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Would you like to talk about startups and entrepreneurship? I would! This is really just an interest check. Here are some ideas for things we could discuss, and could become part of the foundations for an OP: -How to validate ideas -Getting seed money / raising money -Incubators -Uniquely goony ways to help out (e.g. SA-Mart) -Connecting people and services: outsourcing, recruiting, networking, and other fun
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Sep 20, 2011 22:36
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_areaman posted:Doband I can see the upside here. One person dreams of traveling to Europe and it turns into a group of 5 people planning a trip next summer. Monetizes super-easily with travel companies, language schools/software, or the aforementioned 'action lifestyle' brands for stuff like ski trips. This could be a pretty lightweight Facebook app, but maybe that's not aiming high enough for these guys. *shrug*
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Sep 22, 2011 21:37
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Hey dudes! So, discussion seems to be somewhat happening. How about we turn this into a serious thread? Aside from possibilities I mentioned in my OP, here are some more things that seem to have come up: -Life in a startup -Follow the progress of (optionally, goon) startups -Hey, is my idea any good? FAQ These are a lot of points. Should I remake a thread with placeholders?
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Oct 4, 2011 23:42
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OG KUSH BLUNTS posted:I came up with a start up that had a pretty good idea and met with a couple of VCs that were interested only to have my hopes dashed when a established company came out with a similar service. Ive been trying to motivate myself to write out a new business plan on a modified service of the original plan, but I just can't find the motivation. Hey, just be thankful that happened early enough to where no actual damage was done to you.
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Oct 5, 2011 01:02
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sry4partying posted:Our site is here: http://namella.com/ I like it! I'll chime in with four quick things after a 30-second look over: 1. Play with the tagline a bit and see what works best. If I'm understanding the value prop right, I'd suggest "An available domain name + matching professional logo for $199." 2. Is that competitive pricing? I vaguely recall reading about services that specialize in naming things on the very high-end, like massive consumer electronics products or new pharmaceuticals. I wouldn't be surprised to see if someone were doing just this part of it for the bootstrap market. So, is a name and a 99designs-ish logo worth it for $199? Am I saving money? Are you guys good at this naming thing or are you just smoking the ganj once a week and buying up domains? 3. About domains: can you offer added TLDs (.net, etc.) and common typos/misspellings? Can you ensure that the name won't be fighting for Google PageRank? 4. The grid of available names/logos may be sending me in the wrong direction. Is that your inventory of available names and that's what I get to run with right now? I'm much more interested in having a quick conversation with you about what my startup idea is and paying you $X for a clever name/domain and logo within a week. All that said, I think you're solving a legit problem and someone may buy into this.
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Oct 13, 2011 00:15
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sry4partying posted:3. We don't want to offer any pre-branded TLDs that isnt a .com. We will work with a custom job if the customer wants it. On one point, I have an unanswered question. On the other, I have an opinion: 3. If I give you $200 to buy fotouplodr.com, I don't want there to exist a competing domain (such as the .net variant) OR another service with the same name that already exists in Google results. Are you taking these potential customer needs into consideration with each domain name you offer? 4. OK, so having been introduced to BrandBucket, I see that they offer a similar service to your 'phase one,' and you're trying to undercut them. Which is fine - I find their designs more appealing but much more expensive. If you want to undercut those guys, that's cool, but I think the bigger opportunity is in what you're calling 'phase two,' and you could instead create a portfolio of clients akin to any web designer's portfolio instead of showing your inventory. (Edit for clarity: I think you should move straight into phase two as quickly as possible.) Lastly, now that Konstantin has brought up the IP question, you guys may want to make sure you're digging deeply. Hiplure, PayPleaser and MoneyTilt all called to mind Shopify due to the font, and MoneyTilt's little icon thing looks like it could have come from a stock library. snagger fucked around with this message at 18:32 on Oct 13, 2011 |
