The depressing reality of your startup failing

http://spotbloq.blogspot.de/2012/05/depressing-reality-of-your-startup.html

by ComNik • 14 years ago

19 31 14 years ago

spotbloq.blogspot.de

hedgehog• 14 years ago

Upvoted for content but please read this: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/621/01/

ComNik8• 14 years ago

I'm sorry :/ Will keep this open while writing...

mrsteveman1• 14 years ago

A bit early to declare something a failure no? If I had declared some of the App Store stuff I've done to have failed the same day they went up for sale purely based on watching analytics data, I would have totally missed the media coverage, chart rankings and word of mouth exposure (not to mention the loads of "thank you" emails from users) that occurred 1,2,3+ weeks later.

In any case from what I can tell this is exclusive to Amazon right? I'm guessing they have an API for this sort of thing or a way for you to scrape specific products.

Can Amazon notify users when prices drop? What makes this system you've setup unique? Pitch me, because it's not over yet :)

ComNik8• 14 years ago

Thank you for the encouragement :)

I tried using Amazon's builtin wishlist feature, but never recieved a notification (I had the items in my Rankique wishlist at the same time and got one).

Jep, this is exclusive to Amazon, but I planned to implement BestBuy and whatnot if the concept seems to work (the backend is designed to manage multiple data sources).

What makes this system unique is, that I have no interest in squeezing everything out of a customer (that may be because I don't need to make any money from this). I try to minimize the time you spend shopping and I wan't you to pay the lowest price.

The replies here got me thinking, this is the first time I'm doing something like this, and I think I overinterpreted what Eric Ries has thought me about pivoting...

I'm increasingly feeling naive here... (which may very well be)

tlianza• 14 years ago

FWIW, I wrote that same feature for Wishpot (price alerts) including the infrastructure for scraping thousands of stores that don't have APIs.

It's a pretty interesting problem, but to be honest I never could see it as a product in and of itself. A lot of people have tried. Some spun it as a way to track things you've already bought in case you might be able to get a refund/rebate when the price dropped, which was a nice spin on the idea. But, to my knowledge none of these services have taken off.

Fundamental to all of this is that if you want to launch a consumer service and have it "take off" you need to figure out distribution first. If the idea doesn't have "social built in" and if you don't have lots of money to spend on advertising and marketing (which, in the consumer space is considerably more than if you're in the b2b space) it's Really Difficult to get attention.

That's the biggest thing I'd recommend to anyone in the consumer space... before you build it, figure out how people are going to hear about it. Most of the consumer business models require millions of users to pay off (ads, freemium, affiliate, etc). So, no million users, no business. Andrew Chen wrote a great article about how programmers can (and should) mitigate that problem these days: http://andrewchenblog.com/2012/04/27/how-to-be-a-growth-hack...

geekfactor• 14 years ago

Amazon does notify users of price changes -- up or down -- for items that are kept in your shopping cart.

jasonshen• 14 years ago

Look - your startup hasn't failed. First of all, it's not a startup, it's just a project you've been working on. You haven't spent savings or taken debt or investment to do this. It sounds like you are maybe still in school.

Second, you put it on HN and on person signed up. This doesn't mean you failed. It is merely the first in a very long line of setbacks that every startup, both great ones and not so great ones face along the way. Figure out why no one was interested in this - talk to potential customers, tweak the product/landing page/distribution channel and tr again.

I hope this doesn't come across as harsh because projects become our babies and it hurts when no one else cares, but hopefully you can take a step back and realize there's a lot you can do to remedy the situation.

ComNik8• 14 years ago

This did not came across harsh, this came across as a reminder to not give up so quickly. I still think that what I said about sharing more stories of failure is true, but maybe the reason for my post was more of an impulsive reaction :/

nbashaw• 14 years ago

It ok - user acquisition is tough! It takes a lot of work, and submitting your link to Hacker News is not really work.

I'd start out by doing some user testing. Have people look at your site and tell you what they think. Then maybe a bit of usability testing - tell people to perform actions (like signing up or adding a product to their list) and see where they get stuck. This is called funnel optimization.

Then you can focus on finding channels - ways people discover you. You'll probably want to spend some money on google adwords, but definitely also try to get some press through traditional media and blogs.

You haven't failed - you just started!

davidcann• 14 years ago

You should give it more than a day before calling it a failure.

nicholassmith• 14 years ago

Saying it's a failure at day one is a bit like saying "I built it, and they didn't come. That movie was a crock."

colinplamondon2• 14 years ago

This is a horrifically dumb article. If you care about the first day, you didn't launch a startup, you launched a project. Submitting an article to Hacker News isn't a launch strategy, it's showing off a cute project you did.

A startup is something you fully commit to until you're convinced you tried every reasonable permutation in a scalable market opportunity.

The average startup takes 7 years to get to liquidity. That's 2,520 days. You got one day in before throwing in the towel.

F_J_H• 14 years ago

Stephen R. Covey once said something along the lines of "In any given situation, you can be right or you can be kind. It's better to be kind."

