10 web start-ups (all mine) ... and why they failed | Hacker News Reader

10 web start-ups (all mine) ... and why they failed

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64 pointsjawns23 comments

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I really liked Truyoo and I think it could be a success.

But I agree that you can't have the user pay right away.

Can't they just give you their credit card details and get themselves verified for free the first 1 or 2 times?

After that, to prevent abuse, you can charge them the $2.

I can see this being very useful.

In fact, Heroku does something similar, with many features of their free account not activated until you give them a credit card to prove your identity.

I would love to be able to do something like that -- grabbing their credit card details and only charging them if they run afoul of the rules -- but I haven't found a credit card processing service that would give me that flexibility.

The only problem, I guess, is what if you have someone who has a dozen credit cards. Or, more problematic, what if their credit card company offers "throwaway" credit card numbers (as mine does) that you can use for one-of purchases? That would give them unlimited attempts to game the system.

It would still be useful, even if 100% free.

Its the hurdle or having to keep setting up accounts with different credit cards. And the very strong psychological aspect of having to fork over some real, identifying information to a website in order to comment.

I think this would really make people behave much better.

Its a good idea. I'd encourage you to look into it more.

Agree that you should pursue this one harder...

You have a nice "inside track" by already being in the industry... and it's quite likely that you're very passionate about this topic, which will come through once you...

...Consolidate your pitch to more tightly communicate the opportunity, the problem in solving the opportunity, and how your product fixes that problem. (Preferably in a way that works better than existing solutions/semi-solutions. ;)

Remember, you've got to put your salesman hat on when making your case for a product like this. What was the principle objection your potential customers raised when declining your proposed solution? ie: Why didn't they like the fact that the end-user has to pay?

Is there a way to shift that cost elsewhere while maintaining the integrity of the system?

Have you listed all of your assumptions with that solution and thought of ways to test and prove/disprove each one?

Could you do something like Amazon, where they preauthorize the charges before the ship, and then actually bill when the items arrive? This may be something you want to specify this with processors before you get a merchant account.

Running a preauth that you don't intend to capture (or won't capture in a reasonable time frame) is a violation of the card association operating regulations and will result in abuse fees, and if continued, loss of your merchant account.

I agree that Truyoo has potential. Similar ideas have come up in brainstorming with others and I think something like this will catch on. I'm not sure payment is necessary to do this. Facebook Connect solves this problem to some extent, as you have a much better identity check than just an email (although not as good as a credit card.)

1. Few people are using their real names

2. karma largely solves this

3. Publishers want as low a barrier to commenting as possible- even a captcha is too high for some. Lots of comments creates the impression of lots of readers which brings in lots of advertising.

4. No one is going to pay to comment.

It's a dead duck. Look at making karma portable between sites - HN, SO etc.

I think you're just not using sites where this is a problem. Any site that currently pre-moderates comments is a potential customer to a service such as this. For instance, websites of dead tree media must defend their brand vigorously, as it's all they've got left. So the quality of their comments matters a lot.

It's a lot simpler than that: Truyoo just didn't identify the right customer!

The commenter is not the customer. The website owner is. While the commenter is not going to pay anything, the website owner will (or rather, might), because it's in their interest to keep their website clean and tidy.

There has got to be some connection to the true customer there that would keep the sign-up limited in hurdles...

BTW: Why Credit card? Why not something else that offers enough of a catch but isn't subject to such scrutiny? Phone number, perhaps? Maybe references (I.E. you'r comments are "approved" manually until you establish enough of a "rep")...

This is such a huge issue that I really think it is worth you perusing more... you're basically doing the one thing that disqus avoids/is not.

I think an opportunity was missed here. Instead of pitching publishers, he should have taken some time out to pitch a politician or two. What? Yes, that's right. Nobody hates anonymous commenting more than politicians, and every now and again, one tries to force registrations for comments. If you laid the groundwork (assuming the service is still around), at the right moment (say, when an anonymous commenter really does something to inflame opinions) you could pitch a politician to try and get the idea legislated into existence for certain types of publishing.

Granted it's not an easy strategy or a usual one, but corporations have been legislating themselves into business for years, so it would be worth a try.

He could charge the cardholder/user a nominal amount like paypal does to verify their identity and then refund it to them. A forum owner who then uses Truyoo pays out to Truyoo 25c for every new member who signs up under the system and goes on to make a certain number of posts, say for instance at least fifteen. The new member will by that stage have added value to the forum and is worth the cost, as they haven shown not to be a one-question drive-by costing the forum owner.

