My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love

http://twicsy.tumblr.com/post/65725559098/the-10th-year-anniversary-of-my-really-successful

by dumbfounder • 13 years ago

413 163 13 years ago

twicsy.tumblr.com

mumbi• 13 years ago

You should make it look better, imo.

martey• 13 years ago

How would that solve the issue of it not making money?

krapp5• 13 years ago

Depends on how he decides to monetize it I guess. But at the very least a better designed site gives the impression of professionalism and security, and users who trust you will also trust you with their money. Also a better organized (I think less noisy) site would make the ads easier to see and more relevant.

Although for me, the bigger issue is finding what Twicsy offers that's worth paying for?

diorray2• 13 years ago

Twitter Bootstrap, a developer's greatest ally

logicallee• 13 years ago

It might solve the "unfundable" and "piece of shit" adjectives in the title.

pretty much the whole Internet is built on the idea that if you can get metrics like his up, and get funded, you can figure out monetization with the help of your expert investors.

naterator• 13 years ago

That's not going to help his revenue problem, probably. The only thing I can think of is if he--in addition to making it look appealing--somehow places targeted ads based on user queries, in the midst of their search results. This is essentially the "killer" strategy a lot of companies like FB and Twitter have started using. Make ads a seamless part of the scenery. Not as annoying sidebar shit that no one ever looks at.

cwe• 13 years ago

Why does he say "really successful" in the title, if it doesn't even break even?

EDIT: Must be the traffic, but these days that's not (that) impressive if there's no revenue model around it. That said, I'd love 6 million users/month.

EDIT 2: downvotes? I guess funding = success still around here, huh?

jff• 13 years ago

I'd hate to have 6 million visitors a month if they're viewing pictures (high bandwidth) and I'm not actually making any money from them.

jbrandon52• 13 years ago

It appears the pictures are actually hosted on Twitter, so not that much traffic.

lsc• 13 years ago

eh, I'd take it. Bandwidth is cheap... and I have the sort of ego that derives a lot of pleasure from creating something that other people find useful and use.

alistairSH• 13 years ago

The ten years included several startups. And while it appears all eventually failed or were put in the back-burner, he did raise $2 million in angel funding along the way. So, at least in regards to keeping himself housed and fed, I guess it was successful.

dumbfounder29• 13 years ago

I actually meant to put successful in quotes but then forgot. The way I meant it is, if you had told me I would be seeing 6 million unique visitors per month when I first started out I would have definitely said that is a huge success. In some ways it is, but obviously not the most important way. I definitely agree that raising money is not success, and actually all of the money raised was prior to launching Twicsy.

aresant• 13 years ago

Sharing some of the analytics behind how you think people use the site would probably make for a much more interesting discussion around monetization.

EG - I can't figure out how or why 6m uniques would show up here, or what they're doing.

And that's not an insult, I am curious - are they looking for discovery / trends? Are they looking to see all the latest pics of a user? etc?

Those are dramatically different user segments / values.

You've got a bit of a 31-flavors UX where I can do a lot, but as a result wonder if you could massively pare this down, improve focus, and discover monetization through understanding what people actually use it for.

dumbfounder29• 13 years ago

SEO is the largest feeder of traffic for Twicsy. People get there by searching for a very long tail of things. But there are quite a few that return just to browse around it seems, or check out the top photos.

Agreed, the UX/UI is terrible. One big problem is that I am a terrible web developer, I am really just a back end data guy that knows enough to be dangerous on the front end.

But that's part of the reason why I think it has much more potential. The site gets a ton of traffic despite its obvious flaws. If I had the funds to do a redesign and even execute well on the basics who knows what could happen?

ashraful2• 13 years ago

I'd love to do a free redesign for Twicsy. Email me (inlith@gmail.com) if you're interested.

My portfolio is at madebyargon.com

triplesec• 13 years ago

it would make sense to hire complementary skills, like UX-design. I hear this is what the usual advices say.

sitkack• 13 years ago

seriously, just put images in divs and use some box to move them around. flat sexy gravity. ken burns effect for web 4.x

vidarh2• 13 years ago

Given how long you've been doing this, you've overlapped with my last startup, which had similar issues (Edgeio.com - long since defunct; we started development in 2005; sold off the assets end of 2007; the service was a classified aggregator).

We got a huge amount of traffic via SEO, and lots of long tail traffic (e.g. we'd come up first for a huge number of zip codes). A big problem with our consumer site was atrocious bounce rates: Most people clicked through out of curiosity, looked around on that single page or maybe one more, and left never to be seen again, because we did a really poor job of hooking them unless they happened to be looking for classified ads matching that particular long tail term, which few were. We should in retrospect have treated those visits as someone watching an ad for our site, rather than as a conscious visit by a user of our site, because most of our traffic was from people who likely did not even realise what the site was about by the time they clicked back or closed the window.

A big part of the challenge for you as well, I think, is driving down bounce rates and challenging those users into other parts of the site and to repeat visits by helping them "get" what they can get out of the site other than 15 seconds of looking at that one image.

