Ask HN: What is the best way to find a new home for my old startup?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1464343

by eisokant • 16 years ago

4 2 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

In December 2008 I started Twollars with a co-founder. We had a great run and learned an incredible amount, especially about building communities (it was amazing to see how people around the world gathered offline around our vision).

After 6 months my co-founder returned to his consulting company (he was working part-time, I was doing it full-time). I then had to make the decision to build a real team and get funding or quit (until then it was mainly me doing a lot of the work, and some freelancers we hired). At the time there were some seed-stage investors that approached me since startups built on Twitter were the hype. I had made the commitment to continue my education in several months and was about to move. I decided it would be unfair to raise funding for an idea where the startup founder can't be working full-time and there isn't a team in place yet.

I spent from September onwards focussing on my education and my new social life. Since March I founded a new startup, that has a great team and is in the education sector (which is allowing me to benefit from the environment I am in). We're having a great time and all the lessons learned from Twollars are being put to good use.

Twollars has been dormant since September 2009, traffic has slowly gone to almost nihil and I can't help to find it an incredible waste.

I have been an HN member for over 2 years and have always found the answers here incredibly insightful, therefore I come for advice here. What is the best way to find a new home for my old startup?

I hope the answers to this question can help others who are in a similar situation.

Thank you,

Eiso

p.s. If you want to here more about the idea to answer specifically in relation to Twollars, this interview with Robert Scoble explains it the best: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYBORr8nl3Y

noodle• 16 years ago

relevant link: http://twollars.com/

Vistico• 16 years ago

Hey Eiso,

So yeah what I am about to say here assumes that "find a new home" = reinvent the idea/ Breathe new life into it.

You know there is a saying about how one doesn't pour new wine into old bottles.. they put it in new ones! Even so, I think that what you guys did when twitter startups began to heat up was awesome! It was an opportunity and you took advantage of it. However.. I think the general problem here is that your missing the vitality incentive factor.. aired with a chicken and egg problem (the whole brands advertising won't really happen with out the people.. then in turn the charities won't get anything.)

So the solution is simple.. It all comes down to what you believe in. Whatever it is that you believe in for this.. the idea needs to mature to give proper incentives for people to take part.. also it should have ample virality included (you had that going with the @twollars thing.) problem is i don't think people may have clearly understood why they were doing it.. and then furthermore.. how much are the charities getting for the effort of tweeting that out.

What I think about the way things should have worked out is something to the tune of.. Business --> Users --> Charities instead of your current model deal (Users <--- Business --> Charity).. which also looks kind fuzzy it should be easier to grasp.

So my point is if it were something like Businesses sponsor the process with their products (like free service/software/products) let's say per month.. then users pay to be part of the process.. in which their money goes to charities. then at the end of every cycle users win products from the businesses that participated. Now the only thing left would be to find out a systematic way to get twollars involved for instance you can have a set number of charities that are in the event for that month.. in which different prizes are available from the business sponsors and one could @twollars to a specific charity to spread awareness? to be honest the most difficult part of it seems to be the implementation of the @twollars making that meaningful devoid of money/incentive will be difficult..

Furthermore you have to give incentive giving out more twollars.. it just does'nt seem convincing enough to me unless you add some means of tracking twollar karma on your website through various means and then using the karma (gained by spreading awarness/activity/positivity) to get rewards from the business sponsors.

/end wall of text

What exactly where you thinking about?