direction to go.

The website is popular, and people love Silk, but for different reasons: some find it relaxing and meditative, others like that it closes the gap between their artistic ability and taste.

It's been used as an inspirational sketching tool for artists (http://bit.ly/1Qlm1kA), to make album art, and has been on exhibit at the Children's Creativity Museum. Some teachers use it to teach kids about symmetry.

I've made something compelling but don't know what to do next, or how to figure it out.

Then your growth comes down to keeping people engaged with new / fun ways to make art easily.

What I like best is that it allows someone with zero artistic ability (like me) to make a piece of artwork that they'd be proud of. That's quite a trick.

What are some things you've thought about building on top of it? What have your users been asking for?

Some of the things I've thought about:

- Expanding the expressive range. The new app has a "silk eraser" and I have ideas for at least one new type of brush.

- Continuous undo (as if it's a movie), or at least more undo levels.

- Making a better Alchemy: http://al.chemy.org/

- Unifying the experience of the website (2013; JS/Canvas) and the new app (Swift/Metal)

- The website lets you share replays of your drawings that play back on the site. What's the best way to do something similar with the app?

- A gallery would be great but requires figuring out the previous two points to some extent. There's a lot of potential but it feels like a lot to navigate through.

Long-term I'd love Silk to be a Bret Victor-inspired environment for visually exploring computation: Compute with color and time, explore the system, make your own brushes. You can think of a brush as a function from input history to pixels on the canvas. I think there's a lot of potential here.

Some of the common things people ask for:

- More colors. The new app has more palettes, which is a start.

- More undo levels.

- High-resolution export. This will be coming to the app, potentially inside a bundle of "pro" features.

- Plugins for Photoshop and other professional design tools.

- Prints. I've experimented with prints before but found that the art doesn't come out nearly as well in print. My bar for quality here is this piece made by a talented designer friend (Anand Sharma) many years ago: http://bit.ly/1TDS2sz. Maybe the right answer here is something more ephemeral like greeting cards.

I like the idea of a gallery - that will help you grow as people show off their work. You don't necessarily need live replays to do it - you could start with static and add those later.

One thing to think about is how you can make it grow more. Your users won't generally bring you growth ideas, but it's important to always be thinking about how to get more users.

Also +1 for the gallery idea, and not worrying about animations, just a gallery with voting and show off the ones that get the most votes.

Like: http://www.colourlovers.com/palettes

Another idea from that: take the palettes from colourlovers and add those as something people can choose from to do the drawings with.

EDIT: Also, add a mailing list. I'd like to be notified when you get around to doing high-res or prints. Right now, I can't even find contact information to get in touch with you to make this request.

First, what are your thoughts on this market?

Also, some advice: I'm currently building the prototype based on my own experience as I'm my own user. That's the only thing I've been focusing on, I haven't looked for external feedback yet and haven't spent much time looking for people to join me. I figured both of those things will be much easier once I have the prototype ready. Am I on the right track or should I be doing everything at once?

Can I suggest an idea for a related product; a platform to make collaboration between different areas easier. Right now if you have an area where you lack a skill or background it can be very time consuming finding the right people to collaborate with, especially internationally. Make it easier to create collaborations that result in publication and you will have a product with paying customers.

I wish you luck with this project as it certainly is needed.

Even though you are your own target user, it's dangerous to build a full prototype without talking to actual users. It's likely that you will find that what you thought people wanted does not match 100% with what they actually want.

Do you have mockups or screenshots of the tool? I would recommend lining up some research scientists who can serve as product advisors. Tell them about your idea and ask them what they would want in this kind of tool. Try to get a commitment from them to use it after you build it - that will force clarity on their side.

Not only will that prevent you from potentially throwing away code, it will get you started building the kind of deep advocates in the science community that you will need to get a movement like this started.

I am the founder of http://www.pnyxter.com - a video (only) based debate and discussion app.

My question is about product-market fit.

A user can create topic and upload a video selfie talking on the topic or respond to other topics via video selfie. The app does not have provision of text comments at all - only video responses.

I've invited several friends and family for private beta, and its been 10 days now and only 1 of my friend dared to create a video.

I also shared the link on FB and linked in and got several views, but no one created a topic. I also did a FB ad for 2 days - no luck here too. Is this a clear indication of product - market misfit? Or is it too early to conclude?

Or should I shift my focus only on professional and amateur debaters of various debate clubs in cities, universities, schools etc.

I do understand the privacy issues of showing video selfie - but I've given provision of a good privacy control (or at least I think its good).

Video based opinions are already being posted by users in Facebook and youtube - but do not have this consolidated grouping of all video discussions on a topic in one place. Youtube tried video response feature and closed it in 2013 due to low engagement - but of course youtube is a very generic video site - not all videos needs video responses/discusisons/debates.

Thanks!!

Couple ideas: (1) Analysis tool like Krossover, by cutting out prep time from videos like the above, segmenting by speech, and allowing people to annotate, search by annotation, etc. (2) a response platform for people to practice debates outside of tournaments. Right now, if you want to practice, you either debate with a teammember, or email speech docs to others, which doesn't really capture the energy or spirit of a debate. I could see this being useful esp for debaters at small schools without large teams, or rural areas without nearby partner schools, etc...