If I was you, I'd segment users hard on referrals vs. direct traffic and cookied vs. uncookied (assume first time visitors). First of all, are you earning any money on those first time referral users? If not, that gives you total freedom to experiment. But regardless, subject the first time referred users to an absolute battery of segmented tests (A/B or multivariate or whatever scheme you're comfortable you can analyze results from) with pretty much the sole purpose of figuring out how to get more of those users to visit more sticky pages. Especially if people are coming in from long tail searches, I think you'd be better focusing on turning them into users than "drive by" assaulting them with ads like it feels like the site currently is doing.

E.g. consider imgur. Consider users coming to imgur pages from Reddit (consider your specific traffic sources, and whether or not you can do anything "special" for them)- not only do they get an interface to navigate that in many cases are more convenient than continuing to browse the equivalent image reddits, but you can even go to imgur.com/r/someimagereddit (e.g. http://imgur.com/r/pics) and get all the pictures from that subreddit in one place. It's seductive. Then there's ability to comment. The image pages themselves are extremely clean. It's seductive.

While if I get to your site from Google search results (say by entering "twitter babes" and going to the image results - I tested, it gives a Twicsy result high up, in between the porn), I need to go below the fold to even realize that there are related pictures, and there are no "niceties" like being able to use cursor left/right to move through a "gallery", or space to enlarge the image, as on imgur.com (if there are on Twicsy, I didn't notice them). What is there is massively distracting ads.

Imgur is teasing people in when they hit it for the first time, making it very tempting to click one more image, while your site is pretty much bunching people in the face with ads, which makes it hard to even discover the potential.

corporealshift• 13 years ago

No ads if you sign in with twitter? Maybe that's the problem, since it's a search engine specifically for twitter...

I'd be curious to see some information regarding the number of ad impressions/clicks too. The only ad on the homepage is way at the bottom (I think).

reasonnotreason2• 13 years ago

I don't understand if it has 6 million unique visitors a month, how can he not monetize this? This seems to be more about how the revenue via advertising has dried up. Can barely pay for the servers !?

krapp5• 13 years ago

6 million unique visitors a month are seeing nothing they can't see for free on Twitter. The problem of how to make money on aggregated content is an interesting one (and relevant to more than a few struggling entrepreneurs)

SandersAK• 13 years ago

I get that people are trying to be helpful, and think that's great.

But this blog post was awesome, raw, and captured something that so few of us can really relate to.

Dude grinds for 10 years, keeps grinding, doesn't know where to go but will probably keep grinding.

"Twicsy, you son of a bitch. You frustrate me so. I love you, but oh how I hate to love you."

Shine on, buddy. Best of luck!

sockgrant• 13 years ago

Agreed. This was a fun read and I really hope things work out for him.

bashcoder• 13 years ago

Absolutely - well said.

dumbfounder29• 13 years ago

Don't worry, you haven't seen the last of Twicsy!

krapp5• 13 years ago

I know... his failure has already been more successful than many people's successes.

KamiCrit• 13 years ago

Spot on man! I gotta admit the website is meh (although what can I say, I've never published+hosted a website before) but that story is pretty amazing!

Maybe OP should try to publish an ebook on his 10 year adventure?

n_coats• 13 years ago

Well put! (and a bit unusual to see such kindness in an HN comment haha)

Kudos to the author, best wishes for the future!

jaredsohn• 13 years ago

captured something that so few of us can really relate to. Dude grinds for 10 years, keeps grinding, doesn't know where to go but will probably keep grinding. "Twicsy, you son of a bitch. You frustrate me so. I love you, but oh how I hate to love you."

Maybe not the ten years part, but I imagine that a decent number of people here can relate to this (i.e. working on a startup for awhile and having a love/hate relationship with it while it is not yet a financial success.)

moot• 13 years ago

I know this man's feels.

4chan is only one month older. It's like we're cousins.

asdfs• 13 years ago

Oh, don't pretend you haven't become fabulously wealthy with all those 4chan passes.

How many of those do you sell, anyway (if you don't mind me asking)?

dumbfounder29• 13 years ago

Yes but you are an Internet god and nobody has heard of me :)

But, I am happy to be considered your cuz, even if it's the one you always beat up and lock in the shed.

vidarh2• 13 years ago

The projects I've kept grinding on for the longest have been the ones with the worst odds of making me rich. There are many types of projects that are just too seductive and habit forming. "Just one more tweak" becomes an intellectual challenge or a hobby as much as about business.

Though ultimately I think those kinds of projects are also the ones that often lead people to massive success too, because a lot of projects that are eventually successful takes long enough to get there that you'd give up if they didn't have that seductive effect.

