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Show HN: 6 days until broke/homeless: here is my hack

askjemima.com

19 pointsoliv__19 comments

Hi HN, my name is Olivier, I’m a 22 yo entrepreneur with a failing startup. I have 6 days left until I go broke, have to leave the city and end my bootstrapped company.

So I came up with this crazy website to raise funds to help me survive: AskJemima.com is a witty virtual psychic that will text you a personalized answer to any question you ask for 99c.

Help out a fellow hacker and ask a question!

What is your other business? Why is it failing?

I appreciate you're trying to hang on in there, but it might be better to cut your losses and move on to the next thing.

It's Skyler[0]: it's a fashion weather app. We are bootstrapped and can't raise money so we have to shut down at the end of the month... :(

[0] https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1011881829

Looks interesting and it's a nice feature. Not sure if it is a standalone app though - I have the default weather app that works just fine.

However, you have something that would be valuable to other Apps such as Next, New Look or similar (I'm in the UK, so these shops may not be relevant to you.). I would suggest approaching them and offering to license your software so every morning a push alert is sent to their users with the weather for that day and a suggested outfit from their shop. That is the only route to real monetisation that I can see.

I think these (and the pepper thing?!) are all good lessons for you if you're able to learn from them. The key things I missing from your portfolio are: A. The Elusive Obvious B. Communication of Value. Those are your blind spots. Nail those and with your other qualities you'll be successful. I hope this feedback is useful to you:

A. The Elusive Obvious: What is a "fashion weather app?" It's obvious to you, but not enough other people. The Elusive Obvious is a common problem and the good thing is: it's relatively easy to correct. Just use the "elevator pitch" or "grandparent description" techniques. Say "It shows you attractive people in cool clothes automatically dressed for the weather forecast so you know what to wear that day."

B. Value: You have to tell everyone who hasn't bought your app why to spend five minutes, 99 cents, 1.6 MB, learning and using your apps instead of doing other things we already love like making a stir fry and letting the chips fall where they may w/r/t weather: How much will we get back for our expenditure? Tell a story, will it save us time? Lead to better social results? Save us money? Change our mood, make us laugh, validate our clothes choices? Lead with emotion.

You can't count on your customers to hang out in 45-minute brainstorming sessions ideating all the reasons they should use your program. You've got to tell them point-blank.

(And now I'm off to do the most important thing which is to apply all these critiques to myself. Good luck, Oliv__)

So ... why is it free?

you probably should rather ask those questions through OPs website? :)

heh. You're probably right, except I wonder if I'd be helping to keep a business going when I'm not sure that is what is right thing to do here.

This is pretty racist, "mon".

Nowadays, everything is considered racist.

EDIT: See what I mean?

Even if that were true, it wouldn't stop some things from actually being racist.

Cultural appropriation is always uncomfortable in the first place. For example, see the media storm over Kylie Jenner's hairstyle [0]

[0] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kadia-blagrove-/cultural-appro...

Consider it a pull request I think callsyfing it as racist is fair, isn't "mon" slang from Jamaica, a nation in which 59%[1] have mixed ancestry?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamaica

The website's color: red, yellow and purple.

It's obviously a humorous reference.

Sorry if you find this offensive, it was just intended to be tongue-in-cheek.

Actually my cofounder's grandma is pretty much the type portrayed: that's where we took the inspiration from.

Strange ... I would have thought you took inspiration from the 'breakfast food' brand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aunt_Jemima

It's a spoof of those late night TV psychics...

It might not be racist if it had just ripped off Miss Cleo, a famous 'psychic' who claimed to be Jamaican. Hilariously enough, the image used on the site is from a French Toast Crunch commercial parodying Miss Cleo (incidentally, it looks like she is now suing General Mills for the ad).

So the op has taken a ridiculous stereotype as the starting point. I wouldn't be that offended.

But jamming another black stereotype on top by calling it "ask jemima" an obvious reference to Aunt Jemima. People already consider that imagery to be racist. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/racially-insensitiv... I think combining both of these together so haphazardly is a pretty bad idea.

Anyway, to the op: best of luck with your company.

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