Ask YC: Status of your startup

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=108115

by robmnl • 18 years ago

48 91 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Hi! Want to get some conversations going here. How's your startup doing right now?

Any planned launch dates?

What's your startup anyway?

We're quite busy with ours, we were ready to release a beta, but choose to redesign and refactor things again. What about yours?

eusman2• 18 years ago

how about answering your own questions first!

robmnl13• 18 years ago

We're really excited to launch. We kept pushing dates back, as there is just more work than expected. We're working on a complete ondemand solution. So instead of signing up for project management, crm, invoicing separately, we'll provide an all in one solution. Plus it's a platform, so it's extensible. We're working to go into private beta this month.

eusman2• 18 years ago

i already upmodded the thread before making the comment, so it wasnt meant to be hostile, if it felt like that.

pre-launch phase for a startup its very exciting time. Hopefully you will keep up your work with the same mood right after launching, and won't get dissapointed by the attack of anyone or non-immediate massive response of your application.

for everyone else, i think its interesting to pariticipate in commenting other startups as it helps them kept focused also in their starup efforts, so i suppose we wil hear from you again here.

wumi2• 18 years ago

as a person who manages all that for a small business, that would certainly be a life saver.

but what about the salesforce users? you must be thinking exportability is key (entering in thousands of contacts again would not be enjoyable)

I vote on making a salesforce or google apps application that leverages your information already stored there into a super all-in-one

kogir• 18 years ago

you should release the beta. Then you'll at least have user feedback for the redesign.

robmnl13• 18 years ago

The redesign is really a user interface design, not looks. We'll confuse users too much if we completely change the whole thing on them. But we're close to launching anyway.

stillmotion• 18 years ago

Built the system, but then we realized we were hitting a common demographic. Went back to the drawing board and begun to rewrite it. We're close to private beta.

robmnl13• 18 years ago

What are you guys doing? Even just roughly.

motoko2• 18 years ago

Threw out something as fast possible to credibly sell our product, we've made some sales, and now we're going back and fixing everything / adding infrastructure & features.

We also secured a small seed round of funding ---enough to last us a few months.

robmnl13• 18 years ago

What's your startup?

How do you deal with the loss of flexibility once launching? You really can't make big architectural changes after launching in some cases. I.e., when were you confident enough that it was a good time to launch?

motoko2• 18 years ago

This isn't the place to discuss the business itself, but our product isn't software. We simply conduct business over the internet.

So, for example, instead of writing/installing/debugging a shopping cart, we just posted Google Checkout buttons. Instead of creating a database backend for orders, we have the form submit to email. Instead of creating the most beautiful website with the best copy, we made something that looked OK and populated it with some basic content.

secorp2• 18 years ago

We are doing online backup and storage. We have an open source project (http://allmydata.org) that we are building a commercial product (http://allmydata.com) on top of. We have a fair amount of beta users (10K) and have our new architecture beta release due out mid-February. We will then be fixing any major issues, testing usability, and then going full release.

We've had good feedback from our users which has helped shape our usability and also which features were important to them (like having ftp access for example).

Hope this helps, Peter

robmnl13• 18 years ago

Hey Peter, how did you promote your beta to get to 10k users?

Appreciate your sharing.

secorp2• 18 years ago

Currently all word-of-mouth. For our commercial product we will be doing some standard key-word advertising and an interview round about the company and project.

One thing I meant to mention earlier, we are self-funded so far.

bootload• 18 years ago

"... how did you promote your beta to get to 10k users? ..."

Firstly reliable data backup is a real problem. Anything that can help solve this for users is going to attract attention. Writing your own backup script that reliably backs up your data with RSync and remote servers for example is doable but wastes time and effort. Secondly you can download the software, try it out, change it. But most consumers are not developers and are not interested in playing with software and hardware themselves so they look for a company that provides the service.

So the key bits here are

- Solving a users problem

- Show don't tell.

- Provide a service that users can use if they don't do it themselves.