The problem, of course, is figuring out when enough is enough (though the absence of commercial success is not necessarily a good yardstick, if it's still fun)

jsonne• 13 years ago

Have you thought of doing in content ads when people search specific things? I.e. If I look up "party" maybe there's an alcohol ad or an ad for a local bar. I have so many ideas around this.

diorray2• 13 years ago

Some monetization ideas:

* Follow the 4chan's method. Add captcha to search and offer captcha bypass for $15~ per year

* Make iOS / Android app, sell it for $1.99~ (you can make it with HTML/Javascript via PhoneGap)

* Offer API for affordable price

and please change current website design, make it simple and cleaner (Twitter Bootstrap is nice for that job and it's easy to learn)

birken• 13 years ago

A few comments from an initial glance:

- Site could be improved a lot for mobile. If you get a lot of mobile traffic, which wouldn't surprise me, I'll bet it massively underperforms desktop traffic on site engagement and ad revenue.

- You need to A/B test your ad locations a lot more. The locations do not look particularly good to me, but then again this does depend a lot on how most people interact with your site (which likely isn't starting at the homepage).

- More ad networks isn't always better. Are these ad networks actually outperforming adsense? Are you banned from adsense?

Edit: Ignore these two below, thanks jim-greer. Twitter is in fact hosting the images!

- (ignore) You probably could compress the big images more to save bandwidth. I don't know how big of an expense your edgecast bill is, but I'll bet you could cut it down by a lot.

- (ignore) Additionally, fix the cache headers on your images (change them from max-age: 0 to cache forever -- they look immutable). This will immediately lower your edgecast bill by a little bit and really help performance.

jim-greer• 13 years ago

You probably could compress the big images more to save bandwidth

He's not hosting the images, Twitter is.

dumbfounder29• 13 years ago

Agreed with mobile optimization, I have over 35% mobile traffic and I am doing a terrible job of taking advantage of this. But I don't know the first thing about how to do this. I have done some research and experiments but honestly couldn't make sense of it.

Yes, I am banned from Adsense, and just about every top tier ad network. There is a certain amount of porn on Twicsy (maybe 10% of overall traffic, nothing earth shattering) that makes it unsavory to many advertisers. Despite aggressive filtering in place to stop serving top tier ads on anything that might possibly be objectionable, and removing 10's of millions of pictures, it seems like every top provider has blacklisted Twicsy.

reasonnotreason2• 13 years ago

How much do these bannings hurt your profitability ? Any way to quantify it ?

rsiqueira• 13 years ago

Are you banned from Adsense just because of the porn pics/videos? Or have you been banned for other reasons (e.g. not having your own content, making duplicate content from twitter, copyright issues, dmca, gambling, site quality or other) ?

laurencei2• 13 years ago

I don't use twitter much.

But recently there was a large tanker crash near where I live. The truck had exploded, and there were lots of people killed and hurt.

I wanted to see some pictures, but one hour after the incident the story was not (yet) on the TV news. So I turned to twitter, and using the standard twitter search, I found a few ransoms photos of the incident.

What I needed was a better way to search twitter for photos, with a specific tag or time frame posting, and perhaps even a geographical filter too (since the incident was at a specific place).

I'm sure other people would find this useful, especially when large events unfold live (I.e boston bombings, plane crash etc etc)

jackweirdy• 13 years ago

Time & Geographically based searches would be a moneymaker, no doubt about it. Could be something that Twitter would buy up themselves too

laurencei2• 13 years ago

Actually I just found this: http://nearbytweets.com/ - seems someone has already done it (for free). You can change the location to anywhere in the world (not just 'near' you)

dopamean• 13 years ago

I actually do this on Instagram. It's not so effective for breaking news stories but it can be fun at music festivals and other entertainment type events.

martinkallstrom• 13 years ago

Make a Twicsy app, price it at a dollar, push it through the site and you're set.

dumbfounder29• 13 years ago

I agree this idea has potential, and I have thought about it, but I am a bad web developer, and an even worse app developer. I have been looking for a partner to possibly do it with a rev share and I have contacted numerous people, but no takers...

akngo• 13 years ago

I'd love to help out with doing some of your web stuff if you are interested. Shoot me an email, anhkiet(at)gmail

23andwalnut• 13 years ago

Happy to help you with some of your web dev and design issues. Check out some of my work at http://www.duetapp.com, http://www.getsoloapp.com, http://www.23andwalnut.com. Shoot me an email at from any one of those sites if you're interested.

srid68• 13 years ago

If you are interested, i can develop NATIVE android/ios mobile html/web based app (similar to phonegap with embedded socket server) based on Xamarin.Android/Xamarin.IOS for FREE (looking to publish a portfolio of case studies). If interested contact srid68 at gmail.

programminggeek• 13 years ago

The ad placement is basically terrible. You should place fewer ads, but put them nearer the content and above the fold.

For example, get them out of the sidebar and make one banner in line with the content between the navigation and the pictures. Basically get rid of the rest.

Also, have you considered selling ads on BuySellAds.com? With that amount of traffic you should make decent money on a CPM or monthly basis.

dumbfounder29• 13 years ago

I have very little ability to change the UI because I am a bad web developer and every change I make seems to make things worse. But thanks for the placement suggestion, maybe that is worth a try.

