Ask HN: Please review my startup www.Swayable.com
The HN community has been a great resource to me in learning all sorts of startup advice/tips etc. I'd like to get some feedback/reviews on my startup http://www.Swayable.com
You have developed a broad service and there is nothing wrong with that. But you need to focus on one particular vertical to grow. Let me explain why.
As you will discover the challenge is not in developing the site (though that is not to be minimized). The challenge is in growing the user base. The only practical cost effective way for a start-up to do this is by word-of-mouth.
When you target multiple verticals (sports, handbags etc) people are not going to become passionate about the site. And people are not going to come to it again and again for opinions. A few visionary souls may try it out but never return.
So you need to pick a vertical which gets people in that group to come back again and again to your site. And refer it to their friends. Thus a viral loop is born and a community comes alive. And then you can move to an adjacent vertical. And grow from there. Its going to take time. And it is hard to focus on a vertical because you will feel that you are reducing the size of your market.
But you need to focus. Pick some sector/user demographic. Quora did this brilliantly by focusing on the start-up group. Facebook did .edu. etc.
- had a problem swaying from iphone not the app... Got an error saying there was a problem - have you thought of making this a facebook app?