Review my startup: Mentaway.com

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2275482

by eduardosasso • 15 years ago

4 11 15 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Mentaway is a Facebook app to automatically track your travels. It integrates geolocation services like Facebook Places, Foursquare, Flickr and Twitter and helps to collect and organize all the countries you have visited and also see the places your friends have been visiting.

http://mentaway.com

Would love your feedback on the idea and its direction.

Thanks!

RiderOfGiraffes• 15 years ago

Clickable: http://mentaway.com

JohnTitus• 15 years ago

Curious: How'd you come up with the name? Also: How do you plan to make money?

eduardosasso4• 15 years ago

The name was inspired on a island in Indonesia called Mentawaii, which is a surf paradise and place that i would love to visit.

We plan to make money selling Ads initially.

ffumarola3• 15 years ago

How much traffic is needed to make this supportable by an ad-based model?

Other than that, who are your major competitors? I know I've seen a ton of people use travel apps on facebook, but I don't think any aggregate all of their social feeds.

Have you considered a demo for someone who wants to tour the service before joining?

eduardosasso4• 15 years ago

I'm not sure, but probably i think we need a large user base to generate some revenue on this model, the initial idea is to test this ad-base model and see how it goes, other than that i didn't figure it out any other way to monetize it at least so far.

Inside Facebook we have 2. TripAdvisor and Where I've been. Both of them require you to manually add your places on the map which is little bit different than Mentaway where everything is automatic.

ffumarola3• 15 years ago

Well, to walk through some numbers..

Assume an eCPM of $8 (I think that is good performance, but still a "safe" number to work from). For perspective, I write about personal finance and tend to get a few more dollars than that.

Work backwards from there.

To make $100,000, at an eCPM of $8, you will need: 12,500 thousand impressions, OR 12,500,000 impressions. If each visitor has 10 pageviews, you need 1,250,000 visits. So, each month, you need to get 104,167 visitors.

Of that $100,000, how much goes towards costs?

Just a thought exercise!

yoseph• 15 years ago

Interesting idea. It sounds cool.

My only piece of feedback would be about the name. When I first read the title of this post, I thought your company was a mentoring service.

TripAdvisor and Where I've Been certainly sound like travel apps.

eduardosasso4• 15 years ago

Right. Our idea was to have a original name, easy to spell and that was also related to an exotic place which is the Mentawaii island.

Review my startup: Mentaway.com

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