I contacted BuySellAds a while back and they passed on the opportunity. They said their target audience doesn't line up well with Twicsy. Or some crap like that :)

chriogenix• 13 years ago

@dumbfounder how can i get in touch regarding buying space on your site?

elorant• 13 years ago

He could do something like the new Pinterest ads. You search for a pic on Twitter and inside the results is a picture with an ad with a relative theme.

dumbfounder29• 13 years ago

Pinterest is so hot right now. Twicsy is so not hot right now. That makes a huge difference when it comes to launching products like that. They also have much better engagement.

ye• 13 years ago

A few random ideas in no particular order

1) Paywall. Even if 1 out of 10,000 people agrees to pay, you will have 600 paying customers per month.

2) Sell analytics / data on what's trending.

3) Offer to make prints of the images.

4) Branching out #3 - not just prints, but fridge magnets, tiles, mugs, whatever.

dclusin• 13 years ago

I suspect #3 & #4 would incur legal liabilities that far exceed the revenue they generate. I'm thinking about copyright infringement.

dumbfounder29• 13 years ago

You may be right about #1, that was to be my next attempt at monetization. Right now you can only do keyword searches on the past month, I was going to offer a service to let people search the full index for maybe $10/month. But I am now involved with another startup that is taking all my time and I am not sure when I will get the chance to try this.

I have talked to many people about #2 but was unable to figure out something compelling to sell.

Tried #3 with Peecho for about a week, not one sale!

brador• 13 years ago

Who can you sell analytics/trending data to?

bacheson• 13 years ago

Successful? No ... Potential? Yes

badalyan• 13 years ago

Find real problems first, then solve them by creating a Business™

oddshocks• 13 years ago

If you want some cricisim, the website style might be turning people away. http://twicsy.com/ The colours, contrast, and various sizes/spacing of things are somewhat unsettling.

woah• 13 years ago

It could be a lot cleaner and calmer

alexcroox• 13 years ago

Yep, his first hire should be/have been a designer. People only care about interfaces, they couldn't care less how great the backend is.

lazyjones• 13 years ago

It's full of (crappy - sorry) ads that probably don't pay much. Perhaps less is more? I'm not really a Google advocate, but how about switching to text-based ads only and focusing more on showing the user real content instead of large, annoying banners?

dumbfounder29• 13 years ago

I have tried at least 50 ad networks and what I am using now seems to work the best. But I am always willing to try something new...

tn13• 13 years ago

This happened with me as well. After spending lots of money and time building a complex tech I failed miserably. So on a boring day I wrote some crappy android app. I published it and went to sleep. A week passed and I realized that the app was in first 10 for a particular section in India.

I put Admob ads and suddenly revenue started zooming. My app will not scale beyond a point. It is unfundable. It is really crappy technology (basically a static website put as a webview) but it gets hundreds of installs every day and touching "thank you emails" every day.

WoodenChair• 13 years ago

It was once told to me that after 2 years a startup is no longer a startup, it's just a failed business.

dmead• 13 years ago

someone's bad at being greedy

notlisted3• 13 years ago

Where does the traffic come from? I think I may know.

TRAFFIC

A brief glance at alexa (I know, I know...) shows the source breakdown of his traffic:

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/twicsy.com USA (17.5%), India (13.4%), Indonesia (11.3%), Japan (4.1%)

More interestingly, it lists some feeder pages, and there's one interesting one:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090722010355AA...

Which contains this answer:

"Bonus - This is an easy way to include pictures you have uploaded to Twitter in an easy and automated fashion. Go to http://twicsy.com and type in your twitter username. You will see all of the pictures you have uploaded through twitter. Now scroll to the right and click on the 'RSS' button. Now you can use this automatically updated link of your tiwtter pictures."

RSS FEEDS

So... since people can use twicsy to find all pictures on a certain hashtag topic ( http://twicsy.com/?search=%23cinderella ) or from a certain user ( http://twicsy.com/u/onedirection ), they can include these in their own sites as RSS feeds, thus contributing to his overall server traffic, but perhaps not actual visitors.

BANDWIDTH

He does not actually seem to host (all/any?) pictures himself (i.e. little bandwidth), but wraps twimg.com files in his own RSS tags, adding links to his site.

TRAFFIC 2

By the way, his assertion of 6MM visits a month is reflected in the quantcast numbers:

https://www.quantcast.com/twicsy.com#!traffic

DEMOGRAPHIC

Also, pretty interesting affinity sites and demographic (younger males, no kids, not wealthy, college educated, more than avg african american and hispanic visitors) with a strong affinity for O'Reilly Automotive (perhaps not very similar to the audience of this site, hence virtually unknown)

https://www.quantcast.com/twicsy.com#!demo

GEO

Geo findings of Alexa seem to agree with Alexa, though strangely enough, India is missing from the top countries. Quantcast claims only 56k unique cookies from India. Perhaps someone one is using his site and responsible for a lot of the Alexa 13.5% ?

https://www.quantcast.com/twicsy.com#!geo

MONEY MONEY MONEY

If my theory of above average RSS traffic is right, only he can tell, think he could make more money if he inserted some adverts into his RSS feed. Not sure how well this would go over with Twitter, since he's not doing (most of?) the image hosting.