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Oct 13, 2011 18:28
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Konstantin posted:One interesting idea in that area would be a premium car shopping service. You sign up, and tell them what you want in a car. The site searches all cars advertised online, and recommends cars that meet your criteria, factoring in things like ratings of certain models and pricing guides. I love this idea. Top Gear in the UK is already halfway there with a Car Chooser that recommends models to look at, but doesn't link to specific cars on sale now on the used market: http://www.topgear.com/uk/car-chooser-launch Their semi-curated search (by listing at the top their best-reviewed cars) already rounds your search down to a good car, if that's what you want, and from there you can add more value by 'fixing' so many other parts of the process like the Steps 1-5 you listed. I like the idea of a curated search, where you recommend the consensus 'better' cars in a particular segment (trivial example: Fit or Golf over a Mini). A few things that also popped into my head: -You could do a deal with a reputable source to get your own car reviews in place. AOL Autos / Autoblog is the first that comes to mind, but there are certainly others. Top Gear makes it really easy with numerical ratings, but some form of content just intuitively feels important to me. Maybe I'm wrong. -Good luck getting a reputable car shipping service on board at such a large scale without creating huge headaches for more than 1% of people who use that particular service. That could create customer service problems almost on the same scale as Airbnb. Serious car forum readers - VWVortex, AI and the like - tend to get one-way flights and hotels instead. That may be worth taking into account. -You could handle financing in one of two ways: deals with companies/banks who want to offer their loan services based on the user's credit history, orrrrrrrrr do the unbiased thing and get some content just like Edmunds' car buying guide, which will inevitably recommend a credit union loan.
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Oct 17, 2011 16:57
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thegoonofaudio posted:Scanning documents Scanning documents by itself is way too niche. The logical solution to that would be to get your relative a scanner for Xmas. But, if you wanted to either start a small local biz of digitizing anything (photos, docs, home movies) or start a local house call computer repair service that offered scanning on the side, you could probably do well for yourself (among an an elderly/computer-illiterate clientele). There's no shortage of A/T threads or Reddit AMAs about that kind of thing.
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Nov 10, 2011 03:36
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slapsack posted:Anyone dealt with something like this before? Strictly legally speaking? No, there's nothing these companies could get away with, but that may not necessarily stop a bigger company from trying to harass you by threatening a lawsuit. As always, if you have serious concerns, retain a lawyer. Non-strictly legally speaking, you'd of course be burning all manner of bridges and these companies (and the companies they know) may never hire you again as a contractor. Aside from those factors, if you think those companies' products suck, and you know how to improve them, and you think the companies involved would never do it right, it may be worth trying.
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Dec 4, 2011 21:05
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KITTAH posted:Of course, it would be awesome if we can eventually give out our own loans. I have actually not looked into that process. Will do now! You'd be getting into the finance business, so say hello to unbelievable regulation. Best not to enter this unless you come from that industry. As it stands, it looks like you want to collect a finder's fee for matchmaking students with private lenders. You may still run up against regulation here, as a great deal of study abroad programs are paid to the student's home university using existing student aid, but even if you don't there are a great deal of places students can already look between their university's financial aid office, study abroad office, existing lenders, etc. Not to rain all over your idea, but I'd also be pessimistic that any private lender would want to do a deal with you. They already have their own marketing departments to acquire customers, and as Nam Taf points out, so far you bring nothing to the table in the subprime area. IMO, if you want to build a 'business' from matchmaking students and lenders, it may be a good course of action to just start a blog and get into the content business instead.