- Have something that will continually attract new users (articles, software, discussion, etc)

The technical bits make for a good read and can be found here ~ http://allmydata.org/source/tahoe/trunk/docs/architecture.tx...

gibsonf1• 18 years ago

We have select users now and plan to open up the private beta in about 3 weeks - our deadline as we have a presentation that day. We've been coding for a year now, and we're excited to be on the verge of finally raising the curtain. :) http://streamfocus.com

robmnl13• 18 years ago

yes I remember you :) lmk when you launch

DarrenStuart• 18 years ago

1. its going ok but its just me at the moment and its self funded, I am working 50/50 client work and startup work at the moment.

2. first product very soon, just need to do the final tweak and get some beta testing done to make sure its easy to use and hard to break :p

3. small simple web apps, I plan to release more than 1 app under my companies brand.

4. I just did a redesign of the first app and am happy with the look now. I am also working on tech demos for other products in my portfolio.

Next week I should release my first app.

rokhayakebe2• 18 years ago

one month away from launch. improved messaging system

robmnl13• 18 years ago

can you go into more specifics? just so I get it

rokhayakebe2• 18 years ago

maybe email is really boring

bhb5• 18 years ago

We just launched seekler.com on January 7th. Seekler is a collection of community-built lists that make it really fast and easy to find new stuff like movies, music, etc.

We had some good early traffic (from a few great links to one of our lists), but unfortunately things have slowed down a lot in the past few weeks. We think the basic concept is great, but we're wondering if the UI is keeping people from really digging into our content. We're going to probably release a slightly tweaked interface on Monday. And, as always, we're always looking for feedback on how we could make Seekler better.

robmnl13• 18 years ago

Good work on the app. The ui is really good, I don't know if that's an issue. Do you have a business model?

bhb5• 18 years ago

Yes, basically it'll be supported via advertising and affiliate partnerships once we can get traffic going. The issue we've heard from users (including the news.yc community - thanks everyone for the feedback!) is that the site looks a little "spammy." The redesign will keep most things the same, just show a bit more about each item (including a description and some reviews).

aaroneous4• 18 years ago

I took a look at Seekler again, and I'm a little confused on who your audience is.

The home page appears to be a generic destination, as in, "if you want lists of stuff, we've got 'em" But, I don't think people just want lists of "stuff", they want lists of a few things that are relevant to them.

For example, I may be a movie buff who's very excited about the 2008 anticipated movie list, but charities, books, and comic books are of no use to me. It seems that it'd be better to offer the data on your site targeted to the respective niche audiences that they serve in an easily consumable way (FB App, Blog widget, etc), rather than expecting that there are people who just crave information because it's in a list format.

I'm generally a design snob, but I think your UI is fine for the stage you're at (though it sort of reminds me of a domain landing page). My advice is to refine what the value you're actually adding is, and then find ways to appropriately serve those people looking for your utility.

bhb5• 18 years ago

Good question regarding our audience. We don't really intend to make Seekler a place you would visit every day (as you noticed, we have quite a few gaps in our content, so for any niche, you'll probably only find a few lists that interest you right now) - instead, we're trying to make it resource, more like Wikipedia, but for opinions. The idea is that if you're looking for something in particular niche, you'll start your search on Seekler. Our goal is save you time - instead of spending 20-30 minutes finding your next movie, book, whatever, we can make that 5 minutes or so.

Of course, until we get a lot more data, people won't really start their search at Seekler. But we're starting to show up pretty high on Google results for a number of our lists, so we are trying to get our initial traffic that way.

Your point about the widget and FB is interesting. We have a widget that is being tested and we're strongly considering building a FB app to play up the social angle. For instance, right now the 'Best Movies' list merges the lists of all users - would it be interesting to see a list created from just the lists of your FB friends?

Thanks for the questions and feedback. We're learning something new every day...

nanijoe• 18 years ago

Check out onmylist.com....they seem to be doing the same thing as u guys

bhb5• 18 years ago

Yeah, they are definitely similar. The main difference I see is that all the lists look individualize - that is, you can't merge lists across all users to get a comprehensive lists that includes all items.