I also get the feeling something is amiss. The Alexa and Quantcast numbers are significantly out of whack (13.4% of all traffic from India, yet only 56k unique visitors) strikes me as odd. He may be spending a bunch of money on servers whilst others save money on using them as a tool.

On a personal level I find the design very unattractive and out-of-date, which may prevent the site from becoming much of a destination and could be linked to the 60+% bounce rate. If I were him I would figure out what competitors do ( like twitpic, which according to compete is an actual competitor: https://siteanalytics.compete.com/twicsy.com/ ) and take it from there.

Access to actual analytics could provide more ideas for money-making (or -saving).

dumbfounder29• 13 years ago

For those interested (notlisted appears to be!) here are some actual numbers from Google Analytics for October:

Unique Visitors 6,461,357

Visits 7,592,870

Pageviews 28,461,178

Avg. Visit Duration 00:02:07

Geos

USA: 1.6m visits Indonesia: 687k Japan: 569k not set: 513k UK: 369k Mexico: 261k Turkey: 247k France: 232k Germany: 213k Spain: 185k

And an amazingly long tail from there. So that is definitely part of the problem when it comes to monetization. There are 120 different countries that had more than 1000 visits in October.

-----------

I do not actually believe that rss produces a significant amount of traffic for Twicsy. I don't see any evidence in the stats it has much of an impact at all.

fotoblur• 13 years ago

I just looked how much we made in Google Adsense in Oct based on the number of unique visitors we received. I calculate that we would have made roughly $42K in Oct based on your unique visitors value. This sounds nonintuitive, but its my opinion that you actually have too many ads on your site to make any money from them. My site is fotoblur.com. You can reach me through the support page if you'd like to chat. I'd love to help you if I can.

notlisted3• 13 years ago

I am. Like digging through analytics. Some people pay me for it (not a hint, just a fact).

I feel something is missing in this story...

Google has very few sites linking to yours (~35 pages, mostly garbage pages), reports a huge number of indexed pages, but actually shows very few. Why? Hummingbird update or something else?

A search for Twicsy links in twitter finds hardly anything, except the site name in combination with a link to http://po.st.

You have 30k followers on Twitter, quite a few but not humongous, so your top trend tweets won't generate major traffic. 24k on FB, but most status updates get little or no comments, likes or shares.

I see a bunch of twicsy-'hosted' images on pinterest and tumblr. Most PG-18 search terms on your site are blocked, but when I do a google image search or twitter search, quite a few, I'd say 1 in 20 are of an adult nature (which perhaps doesn't help in terms of getting advertisers).

Is the real reason for your success & traffic really... pr0n?

Edit: One of the reasons I ask this is the source of your traffic. Would visits to your site allow Indonesians to bypass their 1MM site pr0n filters?

dpweb2• 13 years ago

Forget Twitter Bootstrap, if people cared what a site looks like - explain Craigslist..

You may want to rethink the ads on the home page. Text link below the banner center, remove the image boxes. You should be getting at least $3-4 per 1k imps. Maybe dropping the 'no ads when sign in'. Show ads to everybody, but very few ads. 1 per page, maybe 2, but that's it.

iblaine• 13 years ago

I am unconvinced that traffic is all a site needs to be a real business. Sites like pinterest & snapchat convince us otherwise. And those business operate at a loss. Trying doing that as your side project...and you probably wont go very far unless you have VCs with some deep pockets...or publicity from sites like hacker news & tech crunch.

austenallred• 13 years ago

You should be making a lot more than you're making. With a few tweaks to your ad placement you should be making more than enough to live off of.

I only say this because your current ad placement is kind of annoying and intrusive (especially on the content detail pages), yet they seem to be placed in some of the worst places to actually generate clicks. Of course, I don't have specific data or testing from your site to back that theory up, but if your site follows the trends I've seen in other sites this is certainly the case.

Feel free to reach out to me at the email address in my HN profile and I'll help you get them placed right/help you test out placement to start generating some real revenue. 6 million uniques is nothing to turn your nose up at, and it should be enough for you to make a living off of quite easily.

thenomad2• 13 years ago

Question: what CPM are you getting for your ads?

Depending on how much you're getting, I may know some people who would be interested in beating that price.

dumbfounder29• 13 years ago

On average less than 10 cents.

thenomad2• 13 years ago

Hmm, interesting. I shall contact you by email!

aggronn• 13 years ago

What CPMs are you getting in the US? If 17% of your traffic is US, even with one ad per page, you should be getting ~4,760,000 pageviews per month.

have you ever tried to outsource your ad operations? that kind of inventory could be worth worth enough to live on comfortably.

wavesounds• 13 years ago

This is proof of Marc Andreessen's idea[1] that if you obtain good product market fit nothing else really matters. Despite ignoring this product for 4 years and having a totally outdated design the market is compelling this product to exist none the less.

You've basically invented Instagram for Twitter here and don't seem to even realize it.