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Dec 26, 2011 22:10
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Analytic Engine posted:Hacker News and TechCrunch. They're a great pair of communities, but you're smart to perceive that they're not without their flaws. HN is generally a positive, helpful community. It isn't hiding some sort of crazy agenda or seedy underbelly. If you want to know more about specifically entering the field, read Paul Graham's articles in the YC library (somewhere within ycombinator.com) - there's some useful and very motivational stuff in there. Better yet, read the published books by the YC partners. Debates tend to sperg out very quickly, but that seems to me to be a common side effect of upvote/downvote moderation systems (see: Reddit). Oh, and don't expect jokes to go over well. TC is a different story. People who follow it better than me can probably provide better detail, but it's historically (since 2010) been an AOL blog whose beat was what company was going where. Simple formula and basically reliable information. In 2011 the site turned into a public airing of dirty laundry once the site's original founder was fired by Ariana Huffington. The staff basically turned over around the same time and the departing writers left drama bomb career suicide notes published for the Web to see. People in the entrepreneurship "scene," who are never to be trusted, whine about TC's credibility having totally gone downhill. Two things you need to know about the site: 1. Regardless of drama, the site is essentially an AOL blog whose job is to turn a profit by writing a post every 20 minutes. This profit motive affects content in a way that it doesn't at HN. 2. From the perspective of YC founders, the site is (or was) a free outlet for press releases announcing new companies as they finish YC's Demo Day or finish raising a VC round of capital. It's like an unwritten YC perk: everyone gets one TC post to try to grab attention. That in mind, I generally just Google "<company> techcrunch" to find out the basics on a startup that I've never heard of, and that's about it. That's all just my take, though.
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Mar 20, 2012 06:44
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jjttjj posted:I feel that it would be hugely beneficial to have some sort of intermediate page with a few questions, even if they are just contrived or simple as "what is your email address/phone number" or "enter a very brief description of your business", or whatever. Anything besides "pay us first and THEN we'll take care of the rest". Are forms even the right way to go with this? Assuming this is as conversation-intensive as I think it is, it feels to me more like you should just stick up a 1-800 number and go straight to a sales team.
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Jul 3, 2012 13:31
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hello dog posted:I need some advice. Negotiate what you're willing to give up for what you need to get. There aren't guidelines for this kind of thing. I also don't know why you're approaching competitors to pitch them, but I trust you know your scene better than I. Since this is porn, and possibly an open marketplace, you better have all kinds of legal work done regarding copyright and legality of actors. Talk to a lawyer sooner than later.
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Jul 15, 2012 01:50
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swyys posted:Hey all! Delurk and hopefully a contribution as well. Sweet! Thanks for posting. You've already got my brother's classes up in the music category. Thanks for that! 
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Dec 19, 2012 10:54
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Speaking of my brother's classes, can you guys critique our landing pages? http://ude.my/bre63 http://ude.my/buaaj The only content we can really change is the introductory video, text, and what videos are viewable for free. We haven't really done much to improve these (outside a tiny amount of SEO work) since we put the classes up, but I'd like to try to optimize the content before making a SA-Mart thread.
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Dec 20, 2012 10:09
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swyys posted:we have teacher pages on the site. Are those something that you think your brother, as instructor, would like to have access to for editing? Yes! I handle all the online stuff so PM me with details. Thanks, btw, for the awesome feedback. We're going to reshoot the introductory material and run a sale in the next few days. Hopefully we'll do a better job showing off what's unique.
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Dec 21, 2012 11:00
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Has anyone tried putting videos behind a paywall for their site, perhaps even in a non-porn fashion? I'm hosting classes on Udemy right now but might need to set up my own site if some institutional deals go through.
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Mar 17, 2013 05:46
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Hey dudes, can I get one upvote here? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5404889 That'll put me back in the 'Ask' heading and hopefully get some critiques coming in.
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Mar 20, 2013 03:49
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Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:They check referrers and voting up from a direct link. You gotta link the newest page and get people to find and upvote it from that for it to have a major effect. Ah! Duly noted for, well, sometime in the distant future. Thanks!
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Mar 20, 2013 14:01
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I'm trying to find something. Maybe an OSS person here would know. For a new project I basically want to build a porn site without the porn - a set of videos (they're educational!) behind a subscription paywall. I've looked around for out-of-the-box software to do this and the closest I've come is Mediacore - a system that functionally works but is ugly, not customizable, and may be prohibitively expensive (I don't even know - I have to talk to their sales peeps). If there were an appropriate combination of open-source packages I'd consider building it myself. Can anyone drop some science on me?