One advantage of video is (hopefully) reduce abuse. Twitter is plagued with the problem of anonymous abuse. However, its not easy to show your face in video and abuse!

One approach would be to set a topic every day, and persuade 3-4 of your friends to record something on the topic. Once you get a debate going, more people will join in.

You're competing with posting vlogs on Youtube. So you need to figure out what will make people much happier posting on your site, even though the audience is smaller at first.

Also, would you or Jared like to speak on some topic that interests you ?

I've also given an option of creating a private topic - which only selected invitees can view and participate - so that one can discuss and debate with only close friends/co-workers. Could this be a feature appealing for video bloggers who are concerned of privacy too?

BugReplay (http://www.bugreplay.com) is a bug reporting tool in the form of a browser extension that captures a screencast of the user’s actions synced with network traffic, javascript errors and other browser data.

What's the best way to grow your early user base? Ideally we'd like people who are going to use BugReplay at their jobs and open source endeavors, but we want to keep it relatively small until we feel like it's ready for the widest possible audience.

My guess is that the developers will have to encourage or require bug reporters to use it. Their site will have to say “Here’s how to report a bug: Step 1: install BugReplay. Step 2: …” So find out whether they’re willing to do that, and how to make it as painless as possible.

It’s reasonable to want to keep the initial user base small, but usually that happens by default. The important thing is to keep the initial user base smart, and on a path to the eventual large user base. Don’t make the mistake of pursuing users that aren't your eventual target market in order to keep things small at first.

PS, if you're appealing to web devs, you need first-rate website design. It currently has formatting problems: https://www.dropbox.com/s/4hethogee0d7zgt/Screenshot%202016-...

We think potential users can be broken down into different groups. The first group would be people within the same organization (testers, design, other devs, marketing, support, etc). In that scenario, the company would subscribe to our service and everyone would use it internally, especially once they see how much easier it is.

The second group would be people who have a vested interest in a website working properly. For example, my friend has a clothing company and they sell online through Shopify. If she encountered a bug on Shopify and they told her this is the tool she should use, she would do that. I do agree however that for a casual user on a website, it would take a lot to get them to use our service. That’s why we are not focusing on that.

Thanks for pointing out that formatting problem. We use Instapage to make the marketing site (we’re bootstrapping) and it seems fine when I logged in- I’ll forward the screenshot to them to take a look.

As for the small user base, even if they’re really into it, it’s the kind of tool that someone uses only when they need it. So even if we have a committed user base, unless they have tons of buggy sites, we can’t expect to see tons of activity. That’s why we aren’t sure how to handle it.

Thanks for giving me an opportunity to clarify and for the feedback! It’s really appreciated.

The copy on your site is technical + imho too long. I'm a tech lead so get it, but if I want to buy your product I'm going to have to convince a PHB that it's worth spending money on. They're going to run for the hills when the headline is "records screen usage javascript errors and network".

As a potential customer: if this could be self-hosted and runs on Windows then it's a very interesting product.

If I can deploy this, live, as part of my site, then it's more valuable for me. Again, it must be self-hosted (data protection!) - which is the reason I don't use the other tools. But giving my users the ability to record the process leading up to an error they see is fantastic.

We are not targeting end customers directly but hope that at some point it would be a service that a B2C would offer to their customers.

It’s really hard to describe our product without being technical but we will revisit it. Any ideas?

We are exploring how to run this self hosted, it is entirely possible but we haven't gotten there yet. As for data protection it's an issue we take very seriously. All network data is stored encrypted, and all reports are private unless explicitly set to public. We are also working on ways to obfuscate the traffic before it’s ever uploaded.

"why rely on obscure text reports when bugreply can show you the problem: live!"

"bug reports for the youtube generation"

"take the pain out of bug reports - bugreply lets your QA|consultants|users record the steps leading up to their problems"

You really need to brainstorm this; first get the value prop clear for various target demographics, then iterate iterate iterate until you can get a few nice one-liners.

Then test them on someone who is clean (a potential customer).

Btw if you want any further feedback feel free to ping me on twitter; username is the same as my hn username. I'll DM you my gmail/hangouts address/linkedin.

That's the "easier" play, but with your tool/tech you might be in a good position to create your own crowdsourced QA company. I'm not sure how the economics look for the other crowdsourced qa companies, but I know from looking at them that there prices seem to be too high. Basically I could hire a full time QA person with their prices...so why would I use them.

If you could figure out a way to undercut those companies while providing on-demand crowdsourced qa using your tool...I bet you'd have a pretty nice business.

I've built a prototype for myself, but would like to now connect with the right industry people to help guide the product and be trusted early users. In another reply you mentioned finding users to serve as product advisors similarly (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11183572) . I'm having a hard time discovering who the "right" people are and reaching them in a compelling way. If I were further along [read: post private beta] I would reach out to someone like Phin Barnes @ First Round, but I feel at this stage it's too early for him to really give interest.