Thanks for the heads up.

iamelgringo• 18 years ago

It's in my head. Waiting for school to be done.

ericb3• 18 years ago

I'm building a hosted load testing solution at the moment. There's a little more to it, but that's the idea. I'm close to where I thought I'd be--I need about another month to get it really going and a month or so after to tune and iterate.

http://testomatix.com

My solution will require no hardware, be based on an open source tool people might already be using and be ridiculously easy to use if I hit my mark. I'd like to make it self service too.

robmnl13• 18 years ago

That's pretty cool. Can you let me know when you launch? I might use it

ericb3• 18 years ago

Thanks and absolutely. Can you shoot me your email? I'm 'ebeland' on gmail.

a-priori• 18 years ago

My startup's going fine so far. Tech side's coming along (slower than I'd like of course), but the business side's going crazy.

We're aiming for a beta in the spring. I wish I could say what it is, but we're all hush-hush now (can't even say what it's called right now). Maybe in a few months :)

On a side-note, I'm looking for a programmer, particularly with for UI and design stuff. Let me know if you or someone you know may be interested.

inklesspen• 18 years ago

Dead.

I need someone who knows his way around Photoshop, CSS, and visual design, and I don't have a couple years to drop everything and go learn that.

carpal4• 18 years ago

That's a silly reason for a startup to die. Design is rather unimportant to the success of a site. Heck, look at Craigslist, or News.yc.

daniel-cussen• 18 years ago

Dude, it's nothing you can't learn in a few weeks, or maybe even one week. Get GIMP, read a tutorial, fool around with it for a while, and try online tutorials on how to make a web 2.0 button, say. That might take one, two days tops.

CSS isn't rocket science either. It's a variant of html (sort of) where you choose stuff like font and background color (style, I guess) in one master document that all the other web pages refer to. It's like the Slide Master in powerpoint. It has slightly different punctuation than html, but it's not that special. It's just an easier system, and it's probably overhyped by design bloggers.

Visual design: there's all kinds of "7 mistakes begginers make" type articles in hacker news. Some are better than others. Just use common sense, good taste, effort, and knowledge.

That should get you acquainted with all three problem areas. In fact, after a few weeks one can design clones of homepages of Yahoo, Google, YC, delicious, facebook, and so on. Of course, I don't know what level of mastery you're talking about, and there's definitely a lot of fancy things you can do with photoshop that take a lot of knowledge, but the kind of design chops one needs to do a startup aren't that hard to get.

dkokelley5• 18 years ago

GIMP is good, there's no doubt, but I've found that 90% of the graphical development for my project can be done in about an hour on Inkscape.

mikesabat• 18 years ago

My development and design are being outsourced. While that is taking place I am learning HTML and CSS so that I can understand certain things and tweak design.

I'm reading the Head First book on html and CSS. I didn't know anything before I started. It isn't hard to pick up. http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/hfhtmlcss/index.html

sonink• 18 years ago

design is important ..but not something that will take more than a week to figure out ...i think the only thing that you need is to learn a bit of photoshop (2 days) and read the book "don't make me think"...heck you can even leave photoshop ..just read the book and that should be good enough

run4yourlives2• 18 years ago

Why don't you just contract it out?

Put whatever crappy design you can make on it, and then take it to some of the big name designers, and see how things go? Even if they do it, a few bucks to them and I'm sure they'll post about it on their blog... they get thousands of readers.

xirium• 18 years ago

You can outsource design work to students and foreign workers for approximately US$2 per hour. Indeed, you're spoiled for forum that will bid for you work ( http://freelanceswitch.com/finding/the-monster-list-of-freel... , http://dir.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Employment_and_Wor... ).

However, if the functionality of your app will be greatly expanded then it may also require changes to your CSS. Alternatively, you can skip a large amount of design. People don't access your website to see its innovative style. They access your website to get useful information.

dawnerd• 18 years ago

I actually just started the registration phase of my company. But I already have a few products near beta stage. Right now the company is 100% funded out of my wallet, making living very hard. I might have to take out a loan to pay for the server expenses.

carpal4• 18 years ago

Slowly whittling away at an online accounting suite for small businesses. Stubbed out the underpinnings, and just did the first major design iteration. Should show it to the first potential users in a month or two.

aaroneous4• 18 years ago

I've used Quicken and Quick Books. With both, I've found myself simultaneously limited by the inflexibility and shortcomings of the applications, and overwhelmed at the complexity and obtuseness. Personally, I'd love to find a small business accounting system that's not aimed at the MBA//Accountant market, and is flexible enough for different types of companies.

carpal4• 18 years ago

That's exactly the problem I'm solving.