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Jun 2, 2013 02:19
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AA is for Quitters posted:A local/social startup disrupting basic human interactions Prooooobably talk to a human in that bureaucracy of township/county/state/etc. Bureaucrats, in my experience, are pretty decent at pointing you to the appropriate other parts of their own bureaucracy. edit: Wait, she has family in the construction business? Houses have to be zoned residential as well, amigo. Go ask them.
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Jun 9, 2013 10:32
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Sorry to bring some rain to this parade. So you're pairing local students with local teachers? Hello Groupon circa 2009. It's not surprising that your first deal was with a local deals site that rhymes with Groupon. Nor is it surprising that your pivots into events organizing take on the air of LivingSocial's poorly-ending Adventures vertical combined or the bookings/helpdesk/payment thing that Groupon tried and failed last year before pivoting into ecommerce. Those seeking piano or art lessons will always hit Craigslist or ask their social networks, and there's no room for a middleman. Cooking classes and the like are date activities and not things that bring in recurring revenue. Have you considered matching people and letting them teach online? Popexpert and Google Helpouts just sprang up, like, this month. Investors are going to want in on that party right now.
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Aug 23, 2013 11:44
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Any of you guys using Reddit for marketing purposes? Our posts did well but we now have some people who perceive us as competition, and our posts are being downvoted into oblivion as soon as they go up. Need to learn how to play this game, and I'm all ears for advice.
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Sep 16, 2013 19:48
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danse macabre posted:I've posted the link on a few Chinese forums, but I'm looking for better ways to build traffic. I'd also like to consider monetizing it, although there's apparently not enough text content for Adsense. Any general tips? I think you'll find the blogging/SEO thread helpful: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3447030
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Sep 17, 2013 14:48
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Since danse macabre mentioned it, do we want a really big and informative OP? I'm personally scared that the range of options for a 'startup' are so wide, and there's so much necessary information, that the thread would just devolve into a debate over what deserves to be in the OP. Your thoughts?
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Sep 17, 2013 14:49
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Anyone have suggestions for terms and conditions? My app is now in closed beta. I need to hire a lawyer for company formation purposes anyway, but if there's boilerplate or adaptable T&C's I'd love to know more.
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Nov 4, 2013 02:26
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FateFree posted:The first is a product based business called QuikCallus (https://www.quikcallus.com), which is a non-toxic glue used to create calluses for musicians and the like. I started out with adwords, which was successful in the sense that I made back the money I put into it and no more. I eventually ran out of stock which means its not sustainable going forward. I've halted ads and sell about 1 bottle a day - but I'd love to get the product into stores, I'm just not sure where to start. Based on what you've wrote, I have a suggestion for each: -For QuikCallus, you can probably lower your costs and turn this into a profitable business. You clearly have a market there if you were able to stock out. I'd suggest three things to try, if it's financially feasible: 1. Order a larger amount of your product to lower your unit cost. 2. Improve your Adwords performance to target a lower CPC. There's almost always room to optimize entire campaigns or even specific keywords. 3. If you're getting lots of hits (say, tens of thousands a month), use A/B testing to improve your conversion rate, thereby lowering your cost per user acquisition. -Is Tracktacular always the same service, despite the various use cases? This sounds like a case for masses of small SEO niches like what patio11 does with Bingo Card Creator. Look at your analytics logs to find keywords that are leading users to you, then hire freelancers to cheaply create a unique landing page for each keyword. Outsource as many keyword/landing-page combos as possible to create yourself a long tail of users where you're almost never competing on SEO.
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Nov 23, 2013 01:26
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Golden Bee posted:Seeking information on business management; specifically, turning 100k in investment capital into a digital ad agency with steady staff, office space, and ongoing contracting work. I've done something similar before but, besides putting the principals in touch with my tax advisor, who should I talk to? If you've done something similar before, what do you need help with?