What if you went to the bloggers who are writing these posts? They might find the app even more useful than normal consumers, and they have large audiences they could advertise it to.

Phin Barnes might be a good investor someday, but he won't do the work for you, which is to get sneakerheads using the app. Once you've got passionate fans in the sneakerhead community, you should go talk to him.

My startup is developing technology for natural language understanding (in contrast to NLP). We believe we can approach human-level understanding for standard texts (email, blogs, online articles) in 2.5-4 years.

We are currently self-funded and can comfortably do so for about a year--by the end of which, we believe we can develop a fairly advanced demo that surpasses existing techs in some, but not all, areas.

What kind of demos do you think would impress best-in-class recruits/investors to join our team? The current options we have in mind are:

1) Solving a subset of Winograd schema (commonsense reasoning challenge) with a general approach (i.e., easily extensible with additional investment in knowledge acquisition/data sources). No systems known to public can currently solve all of them (or even a subset generally).

http://commonsensereasoning.org/winograd.html

2) A conversational agent capable of conversing with humans at the level of a 4- or 5-year-old (without resorting to typical chatbot tricks).

3) Surpassing the state-of-the-art systems in a couple of standard AI conference tasks or on datasets released by leading companies (Google, Facebook, etc).

4) Other tasks we have not thought of...

Because of resource and time limitations, we likely need to focus the initial efforts on one, or at most two, of the options above. (A mature system should be able to do all those and beyond, but this is only for about one year from now.)

A couple extra questions if you have the time:

- Given the startup's long-term timescale before monetization and its technical nature, what sorts of investors should we focus on talking with?

- Are there chances of IP leaking and causing problems with patenting our tech later on? What should we do to prevent that?

Sincerely appreciate your time to answer these questions.

-- Ken Noppadon

All the options you mention would be technically impressive (so good for recruiting hackers), but none of them are obviously on the path to building a huge business. You should lean towards the option where you can imagine having a near-monopoly in a huge market.

There's a big danger of getting sucked into some application where better NLP isn't the differentiator. Most interactive agents have small enough domains (getting cable TV installed, parsing S-10s, triaging support emails, ...) that general reasoning isn't critical, and the companies that succeed in this space will be defined by other factors like sales and integration with the customer's IT stack.

I wouldn't worry about IP leakage. I've seen a lot of companies, but none that failed because of IP leakage. They fail for a long list of other reasons: slow execution, bad product-market fit, founder breakups, etc.

I created https://codebunk.com. Its an Online Interviewing Tool for developers. Its the best tool out there. It provides code execution in 23 languages, collaborative editor, REPL shells, AV Text chat, Teams, Question banks and a lot more.

Its cash flow positive and has some of the coolest clients.

However, the rate at which it acquires new customers is pretty low (~3/month). I have exhausted (or nearly exhausted) avenues of generating buzz (PH, HN, Reddit, some tech publications). As a developer without any help, how do I promote CodeBunk further? What's the best way to reach my audience (Hiring Mangers, CTOs)?

If you've made something people want, and it sounds like you have, it's time to invest in getting customers. A good rule of thumb is that you should spend 50% of your time working on your product and 50% of your time getting customers. I have a feeling that's higher than what you're currently doing.

There are a number of distribution channels you can try. Here are a few ideas: 1) It sounds like you have some great customers (pebble, flipboard). Do you know them personally? Get to know them, in person or over the phone ideally, and then ask them for referrals. CTOs / hiring managers all know each other.

2) You guys don't seem to have a blog. Content marketing is great for your space because engineers love to read posts about how much hiring sucks - there's practically a daily thread on this on HN. There is so much you could write about the best way to do technical interviews. Each time you get a post like that to go viral, you'll pick up some customers.

3) There are lots of recruiting conferences and events. Those are good places to meet customers.

4) It might be possible to negotiate distribution partnerships with other companies in the hiring space. ATS's, job boards, and new models like hiring networks (i.e., Hired) are all upstream of an online interviewing tool. Maybe they should integrate with one directly.

5) There are a bunch of standard techniques that rarely work amazingly well but usually work to a certain extent that you can start with: everything from adwords and facebook ads to email campaigns to hiring managers.

Overall, you need to be very experimental to find good distribution channels. A good book to get your creative juices going is "Traction: how any startup can achieve explosive growth"

Also, I like coderpad's landing page more. Have you done A/B testing?

If you already are familiar with and know how to A/B test, you can ignore the following paragraph.