Please do your users a favor and apply Twitter's Bootstrap to the site ASAP, its really not that hard, you've been at this for 10 years, might as well learn a little HTML CSS you've come this far.

1. "Personally, I’ll take the third position – I’ll assert that market is the most impor- tant factor in a startup’s success or failure. Why? In a great market – a market with lots of real potential customers – the market pulls product out of the startup. The market needs to be fulfilled and the market will be fulfilled, by the first viable product that comes along. The product doesn’t need to be great; it just has to basically work. And, the market doesn’t care how good the team is, as long as the team can produce that viable product."

chavesn• 13 years ago

Well, not nothing else. As the author said, it makes next to no money. And it sounds like the traffic is almost entirely transient, which reduces its value greatly. The site averaged less than 2 visits per unique visitor.

So, while I get your point that an interested audience propelled the site to great use without much work at all, that's not the whole equation, not even close.

Axsuul• 13 years ago

I can heavily relate to this with one of my early projects, Jellibug. It aggregated celebrity pictures from Instagram, Twitter, etc and at one point had 1M+ pictures and 250k+ visitors/month. Except it didn't make money and became a "piece of shit startup I hate to love". I stopped working on it about a year ago and finally shut it down last month. Almost all traffic to it was organic, just like Twicsy. And it was mostly teenagers using the site which is a very hard audience to monetize. I couldn't see it as a business anymore so why bother wasting time even thinking about it? Sometimes things fall apart so that better things can fall together. Since then, I've stopped chasing the sexy and cool ideas with no business plan. Today, I run 2 unsexy and boring startups that make money. My advice would be to ditch Twicsy and instead find a problem and solve it.

dumbfounder29• 13 years ago

I can't ditch the piece of shit I love!

AznHisoka• 13 years ago

What are those 2 boring startups you run?

Also, a sneaky, probably short-term idea for making money is to have sneaky affiliate links with misleading anchor text like "Click to see the image", and point the affiliate link to an Amazon product page or something. Probably an easy few thousand dollars per month.

billmalarky2• 13 years ago

I am feeling this so hard right now. Same situation except about double the traffic and yet still losing money.

Definitely looking into SAAS as my next project.

patio11• 13 years ago

My general anti-B2C bias may be showing, but unless you've discovered a new core interaction for people (Instagrammy) I'm betting the 6 million visits a month is basically just a function of having a lot of content about Justin Bieber (and a zillion other topics) which is beating Twitter because Twitter has relatively poor SEO (for a reason). This sort of suggests that the momentary attention of 6 million people is worth what people are willing to pay for it.

You're clearly smart and connected. You've built sites this successful before and probably will again. Why not make something which matters rather than aggregating hashtagged selfies? There's more money in things that matter and they are frequently more rewarding to work on.

dumbfounder29• 13 years ago

I will keep Twicsy going until it makes much less than no sense at all!!!!!!!

But, I am already working on the next thing and we have generated more revenue in the last few months than Twicsy/Dumbfind/Searchles did in 10 years.

rattray• 13 years ago

That's incredible, congratulations!

Care to share what you're working on? Or at least what process led you to the new project?

lubujackson• 13 years ago

I agree with this perspective. Every idea can't be curing cancer, and many innovative ideas are stumbled on while playing with something else - like Feynman discovering quantum electrodynamics because he was curious about why spinning plates wobble. You need to follow your instincts.

At a minimum, you're providing a service to thousands of people and sheparding a product through its lifecycle. I don't know if working on Twicsy will have any real influence on your future work, but following its story seems more valuable than dropping it to "pivot" off in some random trajectory.

oacgnol• 13 years ago

Can I just say that I love your attitude? A borderline unhealthy sense of self deprecation and just 'doing it' because you can - qualities I wish more tech people had.

saym• 13 years ago

what's the reason for poor twitter seo?

shawnreilly• 13 years ago

I can tell you're frustrated with this Project, but I still think you deserve some congrats. Good job! It's not easy to build something and get that much traffic. I think the frustration stems from the platform it's built on, and how hard it is to monetize on that platform. Since the content is basically given away for free, advertising is your only option. And since they advertise as well... it’s tough to pull it off. I can think of three basic options here (and I'm sure there are many many more):

1. Keep it running, keep it free, and use it as a "Bullet Point" project to increase your perceived value on other projects that have the potential to monetize more successfully

2. Go the complete opposite and just start charging money for it, and see what happens. Of course you risk losing traffic and/or the whole thing imploding, but you never know until you try

3. Just scrap it and re-use the Tech to build a different product that is focused on a niche market that you believe can monetize better. Perhaps News related businesses that would find value in an easy /easier way to find Images for the stories they write

lazyeye2• 13 years ago

Its a cheesy video but if you can force yourself to watch to the end there might be a couple of points to make your time worthwhile.