Glad to hear there's a market for it.

thinkcomp• 18 years ago

I started working on a similar product in 2001. Got it done, but it's tough.

dkokelley5• 18 years ago

Is this something designed to replace Quickbooks entirely? Something like this would be nice for my situation. I can't run quickbooks from Ubuntu, and I don't like booting into Windows whenever I need to do anything.

rms2• 18 years ago

Try GNUCash? It's not bad.

carpal4• 18 years ago

Yes, it is. Browser-based, so that you don't run into sharing issues (common in small companies), or platform issues (common with cutting-edge companies).

simianstyle• 18 years ago

http://redsultan.com

Amazon Mechanical Turk competitor in the works (it also happens to be my senior thesis).

robmnl13• 18 years ago

Give us some more info :) Sounds interesting

imsteve• 18 years ago

Launching major site next week. You can hold me to that. Will be awesome site that you'll all want to use. Not sure if I'll do it under this alias.

liliyal3• 18 years ago

We've just launched our social news site for women, with a focus on fashion, beauty, and celebrity gossip. That means lots of pretty photos!

Initial users seem to like it so far :)

http://www.prettysocial.net/

aaroneous4• 18 years ago

Kudos for doing something with social news that isn't aimed at the nerd crowd! I'll pass it along to my gf :]

liliyal3• 18 years ago

Thanks! Would love to know what she thinks :)

wozer• 18 years ago

The site doesn't look so good if the user's default background color is not white because the logo has a white background. You should use something like <body bgcolor="white">.

On the other hand, probably less than 1% of users have a custom default background color...

liliyal3• 18 years ago

Thanks for the tip! I haven't seen a grey background in a while... except in webalizer :)

carpo• 18 years ago

I plan on launching an initial version of my site in March. I started full time in December, and gave myself 3 months to have something out the door. Im pretty well on track. I initally cut some things that were in the original design, to make sure 3 months would do it. That was probably the hardest part of the whole thing - determining at the beginning what to leave out.

dkokelley5• 18 years ago

I've got a startup that brings college bulletin boards online for students to buy and sell their used textbooks. It's eBay meets Craiglist for college textbooks. Check out our alpha project at cocunderground.com (COC is for college of the canyons, the school that this project is directed at). All feedback is welcome!

wumi2• 18 years ago

a prominently-featured search bar would help find textbooks, vs. filling out every detail in a form

dkokelley5• 18 years ago

Thanks! The search form doesn't require every field, but if that's not obvious, I should make sure to make it obvious. I suppose I could also put a simple Section>Course # search field on a side bar. "Quick Search"

thorax2• 18 years ago

Cool idea. Good luck with it.

fendale2• 18 years ago

I have been toiling away for what seems like ages on a source code review app, aimed at helping cube dwellers who can code sort out some of the horrible outsourced code they have to review (something I have to do in my cube too often, and was frustrated with the tools out there to do it).

Its just a part time thing for me these days (still stuck in my cube), but I hope to get a beta release out there in a month or so. Things that are making me nervous/holding me back:

* Can't come up with a decent name for thing!

* While I don't think my app is ugly, its certainly not anywhere near as shiny as many of the other web 2.0 apps out there

* I keep tweaking and adding features instead of polishing what is there and getting the beta finished.

I am pretty pleased with what I have go so far, so at the least I will have learned Rails and created a tool I can use in my current day job.

dcminter• 18 years ago

> Can't come up with a decent name for thing!

"Turd Polisher" ? :-)

richardjg• 18 years ago

Code Raj?

Code East India Company?