Firstly, within you blog content area, there should be various calls to action. This is one great use of a sidebar to advertise your service. On desktop, after a user scrolls past a certain point(which means they're most likely reading the post) you can have one of those boxes that appear in the bottom right of the screen with an advertisement. Then within the content you should reference your service several times, but don't go overboard with it because that can get annoying. For instance, lets say you mention a drawback of a current interviewing process, you can then follow that sentence with a sentence in parenthesis plugging your service, or you can have it as a caption styled paragraph(slightly smaller text, italicized) under the paragraph which you mention the current pain point. Now here is where A/B testing comes in. After you release an article, watch the (hopeful) influx of traffic. Make sure you're collecting data on the number of page views for the post, views to your sales/service page, link clicks, 'close' clicks, members joined. After you see the traffic start to die down, post another article, repeat another 2-3 times without changing any of the marketing content. After the traffic dies down on the last article you posted, change some of the wording around on the calls to action and marketing and play with the phrases. Make sure you keep track of the changes you're making. Now go through this process again of letting the traffic die down and post another article. Continue these cycles of changing content a few times. When you've gone through about 4 or so cycles, it's time to look at the data. Look at how much traffic you received through each period where the call to action content remained the same and see how the users took to the marketing by looking at the leads to the sales/service page and number of members that signed up. See which period had the greater percentage of conversions and you can either stick with that or repeat the cycle again with the periods with greater conversions to see if there's a clear winner and to confirm the results. There's also the possibility that you may not see any difference in conversions. In this case you can either repeat the cycles again, or just go with your heart for the time being. Every 6 months or so it's a good idea to go through this process again as your audience/market for the content may have evolved slightly and you want to keep your calls to action up to date with them.

We've talked to many startup employees and they all have given positive feedback. One concern that comes up is that startups are not OK with changing the cap table for tiny transactions. In that case, we have plans to offer synthetic liquidity solutions via derivative transactions.

We'd like to hire your thoughts on the problem we are solving and our approach so far.

Edit: all three buttons go to same page

https://exivest.herokuapp.com/

http://www.stroomnews.com is a bootstrapped breaking news and events focused sharing platform, that allows live-streaming and pre-captured video and image sharing through our mobile app and website. We are also working on an enterprise solution for the news industry that ties into our platform. Our B2C app was released this past Fall, but has shown little traction and we have had discussions with a major news media company about our enterprise product. We believe that signing up users for our enterprise solution will also help grow our B2C platform.

We also have an idea in the area of video compression (both founders have experience in this industry) that we believe could be huge in the streaming video industry. Our initial tests have shown very promising results, but we have not had much time to work on this due to focusing on our platform and enterprise product. The success of this tech does not only provide a large advantage for our business, but opens us up to many other industries and opportunities.

As our ability to bootstrap dwindles (due to amount of savings), do we continue along our path and try to get revenue as soon as we can by working on our enterprise product or do we spend time trying to raise money so we can focus on our tech, which may not produce anything product worthy for a much longer time (or ever as it is still in the research stage)?

Thanks for your time!

For the video compression technology, it's hard to say without knowing more. What does it do, and who would want it?

As cool as video compression tech is, trying to raise money for pure technology, without demonstrating market demand, is almost impossible. So if you go down the video compression route, you'll need to think hard about exactly what products people could build with it, and how you could show that people would buy them even before you can build them.

Getting to revenue and selling the enterprise product is the safer path.

The enterprise product provides a dashboard that allows a news room to manage past and present media content created through our platform. It allows live modification of stream quality (full bit stream quality control) and description, remote control of the camera, live communication with the reporter/camera person, and some other features we are working on that bring us closer to parity and beyond with other companies in this field. A huge benefit over our competitors is our significantly lower cost and no need to carry around expensive specialized hardware, as we do not require it.

We are probably 2-3 months away from having a revenue generating product. Although we are in conversations with one major news organization, we have found it very difficult getting in the door with other companies.

As for the compression tech, it provides an opportunity to delivery adaptive bit rate video in a single stream. It would significantly decrease bandwidth, storage and compression costs. Anyone who has large libraries of variable bitrate video and is streaming it (YouTube, Netflix, etc.) would be very interested in this.

If you knew you had several customers lined up, you'd (1) have more confidence going down that route and (2) be more confident that you were designing the product right.

I'm a co-founder at https://www.missiveapp.com, a collaborative email client (Slack meets Gmail). We've launched our open beta last January and are actively recruiting beta users.

We're a fully bootstrapped team of 4 working from Quebec city, Canada. We were able to bootstrap Missive with the $ we rake in from another project we launched three years ago called ConferenceBadge.com [1].

My question is, do you think it's a mistake to run two businesses in parallel?

Right now 85% of our time is invested in Missive even though it's bringing $0 in revenue.

Our philosophy is that if we were to look for funding, we would have to invest at least 15% of our time on fundraising and investor relationships.

We also believe that looking for investment before market fit is a recipe for disaster (need not to forget that we are not from/in the valley).

[1] https://medium.com/@plehoux/successfully-bootstrapped-a-prod...).

[2] What are chat conversations doing in an email client? Here are few examples of cool possibilities they enable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcRQhGfT620

If you can support yourselves with only 15% time on the old project, that's pretty good. You can probably get Missive off the ground with 85%. Once it's off the ground, it should be easy to get investment to focus on it full-time.

I like to think that investors aren't just a time sink, but can give useful advice about the parts of the business that are common to the other businesses they work with, like customer acquisition, hiring, and managing teams.

“With all these carefully thought collaborative features baked within an email client, Missive might very well replace your help desk, CRM, and messaging app.”

We do think there is a cost to always switch between multiple apps, but as new kids in a crowd full of big players, we’ve been wondering whether we should expect / try to catch users by “playing well with others” or be bolder and encourage them to ditch other apps?