6 Ways To Make Money Online http://www.shoemoney.com/6-ways-to-make-money-online

(Yes I know its Shoemoney)

cmac29922• 13 years ago

Why would you need funding? Your product seems "finished" and you have a ton of users. You just need to monetize better than crappy ads

dumbfounder29• 13 years ago

Because I have 2 kids and I can't afford to work for no salary anymore! And the site needs a redesign.

Grokit• 13 years ago

Just some honest constructive feedback here.

Kinda just seems like an excuse to me...I don't have kids, so I can't empathize, however, it couldn't take THAT much time to work on monetization strategies. 6 million uniques on a consistent basis is pretty substantial attention, and attention = power, nowadays. Plus, why would an investor want to throw any more money at you when you've already somehow dropped well over a million bucks? I think if you just put some elbow grease in, you'd make it work.

cmac29922• 13 years ago

I certainly understand needing to support your family. But I understand why investors are so leery. Additional $$$ in the business and a redesign would probably result in more users but probably not a substantial increase in revenue. Your monetization strategy is not working at 6 million(impressive btw) users then why would it work at 12 million users. There is a very small ROI with the current strategy. Properly monetizing 6 million users would result in alot more than just beer money.

what you've done is awesome. With a few tweaks to the business model you could generate real revenue without needing to raise investment capital.

photorized2• 13 years ago

Launch a contest, some folks would probably be willing to solve the monetization problem for a percentage of the revenue. I'd love to work with you on this, that kind of traffic isn't easy to build.

I'd also spin off a separate product for marketers (based on the same engine, but without the global trend noise), make it useful (there are a few ways to do that).

dumbfounder29• 13 years ago

Then I would have 50 ideas that I don't have time or money to execute on :)

photorized2• 13 years ago

idea being you let them execute for rev share :)

joshuaellinger• 13 years ago

You are making me love my little enterprise startup.

10 years, no funding -> $750K/year.

Of course, that one company is AT&T. We help send about 1/3% of all direct mail advertising in the U.S. (Sorry about that -- we are trying to get them to switch to digital but it's a hard sell to when that's what they do for a living.)

username223• 13 years ago

Note to "10x founders": both "twitsnbieber.com" and "titsnbieber.com" are still available.

lazyeye2• 13 years ago

Could maybe time-delay search results for free users. Premium users (news companies etc) pay for more real-time service.

msalazar• 13 years ago

This is something that I have thought about a lot recently because I've been wanting to start my own company as well. I don't plan on making money from it right away. I would love to, but at the end of the day.. It comes down to what is reality, which in this case for me is that I will not be making any/much money off of my site. I've looked at alternatives to how I can change this and will continue to do so. Kudos to you for managing to keep your idea going for this long with little to no hope. Maybe I will have to be just like you and just keep at it only because of the love and passion you have for your own product. Best of luck to you on your new project(s)

cyrilg• 13 years ago

The idea seems like a good one but you are not solving any problem, it is just a cool way to discover photos on twitter. If you have 6 millions unique users, can you charge businesses to feature their photo on the home page and charge per follower you give them?

rgonzalez• 13 years ago

Best title ever.

amerf1• 13 years ago

Honestly speaking I've used the website a lot, but only recently I started thinking why doesn't the founder take it to the next level? It's an amazing website!

ringe• 13 years ago

The real problem here IMO is that the focus is on the investors and making a product that will attracted such.

There's something fundamentally wrong with the approach when the major focus is on something else than earning money.

I know, I've been there too.

loop "Build something you can sell. Find a customer. Send a bill. Get money."

rjurney• 13 years ago

Just keep growing the traffic however you can while you break even and figure out how to turn it into something profitable long term.

jjoe• 13 years ago

Interesting... HN seems to be more responsive to stories of failed start ups than averagely successful businesses. Is this because most are reluctant to tell the world they've failed? Doesn't this go counter to the failure-is-good argument.

It's as if one comes out more genuine iff bad news are shared rather than good news. FYI, I don't personally see OP's app/outcome as a failure in itself.

realworldview• 13 years ago

/bin/anothergreatidea < '$$$' > ~/Desktop/Trash 2> /dev/null

WaterSponge• 13 years ago

You ever think to ask your users with a survey to see why they came there in the first place?

Do you have some analytics to see what they are doing on the site? I mean is 60% of it searching for popstar images and then browsing from then?

Once you know this you can start to steer this firehose into a funnel.

nate• 13 years ago

I sent this to the blog author, but then felt maybe someone else might get something from reading it. My offer stands for everyone here. Most of us are going through or have gone through this same struggle eloquently written in this post. I'm here to help brainstorm or chew on any problems any of us are working through. Just need to email me. nate.kontny gmail

--------------------------

I really enjoyed your blog post on Hacker News today about the trouble of running Twicsy.

Here's just a few spelling/grammar corrections:

https://draftin.com/documents/168810/changes_to_savepoint?sh...

I definitely understand what you are going through. I had a successful attempt at starting a business with Inkling (http://inklingmarkets.com, which still runs profitably today), but then wanted to try again. So we started a branded games company where companies could stick there own brand images into a bunch of games we made. For example, our version of Bejeweled but with pictures of the latest sweaters at the Gap. And we did some revenue making deals. But the deals were tough to get, and the investors didn't care.