What you said is correct. Said differently (i.e. in a more kind manner), it also would have been a good example of really helpful mentorship.

larrys• 14 years ago

One advantage of being harsh (vs. kind) is that it forces someone to think before they act for fear of looking like an idiot and wasting everyone's time.

ComNik8• 14 years ago

Maybe that was a bit harsh, but I definitely got your point.

I overreacted and maybe this bit of public embarrassment was necessary.

Thank you.

colinplamondon2• 14 years ago

Sorry, that was phrased dickishly! Definitely hit me up if I can ever be of help.

cynusx• 14 years ago

The value proposition of the site when you visit rankique.com is not clear enough. Changing the headline to "Track products and get notified when the price drops" and making the headline bigger will help a bit.

Driving traffic to the site may be harder. There is no built-in customer acquisition channel as having one user does not lead to more exposure. It might be something that gets some word of mouth once it has made a user happy but that's something you should test.

tolmasky• 14 years ago

I have to agree that if the headline was "get notified when a price drops" I might consider signing up, or at least be intrigued to learn more. However, "save money and time, while shopping online"... sure it rhymes but its a vague value-proposition that's being offered by a thousand other sites right now. It could be anything from a store aggregator to another etsy.

ComNik8• 14 years ago

Changing it right now, absolutely makes sense.

rdg• 14 years ago

Change its name. It's awful. The idea not so much.

k4roshi• 14 years ago

The name isn't related at all to your product, it's rather confusing. "Ranking" is in no way relevant to your service. Either choose a random name with no familiar meaning associated or choose one that is more appropriate for what your app does. I also agree that the tagline should be more clear. Also, you got some things wrong: - A HN post (or 2) isn't a launch, how could you expect people to flock to your app if they don't know it exists. Promote it properly; - Launch =/= your first day, first days usually suck.

Keep going anyway, the idea is not so bad, although i think there are some other services out there that do pretty much what your app does (but again, that can be said for pretty much every startup :P)

ComNik8• 14 years ago

Thank you, very valid points.

joewadcan• 14 years ago

You article, while it have been hard to write, probably helped many others who are facing the exact same scenario (or at least will be upon launch). Take a second to think about why you started the site in the first place? Was it to revolutionize shopping? Or more to bring something to life? colinplamondon makes a good point about this being 1 day into your startup, but i'd also add that you're not even 1 day into being an entrepreneur. Failure is good! FAIL MORE ! Every great entrepreneur does, at some point

joshmlewis• 14 years ago

Hey, this isn't a horrible failure. You might actually have something here. It's kind of like Pricenomics actually, they just went through YC. They're hiring, you should send Omar an email with this link, I'm sure he'd be impressed.

They take the approach of price researching plus subscribing to low prices like you. If I were you I'd look into this.

ComNik8• 14 years ago

I'm absolutely blown away by a)the hn community b) my naivity.

I'd like to thank you all for re-encouraging me and giving me a lot of great input.

dlitwak• 14 years ago

1) as many have mentioned, submitting to a news site like this does not a launch strategy make. Look into strategic partnerships, try to get some legit press, figure out how to incentivize people to share it etc., virality etc., all the typical stuff that it seems like you haven't put any thought into. It's easy not to, and is perhaps one of the pros of talking to investors actually, they will remind you of your woefully inadequate customer acquisition strategies and get you rethinking them.

2) hackernews is a reflection of silicon valley, which is a bit of an echo chamber, keep that in mind. The common behaviors of people using this site are so drastically different than the average person that you shouldn't read much into its success, either way.

3) don't give up so easily.

4) props for having the balls to put yourself out there like this. Too may people in silicon valley have this facade of success all the time. They are always "killing it." This is somewhat necessary as when we are looking for funding we aren't about to publicize any setbacks, but they are there and good to remind people of.

psg• 14 years ago

Jason's comment (as well as others) is spot-on. It's only a project. However, projects are how many sustainable businesses begin.

Your project is based on your assumptions on what customers wants. You now need to discover whether those assumptions are true (facts) or completely wrong. If they turn out to be true, then you're on to something.

Don't give up. Even if your assumptions turn out to be wrong, 'failures' are part of the process, and you can use what you learned on your next quest for a sustainable business.

johnnydt• 14 years ago

I think there is a site that does this already. Try camelcamelcamel.com

Having said that, I appreciate your zeal and effort. No amount of education would have prepared you as much as the workk involved in creating a fairly complicated website.

Good job. I might just be using it. :)

ComNik8• 14 years ago

I'd be delighted (:

But I also can't deny that camel^3 looks like a (much bigger) competitor. I've some ideas to improve what bugs me about Online Shopping, maybe one of them can differentiate me enoguh.

As I learned today: No reason to give up

russtrpkovski• 14 years ago

Are you a solo founder? You may want to surround yourself with other founders. They will make sure to give you a pat on the back when your real-time Google Analytics dashboard shows 0 active users. Hang in there...

The depressing reality of your startup failing

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