I have developed a high-speed image encoder that runs on off-the-shelf graphics cards:

http://grokimagecompression.github.io/GrokImage/

I am working on my marketing strategy: need to decide whether to focus on selling to end-users, or licensing the software to other businesses. Second option requires more $$, and a sales team, but seems to have more potential for growing the business.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

Saving 9 boxes isn't worth an engineer spending much time hacking. You should target people with 1000 CPU boxes to switch to 100 GPU boxes (or whatever the ratio is.) Are enough customers like this to justify building a business around it?

With the rise of streaming video, there are new players entering the broadcast market, so there is an opportunity to sell an inexpensive compression/decompression system for integration into these new systems. The time to develop a JPEG 2000 codec from scratch is quite large, so decreasing time to market is another part of my value proposition.

On the server side, it looks like my focus should be on total cost.

On the client side, for example digital cinema post-production, a user typically has only a single box, so speed is important in this case.

Thanks again, I really appreciate your feedback.

Aaron

Feedback Hotline (feedbackhotline.com) is the easiest way for businesses to collect feedback. We provide the hotline for free. We intend to make money through data.

We think we need to prove three things to succeed:

1. Businesses/organizations will join 2. People will send a lot of feedback 3. We can monetize this feedback

We are currently optimizing for 1, focusing on small businesses. We believe for i, everything before i needs to be true before i can be true. We want to speak about this framework for optimization.

FBH

I see some businesses on your site. Are these all actual customers? How are they using it, and what do they think of it so far?

I'm working on a few different projects all of which I think could become viable companies but having a hard time deciding which to focus on. I've already seen interest from relevant parties in each of the separate projects.

I think the hardest one but also the one with the most growth potential would be a project I'm working on to provide management tools (similar to the stuff a ceo might use) to high level government officials. However, with the way that government contracts are handled I wonder if this is even a reasonable industry to target.

Secondly I have two different projects that focus on College Students, where I would be selling solutions to the Colleges themselves. The first project is an art application that allows users to upload art in any medium and be seen by other students. This would allow them to easily build fan bases by taking advantage of pre-existing school connections.

The other idea is similar but focuses on user generated events. It tackles the question of how does one find interesting things to do, in a new area, when you don't know anyone. And has certain measures in place to help alleviate the awkwardness of trying to join pre-existing groups.

Thanks

Selling to gov’t is hard, because they have a slow and heavyweight purchasing process. Selling to colleges is hard for the same reasons, and also they have small budgets. Selling management tools is very hard, because you have to get people to change the way they work. It’s very very hard to get senior officials to change their process.

If your business works, you’ll spend 1/3 of your waking hours for 10+ years talking to your customers. You can only sustain this if you sincerely like working with them. Whom would you rather spend that much time with?

Do you think that marketplaces for services is too mature of a market? I'm working on a site called bid2mow.com to help new lawn care companies find work. It seems like everyone is focused on come to my app/website and I'll get you a price versus an ebay model. I know task rabbit had that model and went away from it. Ebay may not be amazon but it's no business to sneeze at either.

Usually, marketplaces get started around the margins. Today, eBay sells everything but at first it was obscure collectibles. For lawn care, weather and seasonality drive the short-term market dynamics. So when there's rain or drought, the supply-demand curve shifts rapidly and that's when lawn care providers might look for work to fill up their schedules. You should look into how your marketplace might work on different kinds of days, to see if will be a useful part of the ecosystem.

All this is assuming minimal outside funding.(as a solo founder I doubt I can get funding)

I guess my plan is to play $50-$100 million game of "moneyball." Lawn care was the lowest hanging fruit to get 10k-50k/mo fees with in a year or two. Next was probably to try and go after cleaning and maybe even do a little cross selling. I'm also looking at launching www.bid2flyer.com which will help with a channel to feed businesses looking for marketing. The code is about the same for each of these and the marketing channel is what I have experience in. Obviously not a traditional way to do things.

My question for you is: what challenges are there around marketing for security-focused products? Of course, trust is a key factor, but are there other things I should consider? I'm thinking of Twitter ads, but I'm sure there are better options between that and cold emailing. Thanks again!

Free

Startup: 79$/m

Businesses: 399$/mo

Enterprise: call us

You should market this to developers directly, no ads. Find developers at startups that use AWS (tons), email them directly and say something like: hey, I have a startup, it does this, I can walk you through a scan for free myself, would love your feedback and thoughts.

Cold emailing is a good thing here. Keep it short, keep it real, offer something of value and ask advice (everyone loves giving advice).

I am one of the Co-founders of Disco Melee (https://beta.discomelee.com/hub). We are a live streaming social network designed around the needs of gamers. You could think of us like if Twitch and Facebook had a baby who liked to party and was eyeing up Reddit for a future fling.

The gamers that find us tend to rave about our overall vision, low latency and other base features like IM system, streamer storefronts, and free donate/sub buttons for all. The problem however is that (except for our hardcore believers) they don't seem stick around very long due to the pull of network effects from the established players. What strategies could you recommend for overcoming network effects to the point where we can start generating our own? Thanks!

