Ask HN: I'm having a hard time with my startup, have a few questions | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: I'm having a hard time with my startup, have a few questions

8 pointstaggers8 comments

Hi, Im the founder of TagChats.com,(registration optional) a chatsite startup where you select some tags from the grid, and the system will match you up with a stranger with similar tags - someone who you share interests with and then you can make new friends. The core idea is pretty simple really. I founded this project becuase i realised there is hardly a good chatsite out there for meeting new friends, they are all overrun with trolls/ asl/ spam etc, and i just want to create something cool where people can meet new friends and enjoy themselves.<p>Now the problem, this site isn't very good if very few people are using it, and right now its a ghost town. Please, i really need your advice on how to push this to a critical mass. The few people who have come on the site and chatted with me say they love the concept but it isn't much fun with so few people. I hope you can take the time to advise me,<p>Thank for reading<p>Alex Muller

Essentially all social oriented startups face this problem initially. You need to identify who are the people most likely to adopt your service and focus all your marketing source on them accordingly. Once you build up a sizable user base within your first target group you can then leverage that to launch into other target groups.

Think facebook - initially it was only targeted at college students. Start small and focused

It was originally only for ONE college campus. What this means is that you can't just pick programmers. You probably want it to be the place to find python programmers or perhaps even a more specific niche.

I wonder if you can't sponsor a conference or something (where sponsor=providing the service for free). I'm thinking along the lines of setting up a sub-chat with tags unique to the conference to allow attendees to discuss topics in real-time. This may net you some new users, plus would give you some good PR opportunities.

In order to be accepted by a "critical mass", your website should be dead-simple to use. It should also be dead-simple to understand what value your product adds to the user's life and how it accomplishes that goal. The site has potential, but could definitely use a design/user-interface rework. Here are ideas I gathered after a quick glance at your site:

- White is boring and dated. If you're afraid of color, try some neutral tones or add minimal color to specific areas (think facebook header, or HN header).

- In 1 sentences below the headline "Share interests..!", explain how exactly your site does what it says it will do. If you think you can't explain it in 1 sentence, start with two paragraphs. Then edit it down to one. Then down to one sentence. http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2647-the-class-id-like-to-tea...

- Instead of presenting the tags in a grid, categorize them. This might seem difficult, but I'm sure you could do it. It is simply unpleasant to browse through a grid of words.

- Mention how quickly the user can begin chatting, and make it prominent. Is registration required? If not, advertise this.

Instead of having everyone come to your own site, can you integrate your idea into existing bulletin boards or social networks as an app or even deeper? Seems like that would be the way to get a ton of users onto your solution quickly.

A cool site that could maybe give you some publicity is MakeUseOf.com. I've seen similar services announced on there, and that could at least get bump in the number of users.

Clickable: http://TagChats.com

Thanks for your reply mate, i think i should focus on student geeks (im a 2nd year CS student at UCL), and prehaps try to push it through my uni

btw im on now if u want to chat

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