Code Clive?

sorry...

cousin_it4• 18 years ago

I launched http://openphotovr.org (virtual reality from photos) very quietly yesterday night. A non-profit, my midnight oil hobby project. After two months of development I feel it's time to go online, maybe get some visitors. No rush. Already see glaring mistakes in the UI :-)

philc• 18 years ago

That's really neat. Nice work.

cousin_it4• 18 years ago

Thanks! What would you do next if you were me?

codeLullaby• 18 years ago

LOVE IT! (reminds me of the Photosynth demo @ Ted Talks)

cousin_it4• 18 years ago

Yes, Photosynth was the inspiration, but I managed to avoid the stages of image analysis and 3D reconstruction =)

The main problem right now is non-intuitive interface. It's hard to predict where the camera will go when you click. Working on it.

sadiq• 18 years ago

I'm working on a web-based MMO. We're about 75% through the game logic, artwork requirements is going out to the art studio in the next week.

We should hit our beta milestone at the end of March.

thorax2• 18 years ago

We launched http://bug.gd in late 2007 as a way for everyone to search and capture solutions to error messages. Happily, it was covered on TechCrunch, Digg, Mashable, etc. Exciting stuff. We recently created a full Firefox extension that makes it even more natural. http://bug.gd/download

bug.gd plans to drive its revenue through corporate intranet sales of our software and P2P helpdesk solutions. The public-facing error database is expected to always be free and ad-free as a consequence.

Interesting primarily to places like YC, we're about to announce our http://featurelist.org which is really just a tool we use for our feature tracking and thought we'd open it up to the world. It's a free little Reddit-inspired site for startups and open source projects to let their community vote on features. Anyone can host a project there and have users visit http://featurelist.org/MYPROJECT to request/vote on features. This will probably go public beta in a couple of weeks, but it's really just a gift back to the community more than anything we want to make $$$ with.

Very, very busy lately. Back to work. :)

r7000• 18 years ago

Rolling along with about 25 new users per day. Getting ready to launch the first round of user-requested and pre-planned features. So far it has been a lot of fun! My main problem is I built the site to scratch an itch and now that it exists I use it myself so much I don't work on features enough.

amrithk• 18 years ago

Interesting to see the things people are doing.

A few months ago, 2 of my friends from college and I came up with an idea for allowing people to create polls online and give them tools to look at the results in more detail. Only problem was none of us knew anything about web programming and design. We learnt a lot from reading forums, through w3schools and other websites. After more than 6 months of tinkering and working pretty much on weekends (2 of us work as bankers), we came up with PollBag (www.pollbag.com). Its probably a bit amateur but would love to know what you think. We are always looking to get constructive feedback.

verbal• 18 years ago

we just launched http://www.cellspin.net/ at the DEMO conference (http://www.demo.com). it is a service that provides easy to use mobile software for you to send your media from your phone to your favorite websites (flickr, facebook, youtube, etc). we also have a website where you can manage the content you have uploaded and keep track of what your friends have been posting. check it out and let me what you think (ian [at] cellspinsoft [dot] com). we're always looking for new sites to add as destinations. please give me any feedback you have! i'd love to hear from you guys.

shafqat• 18 years ago

We've been hacking away building the technology for our startup since late last fall. We're finally close to launch time (end Feb hopefully). We're more focused on getting a product launched as quickly as possible and then letting our community have it's say re: what works and doesnt work.

Development took longer than I hoped, but we used our blog to really spread the word and get the 'movement' started in the meantime.

We're NewsCred, a digital newspaper that brings you news based on credibility from your favorite sources. Unlike Digg, which uses popularity, our primary criterion is quality/credibility. Plus we're an online newspaper, not a social news site. Whats the difference? Hopefully you'll be able to see for yourself soon!

Loved reading everyone else's ideas. Let me know what you guys think! http://www.newscred.com

dshah• 18 years ago

My startup (http://www.HubSpot.com) launched its product in November, 2007. It's a web hosted solution for inbound marketing for small businesses.

Revenues are growing steadily. The team is 26 people (22 in Cambridge, MA) and we're getting deeper into search engine algorithms, Facebook apps for business and English text analysis.

Challenge right now is making sure the system will scale as we continue to grow our customers/usage. High quality problem.

geldedus• 18 years ago

Mine is Photoree, the collaborative image recommendation system ( http://www.photoree.com ). Just got reviewed by KillerStartups http://www.killerstartups.com/Video-Music-Photo/Photoreecom-...

Ask YC: Status of your startup

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