Usually, the answer is to focus on a niche where you can do something special to be dramatically better than the incumbents, so you can dominate the niche. On your site I see Street Fighter V, which is pretty mainstream and works fine on Twitch. Is there some game you can support 10x better than Twitch?

WordBrewery (http://wordbrewery.com) teaches languages by scraping real sentences from news sites around world, then processing each sentence with an algorithm that estimates (on the basis of word frequency and other variables) how likely the sentence is to be useful to learners at different levels.

We are now a member of 1776 and participating in Microsoft BizSpark, so we are on the right track. But I am new to the startup world, and I am funding the website entirely by myself at this point using money from my day-job paycheck. What is the best way to pursue seed funding at this early stage while we are developing core features? Do I need to organize it as an LLC or corporation to get funding?

Thank you, Ryan

Yes, you will need to incorporate your company to raise seed funding. A really easy way is using Stripe Atlas: https://stripe.com/atlas - they will do all the paperwork for you to get a company legal structure.

You're probably at the stage where it makes sense to apply to accelerators. Any major accelerator program will help you with the legal structure as well as providing funding.

I'm in the idea stages of creating a website, and I have no previous experience with startups or other business; I'm only a senior in high school. The idea is that there are people who would like to own the same game on multiple platforms, and so the website would offer a discount on a game that you already own, for another platform. So, for example, if you have the Xbox One version of Rocket League, the website would offer a discount on the Steam version.

My question is: how should I gauge interest in such an idea? I don't have any real budget to speak of, and I don't know where I should go looking for people to ask.

Then, you have to figure out the common ground between what you want (every game free!) and what's possible. The particular idea you mention, discounts on games for other platforms, seems like it would require deals with the game studios, which might be hard to get. But https://www.humblebundle.com/ built a good business around bundling several games together at a big discount, and there are probably more possibilities.

The tricky part about asking your friends is that they'll tell you what they think you want to hear. The only way to find out if they'd really buy something is... sell it to them for real money. Like, actually go out and buy a PS4 and XBox copy of something, and find out what they'd pay for the two together. Or try some other combinations to see what works.

Cross-platform is interesting. Are there large installations that need to migrate between Intel and ARM boxes seamlessly? That's the sort of feature that might make someone switch distros.

I am in the midst of creating a new platform as a service product while working at a large tech company. I am not quite willing to reveal the platform to the world yet, but it is a new take on backend-as-a-service platforms that I think will be very intriguing to developers.

My question is not specific to my product and instead pertains to the situation of trying to develop a startup while working full time at a large company. I have done 0 work on the product on my employers time and am not concerned with that aspect. I am more interested in your thoughts on when would be the ideal time to leave my current post to work full time on the startup? My biggest concern is leaving the financial stability of my current job when I have no capital lined up to support a startup. I have already launched a closed beta of the platform and am getting feedback from a small set of users and plan to open the beta up to the world in the coming months. In your experience have you ever seen VC's or Angel's be willing to make a deal with a startup founded by a full time employee of a different company. If I were able to secure funding, I would be absolutely be willing to move on and work full time on the startup but making that leap without funding would be a difficult decision. Any words of wisdom you can offer here would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

We're developing a publishing network. Individuals and groups can start magazines. Users can read on a timeline and interact like in a social network. What's new? Now anyone can get publishing infrastructure as good as a well funded online magazine. That means lots of unique publications in verticals that well-funded magazines & newspapers cannot do.

What's the best strategy to lure in people to use the service? How do we make money?

Have you started talking to users yet? Is the software usable?

We're a link shortener called Credhot and our business model is to syndicate (potentially sponsored) content on an interstitial page. We also rev-share with our users based on the number of visits. The biggest hurdle to this strategy has been building an interstitial people want to share with their friends. Here is an example of our latest attempt at that, leading to "coinmarketcap.com": https://crd.ht/H7TLMpn.

Our volume is low enough that we haven't tested syndicating sponsored content on that page. Right now we're mostly focused on "building a product that users love" but at some point we will need to strike a deal with a publisher. When should those conversations start happening? We're currently bootstrapping but will want to raise capital in the next few months as we're growing (we've doubled since the last HN office hours ~34 days ago). Should we wait until after securing funding?

What's the nature of the publisher deal you are thinking about? Generally, you should start talking to publishers when you can pay them a meaningful amount of revenue. How much is meaningful? Depends on the publisher. For a small blog, it might be a hundred dollars. For the New York Times, it's probably a million dollars.

The money in a publisher deal flows opposite of the direction you described. They would pay us to get their content syndicated on the interstitial. From my limited knowledge, ad sales for bigger publishers start from 10k and go up, which means we need to guarantee (at $1 CPM) 10M impressions. Currently the service does about 3M monthly impressions, so we're not quite there yet.

What you said about CPMs and minimum ad buys is true. The solution, it seems to me, is to simply go to smaller publishers. There are a million small blogs out there that might pay you $100 for some content marketing. The thing to think about is what your unique value proposition can be that will get them to spend their ad dollars with you. Perhaps it's something to do with the full-page sized ad format. It reminds me (from the advertiser standpoint) of the StumbleUpon model, which is very successful for certain kinds of sites.

