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Comment by cocktailpeanuts | Hacker News Reader

I wish the founders well, but I feel like people nowadays give up too early. And this is one of the most extreme examples of that.

Most community sites take a while to grow and you really never know what will happen. Even Reddit was sort of a failure vs. Digg and they sold it off to conde nast. It was only later AFTER the sale when Digg messed up on their own and Reddit enjoyed success as a side effect.

You really shouldn't be building a community site if you're so impatient to give up so early. I mean the site opened to public in October 26 of 2016, that's exactly 7 months in existence. It's probably because they raised so much money, which is why you should never raise too much money when you're trying to build a community site. I have never seen a successful community site that raised that much money before getting traction.

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Honestly, as much as I love them: Imzy in its current form was never going to catch on.

Other sites can get away with some bad choices like login-required because of momentum, but... The culture and userbase they were hoping to attract was more akin to tumblr, and Tumblrites were never going to leave it for Imzy.

Those used to reddit, meanwhile, saw a signup/login screen (or even a "request an invite" screen) and boredly clicked off. Some actively looking for reddit alternatives (like me) waited to get in, but not many.

>Those used to reddit, meanwhile, saw a signup/login screen (or even a "request an invite" screen) and boredly clicked off.

First time I've heard of Imzy I believe, and this was my exact reaction when I went to their front page.

Ditto

With an initial login/signup screen they definitely should give it at least 5 years, if not 10, to get going.

I was there from early in the beta. The thing that annoyed me, when I suggested that people should take a look at it was the decision that you had to make an account to see content. Most people visited the homepage and then said 'no'.

The Gardened Wall model. Interesting gambit.

This is one of the main reasons i detest pinterest. Lately they have changed, so that you can see small amount of the content, before annoying you with the login screen.

Ditto for Quora. I see interesting content, but they annoy me so much with their accounts (even when I'm just reading) that I never spend much time there. Don-t worry, I will create an account when I have something to say, but until then just let me be.

This did them in. If you run a community-oriented website you can't just promise me the moon and then tell me "Your name's not Dan, you're not coming in."

> I wish the founders well, but I feel like people nowadays give up too early.

It's really difficult to offer perspective like that on something you don't really understand and haven't seen from the inside.

It's pretty clear if you don't have product-market fit as a founder. And if you don't have a really good idea of what you could do to get to product-market fit, it's entirely possible it's wise of the founders to stop and try something new, which is what I hope they plan to do now.

Much love to Dan, Jessica & the Imzy team. I know how hard this can be; best of luck on whatever comes next.

A community isn't a product. It is not at all clear from the inside or the outside whether a community is going to gel and take off within a year.

Communities =/= products. An entirely different kind of thinking and patience is required to grow a community as opposed to build a product.

What would you say Reddit's product is then? It certainly isn't content or the platform...

Actually it is the platform.

Reddit investors and advertisers are not spending money on Reddit because of its platform.

That has nothing to do with what a "product" is.

What? So your advice is to knowingly ignore what actually makes your site money and just call some random other feature "the product"? How would Reddit admins/CEOs ever make decisions using that advice?

If you didn't understand what he meant by the distinction between community and product, you should have asked to clarify, instead of just assuming (completely incorrectly) what he meant and arguing based on your own interpretation.

Building up a community and building a product are completely different things. You can have the perfect product yet never get any community. You can get a great community without even a product.

I don't dispute any of those points, but I think it's still silly to talk about anything in terms of "product" that isn't their community. Reddit the software could come and go, it's essentially irrelevant to the workings of the site (barring radical changes). Whatever you call the community of users that's still the thing you have to try and cultivate, the thing you are presenting to investors, the thing that increases your revenue.

I'd say their community is their primary _asset_. All products are (ought to be?) built around an advantageous asset, whether it is exclusive data or a novel workflow or special insight.

But you design, engineer, build, and test a product, not a community. Though we do try.

Hmm that's a pretty ephemeral "asset"... and it's an asset that is directly tied to your ability to pull funding. Even if you technically don't directly mold the community, it doesn't do you any favors to try and think of something else as your "product" just because you're uncomfortable with the definition.

I never said anything about what their product is. I said their users aren't a "product", they are an "asset".

Value doesn't come only in the form of software. Only software devs believe that.

I definitely didn't claim that value only came in the form of software... in fact I think I claimed the opposite of that in saying that reddit calling their platform their product was useless and unhelpful. They have one thing that is attractive to users, advertisers, investors, and creators. That thing is their community. Pretending anything else is what they should try and capitalize on is silly.

Peter Reinhardt has a great talk about that. You need to understand the feedback that you receive and sometimes is better kill fast your ideas to move on. If it is a product or a community doesn't matter, if your growth is flat you still didn´t hit the market that you need so you could eventually successful monetize your company.

People that really love what you do will "spread the word" and bring new people.

Sometimes product fit takes longer than $VC_ATTENTION_SPAN

Indeed, there are many other ways of building a business on-line than startups.

Makes me think, maybe it's time to create a "bootstrapped" badge, or something like that; something that sites that didn't take VC money could proudly display? At least for me personally, whether something is an investor startup or not is an important data point for deciding whether to invest my time in it.

http://37signals.com/bootstrapped

Hasn't been updated in a while though.