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Jul 12, 2014 01:40
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Golden Bee posted:My thing is a consultancy that didn't solicit outside funds, so it's organizationally similar but I need to prep the proposal for investors (then oversee resultant funds and operations). I am hopelessly confused by this post.
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Jul 12, 2014 20:19
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I Love You! posted:Does anyone know the steps I should be taking to secure this debt if we are dissolving the company? Do I need to put the breaks on this process, or can I transfer the debt to myself without losing the ability to collect on it? Sounds like a question that could be answered by a lawyer for the price of his time on a phone call. I'm in Texas; PM me if you need a guy.
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Dec 20, 2014 18:17
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guidoanselmi posted:e: If you're bored, come and take a personality test @ https://www.nanaya.co My test hit the nail on the head. The results read like a Myers-Briggs test. I wonder how it would help the love life..
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Jan 27, 2015 01:41
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Sepist posted:If I wanted to accelerate our growth, what should my next move be? We're in the new york city area. My developer and I still have full time jobs, I can't consider quitting until I can take at least 100k a year out of the business for my salary but my job gives me a lot of time to work on my business due to the nature of it. Accelerators (YC, Techstars etc.) are there exactly for the purpose you need, accelerating growth online, but the top-tier ones are unlikely to be interested in fantasy sports or interested in getting you to a 100k/year salary. It sounds like you could be on the right path on your own, where you can keep the profits as your salary. Is the free money giveaway profitable? And do those users stay active after getting free money? If the answer to those is yes, then take the buddy's money and off you go.
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Mar 17, 2015 17:00
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Sepist posted:Edit2: And of course as I type this my original interested investor got back to me, so it looks like we may be receiving 300k - 1mil if all things go right in the next few weeks. I came back to say that the news is showing I was wrong: http://recode.net/2015/03/18/draft-raises-3-5-million-to-bring-fantasy-sports-to-the-casual-fan/ Good luck with the fund raise!
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Mar 18, 2015 17:20
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A Flaming Chicken posted:I'm interested to hear how people have validated their ideas, and thoughts on this one. I took an unorthodox approach and validated an education site with a series of Udemy courses. I wouldn't recommend it. While it did answer the "do people want this?" question, it has created a series of enduring headaches between SEO and Udemy's business model messing with our revenue.
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May 13, 2015 05:39
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Pfox posted:I am toying with the idea of starting a small business. I have ideas, proficiency in the technical skills I think I would need to build a product, an OCD-like focus on projects I'm interested in, and a bit of seed money to get me going. The area I feel like I'm lacking is business fundamentals; accounting, marketing, etc. This is obviously a big deal, and something I need to confront before I decide to go down this path. Those are pretty solid. I particularly like The Art of the Start. I also recommend the writings of @patio11 (see him on Twitter or HN; blog at kalzumeus.com), especially if you're partial to bootstrapping rather than seeking VC funding. Get some familiarity with lean methodology to help you focus on the right things. You could probably watch The Marshmallow Challenge (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0_yKBitO8M) faster than reading any of the official Lean books. As soon as you're not hopelessly lost on the fundamentals, start building the thing. Business is mostly applied common sense.
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May 29, 2015 05:32
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There must be some way to arrange that, given that SV/SF is full of young engineers who don't have the cash to pay for taxes on their stakes in unicorn startups. Also, I'm obliged to recommend that you not work with these fellows. Assuming a consumer app startup not involving hardware or infrastructure and doesn't apparently have pre-existing employees, a half-million should be enough to develop a prototype and get it out the door. What did the money go to? Should you still wish to work with these fellows, you may consider that without your help, the value of their work/investment is zero. They own a sinking ship and you're selling life rafts. That's worth only 10%?
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Jan 19, 2016 17:34
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_areaman posted:I want to harvest more money out of my users. I don't know your app, but financial + affiliate seems like it'd be a great combination that's compatible with above-board products and techniques. Can you copy Mint's model of linking to major banks/credit cards/insurance? Or can you tailor mobile ads to these? Those sectors have crazy high ad spend.
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Feb 2, 2016 16:06
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