Ex. http://genius.it/www.nytimes.com breaks vs. http://genius.it/www.wikipedia.org works fine.

I don't know that it's particularly useful to think about business models and pricing strategies disembodied from a specific business. What is it that you predict exactly? Who is the customer and what is the value you bring them?

I've developed a custom toolchain while writing an electronic book[0]. The toolchain automates the conversion of markdown and media into a scrollable "app-novel". Initially I'd hoped to earn income from the book itself, but the naiveness of that idea is quickly becoming apparent.

As a pivot, I am developing a public interface for the toolchain, with the idea of permitting others to write books in the same style. Unfortunately it is not ready to be demonstrated. Nonetheless, this feels like a untapped industry to me, and I wonder what your opinions or suggestions might be.

Thank you.

[0]https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ca.goeiebook.m...

WHAT WE DO: www.wiredhere.com

We integrate every social activity (university created or student created) happening within an university into a mobile app. The students can attend and provide feedback through the app; we than take the analytics that's created and provide it to universities so they can assess and compare themselves to other universities.

QUESTION:

Do you think it's more optimal approach this as a SAAS for the university since we provide them a brand new web platform to make event creation easier and so they can reach students in a faster way? OR be a non-saas and introduce this to the students first and let the universities catch on afterwards, and than work with the university so they can use our web platform and mobile app?

Also, what is your opinion on our concept?

There have been a lot of failures in this space. The big problem is getting quality listings. It's a fair bit of work for event organizers to post their event on multiple platforms, and they're probably already posting on Facebook and a campus mailing list, so it's a hard battle to make them list on yours too. And if you don't have most of the listings, users will just check Facebook instead of you.

I am working on a marketplace through which publishers and journalists can sell the ability to be quoted and linked to in an article to the highest bidder. A realtor, for example, might be willing to pay to be quoted and linked to in an article about how a city's real estate market has been accelerating.

My question is how to get started with marketing it. While the growth hacking crowd would say to simply spam a bunch of reporters to get inventory, I have found in other ventures that people absolutely hate receiving any form of unsolicited email with any kind of pitch.

To solve that, I would consider starting in a very small vertical. You could pick one small town and their local businesses (geographical vertical), or pick one industry and go deep into that industry. If you start in a small vertical, the marketing becomes easier because you have a very targeted pitch that doesn't feel spammy.

About your original question on marketing, though, there is no alternative to talking to users. Before you start pitching people, though, you could go talk to journalists and ask them for feedback on the idea. You can ask them if they would value this service, and what else they wish someone would build. Rather than just selling them, you should try to build a relationship so you can get feedback from them over time.

Problem: in the midst of running everything, I do all the coding slowly by myself, and the urgent coding todo list has exploded while some of our sites age. What should I do?

Thank you!

Tip: if you're in the Bay Area, there'll be a lot of developer/artists here this weekend: http://grayarea.org/event/deepdream-the-art-of-neural-networ...

We're generating $250k of income, a bit more than our present expenses, largely based on the value of our audience.

Being a non-profit also, very importantly, speaks to our motives, which mostly are to fulfill a mission to make important art more accessible to the public, rather than to get bigger and enrich the people involved.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11142402

We have been working on http://growthzilla.com - a data driven growth solution for salons for a little more than a year now. We have paying customers since launch and have zero cancellations. Our customers love the product for 3 reasons (1) ease of use (2) effectiveness in driving growth and (3) customer service

The problem: we are growing slower than we would want. Is there anything you'd like to suggest?

health and beauty trade shows?

buy mailing list of new salons?

Can you work out a deal with a franchise company to be their official software?

How well are online ads and referral working? How does the referral program work?

It sounds like there are a bunch of channels you haven't tried yet. Here are a few ideas.

Standard channels: 1) Sales. Yes, you call up the all the salons and ask them if they need Growthzilla. This is still the way most things are sold to local businesses like salons. You can try email, phone, even in person.

2) Content marketing. My guess is that there are a lot of salons, and not a whole lot people writing about how to run them. Maybe you can become the go-to place not just for software, but for the knowledge salon owners need to run their business well.

3) Improve your website. It looks like there's no way to just try the software, and there isn't much info about it on the site. Having something other than "request demo" may improve conversions.

Wackier ideas: 1) There are lots of software options for salons that do something similar. It's not clear from your site what makes you unique. What is it? If there's nothing truly special, maybe you need to change the product.

2) Channel partnerships. Who are the big companies selling products to hair salons? Could you get them to resell Growthzilla and split the revenue?

3) Affiliate sales. Are there affiliate sales people who sell other products to salons (scissors, hair product, etc)? If so, can you have them sell Growthzilla too?

4) Organize free conferences / meetups for salon owners to learn about how they can tech-enable their business.

