Ask HN: Brilliant team, good product, terrible market. Need new market | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Brilliant team, good product, terrible market. Need new market

15 pointsnotmymain1213 comments

My 2 co-founders and i have been running our startup (angel funded) for about 3 years. We've released 4 products, and none of them have stuck with users. Our present one has around 5000 users in 3 months, not brilliant.

We've decided we need to stop. Take a week off, and do something entirely new. Our previous products were all in the same space-ish.

We're struggling to come up with a market/product to develop in. We're all technical, and one of us is a designer. We can create anything and sell it and win, but we have been working so much in our current space we can't think of a relevant problem to solve.

Any ideas how to fix this? We've not burnt out, just a bit tunnel vision on the current space - and we don't have the resources to take a month off to relax. We'd love someone to just say "x product sucks, make it better" - we've raised funding and understand passion etc, but the first step of a product is actually the hardest, when you have a product resonating with a small market everything falls into place.

tl;dr - tunnel vision team needs new product for new market, ideally b2c of something cool.

If you've got the awesome team you say you do, then you should aggressively do some Lean Startup-style validated learning.

1) Come up with an idea

2) Create a Wordpress landing page for that idea (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1697302 ). Sure WordPress landing sites are ghetto, but if it's good enough for groupon...

3) Buy ads on Google/Facebook to drive traffic to your landing page. If you're angel funded, you're racing against time, not money, so buying targeted traffic is a way to get validated learning in a shorter amount of time.

4) If people are responding to your landing page (clicking through the ads, signing up for an email, etc), make a survey to find out their thoughts on your idea, it's competitors, and what they currently use to solve that problem.

5) When these marketing efforts help you find an audience that is reachable and responsive to your idea, start building! When you have something, monitor usage and solicit feedback to find the next thing to build. If something isn't getting used, scrap it. Repeat as often as possible.

If you're looking for a small tight market, I would highly recommend using Facebook ads. You can target by interests and groups, which means you're showing your ad to people who have self-selected to show their interest in the market you're looking at.

I'm making an online trading card game, and I made a survey on Wufoo, posted it on my site, then made a FB ad pointing to the survey along with a $25 Amazon gift card to a random person that completed it. I spent $75 on ads targeted to Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and Magic: The Gathering players, got 50K impressions, over 200 completed surveys, and this was in only 3 days. $100 total got me validation of my idea plus other useful information, and 50 or so people signed up for my newsletter and to playtest when I'm ready.

I was going to post something similar, but you beat me to it.

This is absolutely fantastic advice for any startup, and something every startup should commit to doing before they spend months building a product. If you gauge interest before committing to an idea, you never risk ending up with a product that can't find a market.

I hope you flesh this out more and turn it into a blog post, it could benefit a lot of people on HN.

Great message, but one thing threw me for a loop. "got me validation of my idea" <-- why? 50k impressions to 200 surveys is a 0.4% conversion rate, and I'm sure at least some percentage of those respondents were not entirely positive. Where did the validation come from? Or was it the $0.50 CPA for your "users" (survey completers)? (Which seems low, assuming you can muster something like $1 revenue per user on average.) (edit: Or maybe you can think of the CPA as $2.00, since only 50 out of the 200 people signed up for the newsletter.)

My "idea" is an online trading card game with a science and technology theme. So the "validation" I got from the survey results were things like:

- I asked how interested people were in playing games with different themes (medicine, business, ancient history, science, etc). Science and technology had the highest interest, both in magnitude (very interested) and percentage of favorable

- I was worried that people would not try new games, but would stick to the ones they already played. This was an issue for a minority of people but most people were excited about trying new games

- I was worried that people wouldn't want to play TCGs online. This was a valid concern, more than half of users had concerns. I got stats on what people like about in-person gaming and what they dislike about computer gaming

- I didn't know if people spent money on online TCGs. Turns out they do, but not as much as cardboard games.

This was not validation of a specific business model - this was answering the question: Is there a plausible market for this? I'll again survey for specific feedback on my game when it's ready to show, but if I found out things like "I'll never play another game besides my favorite" or "No one spends money on any online TCG", then I would have to reconsider.

You can see the whole survey here: http://geekstack.com/survey-for-trading-card-game-players/

1) Come up with an idea

I think the OP is saying they are stuck at this step.

But the point is, come up with any idea, spend two hours on Wordpress and copy, spend $100-200 on traffic to a site or survey, and in a couple of days you know if your idea is any good. With a survey, you also may find some guidance for a new or derivative product.

We can create anything and sell it and win

Show. Don't tell.

If you've got 5000 users in 3 months, surely you can get a lot more. You clearly know your domain and have built something which a lot of people found useful.

Build on your strength, don't jump ship because you are bored. Stick it out.

Most importantly, please please don't try to hide your projects. Just link to them, get some more users. I really don't understand why people do this on HN. You are just losing out on loads of useful feedback and connections.

What are your current products/markets? I have found, the best way to go is generally tweaking the work you have already done vs. scrapping and going towards something completely new because you will run into the same unknown pitfalls every time.

Please make something to extend some of the more popular web-based time tracking systems out there. We already got sites like tick/harvest, etc... which does a great job at project based time tracking.

But a project compromises of;

- benefit management. what each employee is entitled as part of the company, and how can they make the claims, etc.

- training management. how many training hours each employee is entitled, and how they can start to apply for training course, etc.

- leave management. how to apply leave in the system and sync it to the time tracking system, etc..

All these areas have plenty of opportunities to grow. If you have the skills, do make something in these areas.

Go build a cross platform mobile device game. There is a whole industry around game development and tons of new "physical" games are invented each year. Take one of those ideas and port it to tens of millions of customers with a cool UI and experience. Then tie it into the social online world. Partnering with a game developer should be pretty easy as they probably aren't expecting to be the next Monopoly, but instead do it for love.

Look at the hodgepodge of answers I got to this question: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/9371/what-is-...

I was surprised that there wasn't a polished product in this space.

Requirements are mostly about trust between parties and understanding the problem domain and business needs by developers, and technical costs by business. It's much more about relationships and communication than documents.

One option (not saying it's the best) is you could try unashamedly following someone who's getting good early traction. You can be the mouse that gets the cheese if you can learn the space and out execute them.

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