I didn't have the passion for this project like I did with Inkling to see it through. So I gave up relatively quickly. Took a break and worked on the Obama campaign. But then I started Draft (http://draftin.com) about half a year ago, and that's been a considerably different project in terms of success. It's surprised me how much people enjoy it.

One thing that's really helped me is Kathy Sierra's advice (http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/0...): to find something where I'm making people better at something. And let that guide all my decision making.

For example, If I were trying to sell cameras, I'd wake up and just focus on helping people become better photographers. With Draft I focus on helping people "write better", and every feature or decision I make for the product has to have that as its mission. And it continues to serve me well.

As I briefly look at Twicsy, I can't help feel there is something here about helping people get better at something. Maybe it too is about getting better at taking photos. You must have a lot of data (i.e OkCupid) about what types of photos get traffic. Maybe with that data, you could make companies better at sharing images of what they do to get more fans. You obviously have skill getting SEO traffic, and managing a large image site. Maybe there is a kernel there that you'd be excited to productize.

Anyways, I know the feelings you are going through. I'm not going to say just keep going, because obviously you have. But I am confident, that eventually there is something you are exploring here that could be turned into something that can sustain itself.

I'm here to brainstorm or chat if you need me. Happy to be of any kind of help. Please feel free to ask. No need to feel like you are toiling at this alone.

-Nate

-- http://twitter.com/natekontny http://ninjasandrobots.com

normloman• 13 years ago

Finally, a website that lets me search twitters massive database of stupid pictures people take of themselves. How are you not a billionaire?

DanBC• 13 years ago

... It also lets you search for things like LAX, which might have been handy the other day.

A quick search for "thinspo" shows Twitter has a lot of work left to do if they want to stop people using twitter for pro-anorexia messaging.

robomartin• 13 years ago

And this, boys and girls, is what entrepreneurship looks like more often than not. The "over the weekend" stories are rare corner cases. In the vast majority of cases you have to be prepared to slog it out for an extended period of time before you start to see success. And that's one of the huge reasons for which most new businesses fail. Not everyone has the intestinal fortitude to, in the face of adversity, keep pushing forward.

@dumbfounder

First of all, I wish you had chosen a different handle on HN. You are not dumb at all. You are, in fact, a real asset to anyone who might want to launch a startup or get behind a difficult idea. I don't know if you project will ultimately succeed. Hard to tell. You, on the other hand, are an absolute success.

I know that from your current perspective it might seem you wasted a decade in this journey. I simply don't see it that way.

You've received plenty of design and functional advise on this thread with regards to twicsy. The first thing I thought about was something that came up in a discussion on HN a couple of days ago. Here's my short comment on that thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6647818

In my view that still rings true for twicsy. In other words, you have to deliver value that is not found elsewhere and that people are willing to pay for. Im my post I speak of the fact that the vast majority of news websites are regurgitated versions of the news item source, whereas there are a very few who provide you with real incremental value by taking the time to research and give you perspective.

If you are still interested in making twicsy a success perhaps you should start thinking laterally rather than vertically. In other words, don't stay on your current path. Explore other paths. I know that's easier said than done. For example: How might corporate marketing programs be able to use your service? Celebrities? Bloggers? How about a path to licensing some of these pictures? Not through you, through whoever owns the rights with you making a small percentage on the sale.

Don't give up. Pivot.

boonez123• 13 years ago

More ads man! I had a site that had 1 million page views per day and we generated about $1500-$3000/day off the ads. Placement of the ad is imperative.

billmalarky2• 13 years ago

Can you email me? I've got a site that does high pageviews that I'm struggling to monetize.

johnkim• 13 years ago

Just wanted to say love your post. It was fun and educating. ;)

dorfsmay• 13 years ago

Thanks for this post, especially for all the details. Been building a site as a side project, mainly to get it out of my head and the incidental learnings. Reading about your strugle and the hardship of moneytisation was very enlightning.

jameszol• 13 years ago

You have an awesome opportunity with your startup. I'm sure you'll turn something around with the lively discussion you kicked off.

Have you considered non-ad-network revenue sources? What about running affiliate offers?

I used to make 4 to 10 times more as a publisher with affiliate offers than adsense or other ad network placements. I don't affiliate (or publish) enough now to know if that would still happen or not.

A quick idea for an affiliate test, although you may have already tried this:

Given 6MM+ uniques/mo, and a somewhat adult-oriented audience, you may have a decent opportunity to push native ads with affiliate offers toward dating sites, event-themed sites (costumes for halloween trends), and more.

Native ads could be custom, animated banners you create and fill the first, second or x picture spot in your search or tag results. Does that make sense? Your banners would be 100px x 100px on your home page and fill a standard picture spot or two or five instead of the images that might ordinarily go in that space, 150x150 banner ads could fit in well in random places on your tag image pages, etc.

Also, advertisers might like to participate in native advertising on your website if the opportunity were available.

Good luck!

My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love

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