The system would have benefits for forum owners as it prevents both spammers and trolls and makes it harder for people to make shill posts using aliases thus increasing the signal to noise ratio. I don't agree that one mark against a Truyoo member should disqualify them from ever entering any other Truyoo enabled forum, as arguments arise on forums readily. Moderators can be punch-drunk on power and ban users flippantly even though they might have been in the right.

Rather, it should go on their record like a credit rating. Other forums can choose whether to accept or deny them entrance. Truyoo users should be allowed to explain themselves too in comments on their profile against any mark. They should also be able to choose to set different user names for each forum for privacy. Their true identity and aliases should also be kept secret from forum owners. Perhaps they could pay a premium for this - the $2 or you could add a zero.

There's another common theme that would have killed every one of these sites: marketing. I don't see it mentioned anywhere in any of his site ideas. They all seemed to be "build a cool thing and put it on the internet" type of execution.

I went through a whole pile of little startups just like this guy, with similar success, before I started to figure out the marketing side of running a business. Once I started paying more attention to "how are people going to find this" than "how is this going to handle [obscure corner case]", that's when my stuff started getting popular and making money.

Take any one of those sites, and try actually promoting it to the world. You might be surprised at the results.

Any advice on where to get started in figuring out marketing? There are the well known places to start like SEO, but I was wondering if you had anything else in mind?

Look to the Patrick. All knowledge is contained therein:

http://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/

Without wanting to sound like a know-it-all, I think the underlying theme between all of them is not really understanding the value proposition for the customer. You think it's weird that a vacation house owner wouldn't switch to a free service - I would think it weird if they did. They're probably making twice as much money as they used to, and consider it good value for money. They probably aren't terribly motivated to save a few bucks when the existing site is working for them, and has high traffic.

You constructed an elaborate payments scheme for rungjump, but in fact people rarely respond to this type of cash incentive, and introducing payments 'dirties' the whole process. People would probably prefer just to post for the kudos or ego boost. There is probably a lot more money in this model for targeting recruiting ads; if someone is looking at job x and how to get it, recruiters/trainers/educators are going to pay to put an ad in front of them, and you're going to get good clickthrough.

You make some good points!

See ... this is why I said I would have benefited from a co-founder with more of a business mindset. I get so gung-ho about an idea that I don't always think about it from that angle.

This is what spoke volumes to me.

In my mind, ParishNetwork.org was intended to be a place where you could meet other people who attended your parish. But a lot of the users expressed a desire to be able to interact with users from other parishes. I resisted accommodating that request because I really wanted ParishNetwork to be parish-centric, rather than one big meeting place for Catholics across the country.

You need to learn to pivot. Unless you are on a mission, listen to your customers and make something people want.

edit: I was going for Blues Brothers but I realized it sounded a little yucky.

Truyoo reminds me of this idea I had for making a document signing service.

Anyone else ever get pissed of that the only reason you need a printer and a fax machine and/or scanner REALLY is because twice a year you have to sign a document?

I wanted to have a similar idea where a minimal transaction on a credit card was used to authenticate - ie. as a digital signature. So each time you digitally sign a document you get charged 1 cent or something and it verifies the name you're putting on the document is the same as on the card you're using.

With the others on this list, though, would you really call all of these "startups"? Throwing something together and putting it on the web doesn't qualify it as a "startup" surely ... if so I have several "startups" that no-one has ever looked at or used (smsmyride.com whatwhere.com.au smscard.com.au 8centsms.com)

I think if you're going to call something a "web startup" you need a little more than a domain name registration and a couple of stock photographs.

I'd be curious if some of these would have had more success given slightly different operating models. For example, RungJump seemed interesting, but maybe the described commercial model and the long questionnaire killed the community before having a chance to develop into a place focused on great jobs and what makes them so.

I liked the idea and saw the domain expired, so I've put a wiki at http://www.rungjump.com focusing more on what makes a job great as opposed to charging money for ideal job profiles. I'd be curious if it gets some interest in this modified form.

(PS: let me know if you want to claim the domain back)

I liked your sidebar comment: "One thing that's pretty obvious from the screenshots: I kept re-using the same $3 stock photo I purchased for one of my earlier ventures. Hey, it's generic enough that it works in pretty much any context."

However, I think you should ditch that stock photo. It's too "corporate," and when I visited the sites that were using it, I felt like I was on a godaddy squatter page.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/09/if-it-looks-corpora...

Some of these services seem like they failed just for happening at the wrong time.

Constant Ads sounds just like the advertising system used by reddit which is very successful as far as I can tell.

ioFeed sounds like it could have been the replacement for Facebook that Diaspora wants to be.

I think CivicAssociation.net would have actually been a really viable start up during the housing boom for neighborhood and civic associations if it had been marketed as a dead simple CMS/billing system.

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