On Desktop:

That black bar at top is bulkier than it needs to be. You can try moving 'the merrier way' from under 'Growthzilla' to the right of it instead. This would allow you to slip it down a bit. There's also no branding. You don't need to hire a marketing company or anything to do this, just try to get a common theme going because right now your colors are all over the place. The slider is moving a little too fast. If you extended the time by about 15-20% I think that's be great for slower readers like myself. The initial call to action under the slider is good. Like snowmaker said, definitely explain more about your product and what sets it apart. Again with the colors, your icons next to your features are purple/blue and some other text is too, but then you have orange buttons and your logo is orange and yellow. I would probably just stick to orange/yellow since they're in your logo and you can couple this with various shades of gray. The purple/blue completely clashes with the orange/yellow. For the testimonials, your slider isn't centered.

On Mobile:

Everything looks much better on mobile than on the desktop. I see nothing you really need to change here, other than the branding/theme/colors. If you're using Bootstrap, it's really easy to use your current logo for mobile and a more horizontal logo on desktop using by using the hide/visible classes(.visible-md-block, hidden-md).

Hope this was informative, keep on grinding!

I'm building games and tools for language learning. While talking to users, I asked them what language learning tools they wished existed when they were studying in the past. A lot of them talked about a tool that lets them talk to native speakers of their target language online.

I know I should build something users want, but there are plenty of tools that let you do this (including a YC company, cambly) and I don't want to build another one. So what do I do with their answer to my question?

When users tell you this, do you show them the existing products you know of? If your hypothesis is right that the space is saturated, then they should start using them right away. But I suspect that they won't, which means that there's more left to be done.

I'm cofounder of a start up within the beauty space. We have small but active group of users that love creating and consuming a unique type of content only available on our platform. The revenue stream is to eventually sell tangible products so we would like to make use of all this content to convert purchases.

Is there a way we can test out how well the conversion rate could work without shipping tangible products? We don't yet have capital to stockpile.

Even when you eventually have your own inventory, it's worth throwing in affiliate links in case you discover that people watching your beauty content actually buy something else more often than your own products.

We had that thought as well but we're from Southeast Asia with most of our traffic originating from here. Only some of the products related to our site actually ship here from Amazon and incurs international shipping costs so it might hinder orders. We'll still give it a shot since it can give us an idea of how the conversions do.

Would you happen to have any further insights on if affiliate marketing really works especially when it comes to visual content?

For beauty products, affiliate marketing works great. That is how the e-commerce world should work: you show users the results they can get with such-and-such product, and you get a percentage of sales.

Right, didn't think about sales for the sake of getting data. Currently we have a way to map out the products our users use most and made an assumption that these are the ones that they will buy. Would be interesting to compare the data and see if it matches. Hope the conversion works out well once we activate it.

Also just to share that showing users the results they can get with these products is exactly what we do and its in a visual manner, especially since this industry is driven by imagery.

Would love to continue this conversation in a private space if there’s any chance for it. Anyhow thanks for your input and we’ll be sending in an application for YC!

http://nestify.io founder here. We're improving PHP CMS hosting (WordPress, Drupal) with better scaling, on-page optimizations, better security. We have paying customers and ~100 die-hard users that will be really sad / lose revenues if we shut down.

Should we focus on building our brand while scaling or switch to whitelabel and API services and partner with hosting providers?

About your question on whitelabeling: I wouldn't be too dogmatic about this either way. It's easy to make it a question about your company's mission, but it's more of an ROI decision. If you're seeing strong demand from companies who will pay you well for a white-label version, and your software is written in a way that makes it easy to build one, you should do that. Otherwise, it may just be a distraction.

The other thing that jumps out to me about your business is that the economics don't seem to match with the usage. You're serving a lot of traffic but not making as much revenue as I would expect, especially considering that you have "die-hard users" that love the service. Perhaps you can find a way to get them to pay more money, or find other customers that can afford to pay more?

We are now adding tiered pricing plans and charging for based on usage. I'll make sure to add that in our current YC application too.

As for the shop itself, the photographs need improvement – I set up a small lighted space on my kitchen counter and am working on this. Shop: http://zebbles.etsy.com

Maybe you could start a blog offering gift advice for clueless techies, or even become a gift concierge, offering to help individuals find the perfect gift for a small fee.

Could your R1 be significantly better than what's out there somehow?

I spent some time on your site and it took me a long time to understand what your tool does. You need to make it a lot clearer. Here's a good exercise for this. 1) Find someone you haven't told your idea to 2) Show them your home page. Let them read it for 30 seconds. 3) Close your laptop. Then, have them explain what Grobyk is in their own words.

If they can't do that, you need to improve your home page.

I'm the founder of WebArcs (http://webarcs.com) an RSS aggregate for discovering and subscribing to websites. I'm just starting out and I want to see this be the way people surf the web in the future.

I was wondering which demographics I ought to target too too help build a strong user base?

For now you should focus on finding any users that want to use it. The way to do that is to try to distill the value proposition. Why would people use WebArcs instead of going to an aggregator (Reddit, HN), another news reader (Pulse, flipboard), or content sites directly?

Then, show it some people and get some feedback. See if you can get people to use it as their default way to surf the web. If you can get even one person to do that (other than yourself), you've made some progress.

I'll try and find the value proposition and see if I can get that one user.