Github is on there, and they've raised $350 million

Lyra's bootstrapped and already sustainable. There's just that little matter of scaling the database... (AWS means no worries about the server)

www.hellolyra.com

Funding here came (in part) from O'Reilly, who strike me as in it for the longer haul.

VC money or not, isn't the issue. It could be a single guy with 100$ who built that, it wouldn't make a darn difference. I mean sure, a single guy running the site would have all of eternity to twiddle with it, but without PMF, the site isn't going anywhere.

I mean, the K-factor is either greater than 1 or it's less than 1. If it's less than 1, you can have 100s of years go by without gaining a meaningful audience. If it's greater than 1, then they would have seen that in their retention/cohort/signup analysis. Even, if only a sub-segment of their users were growing at a >1 K-factor, they would not have shut down. Since their shutting down, that's clearly not the case.

What's going on with raising $11M if it's pretty clear you don't have product market fit?

It's people who don't know what they're doing playing with Monopoly money. I mean really; $11M+ for that site, which existed all of 7 months?! The start up scene boggles my mind.

They didn't spend all of the $11m. Only a tiny fraction of it. And they worked on the site for two years.

Then why did they raise so much? How do you know how much the spent? And two years to build that site?

I'm not convinced any of this was well thought out.

> Then why did they raise so much?

To be prepared if there was success? I don't know

> How do you know how much they spent?

Because the CEO talked about it in another comment

> And two years to build that site?

Yup. A lot of iterating and trying to find the right fit. Why is that so hard to believe?

> I'm not convinced any of this was well thought out

That's the thing - you have almost zero information about this, so declaring all of these things to be obviously-avoidable mistakes is just silly. If you think you would do a better job you're welcome to try, but learning about a company for <5 minutes I don't think there's any possible way for you to make that call.

Yeah, community sites are often quite slow to take off. Which is perhaps why these Reddit alternatives are not really the best thing to try and raise capital for.

I mean they could theoretically take it off sure. But communities are very rarely going to be 'rocket ship' style instant successes like more traditional service and product businesses. And given how hard they are to make profitable, or how a lot of things VCs will want in order to make them profitable will hurt the community...

Yeah, not sure this is the best kind of thing to try and build as a startup business/get venture capital for. At least not initially, before the momentum is built and the community is proven to be successful.

    I have never seen a successful community site
    that raised that much money before getting traction.

What are some successful community sites?

Ugh...sadly Voat. They recently ran into budget problems (they run at $6k/month) and were able to raise enough to keep running for a few months and get volunteers help move it off Azure's overpriced hosting.

So there's an example of site, without much money, building off their community. It's filled with a lot of hate, racism and extremism.

I still like browsing it, just to see the opinions, try to understand where others are coming from and expose myself to viewpoints I disagree with.

There is some good content and some viewpoints I agree with, but I wish more reasonable people on there weren't so drown out. I think moderate people do try, but after barrages of downvotes, they give up (new accounts can't downvote either; you have to build 100 comment points -- which keeps that group think going).

> without much money, building off their community. It's filled with a lot of hate, racism and extremism

Probably not helped when they get kicked off payment processors or fundraiser sites for openly hosting underage nudity, sorry, "jailbait"...

They banned all their jailbait subverses a while back. I think most services kick them off just due to the hate-speak.

Their front page right at this moment has several unpleasant articles, including three Islamophobic items, one anti-Semitic item, and one joke accusing liberals of equating conservative economic policy and racism. So that's probably not helpful to their prospects.

Voat was better in the beginning but the no-rules atmosphere and underdog nature of the site attracted a lot of a$$holes too.

SSC wrote an interesting thing about this: http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-centrali...

Tl;dr, If you build a service that offers freedom, the first users are going to be the people that don't have freedom elsewhere. Which is mostly unsavory people. So voat attracts radical right wingers that are banned everywhere else. Torrents are mainly used for infringing copyright. Tor is full of illegal and disturbing content. And bitcoin is mainly used for shady stuff like ransomware.

> new accounts can't downvote either; you have to build 100 comment points -- which keeps that group think going

At least they're more generous than HN's downvote restrictions. But I suspect it's the upvote limitations on voat that turn newcomers off more than anything, since every other site encourages you to handout 'likes'/upvotes like candy, making it quite the culture shock when you run up against that wall.

That being said, it's hard to tell whether any of these voting mechanisms are actually any better at producing fruitful discussion than a plain old-school forum. Seems to me like having any kind of voting inevitably leads to amplifying the effects of group think.

Yeah. I wonder how it'd effect usage if down votes from user with under X points simply don't count or have minimal impact. But the user would never really know?

On the other hand, life is short.

As an entrepreneur, if you spend 10 years on something, you can get 4, potentially 5 done over your life time. If you fail early, you can try 20-30. I suspect the chances of actually succeeding are much higher in the latter case.

Instagram was already a hit at 7 months, and even whatsapp was clearly going to be big. I totally understand closing shop without enough traction.

I've been involved with quite a few startups and initiatives, and for every "we shouldn't have closed so early", there are about twenty "we should have closed it much much earlier"

I feel that way too, but I think that's because many founders are opting for funding too early and build their entire operation on money they don't have.

When they're funded it's great, but when investors who are expecting some multiple quickly pull out it's game over.

I'm not sure if that's the case here, this is just a general thought about early shutdowns.

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