Group Messaging apps – so simple, you don’t need $12Million to do it. | Hacker News Reader

Group Messaging apps – so simple, you don’t need $12Million to do it.

26 pointsgenystartup24 comments

Disclaimer: I am not writing any of these to brag, just to encourage first time entrepreneurs who are finding it difficult.

I recently put out my new app wolfpacktales and like any Entrepreneur will do, I pitched the big name blogs/sites. As it usually happens, I didn’t even get a response from the writers I pitched. I wasn’t deterred.

Wolfpacktales: Just think Campfire meets social networking. It’s a group conversation app, where users create private groups (I call wolfpacks) and invite people from their social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Gmail & LinkedIn – to join the conversation.

After realizing there would be no success with these big blogs, I pretty much invited all 546 of my Facebook friends to a random wolfpack I created. I also took to the smaller blogs, startup submission sites etc and pitched about 50 of them. I knew all I needed to get going was just a little initial traction just because of the inherently viral nature of the app. That’s exactly what happened. On Friday, I had seen 120 people signed up, that number kept increasing over the weekend and as of this Morning (Monday), there are 2,567 users. I know it’s not a big number by any means, but it shows potential. And yes, I do realize that GroupMe didn’t take all that money just to market their product…I’m just noting that no money, and no big press doesn’t disqualify your product.

Moral Lesson: Read the last line.

Will write another update in a few days/weeks.

Link: http://wolfpacktales.com (It’s still very much new, so I welcome feedback!)

Agree whole-heartedly. I am still trying to figure out what exactly it takes to be what I refer to as a "sweet heart of silicon valley". Some companies repeatedly get covered regardless of how minor and marginal their new feature is (I recall reading about chat roulette's new wall paper a couple weeks ago).

Same situation in the group messaging space. I am the cofounder of Groupie, which is tied with Beluga as the highest rated group messaging app on the App Store. We have tens of thousands of users and tens of thousands of groups. In fact, you cant search for GroupMe without seeing Groupie, yet we've never been covered. It's a mystery to me but that ultimately hasn't stopped us from growing and with a good product, it won't stop you from growing either.

On that note, happy to make myself available you should want to discuss anything since we've probably hit a few hurdles that you're undoubtedly going to confront.

Good luck.

Leo at groupie dot co

Thanks for the intro mate! Will certainly shoot you an e-mail soon. And I agree with your comments. I haven't said any of these to mock the writers (infact I won't mention the publications), because it's completely up to them to decide who they write about and who they won't write about. I just want to encourage anyone else who was/is in the same boat that being covered helps a lot - yes, but that's all it does. It doesn't disqualify you at all. If I had only been covered on a big blog on Friday, don't think I would have even got to 2k users by now.

Not sure if it still holds true today, but in the past with some blog tech writers, you needed to submit your pitch something like this.

Hello, <insert info about startup here>.

Thanks, <insert name>

P.S. attached is an Apple Macbook Pro, cheers.

In this case I think it's a bit simpler. GroupMe was born at TechCrunch Disrupt Hack Day 2010, and is probably the biggest success story of that event by an order of magnitude. Hence, they got a lot of TC coverage early on.

Thanks for the encouragement. Going through the smaller blogs is definitely a start to get your name out there. At the end of the day its really just relationships in SV that get you on the front page of big blogs.

We also have a group messaging app that just launched our BETA on Android and iPhone last weeks and is now closing on close to 5000 users after a few days. Check it out if you have the chance.

Rob Foxfly dot com

Why does it ask for permission to post tweets when I try to authorize through Twitter? Can you consider switching to read-only access? I hate that every application, which uses twitter only for authorization, seems to want to post a lot of stuff in my twitter account, which I certainly do not want. :(

hey mate, that page only asks you if you want to post to your twitter or not. If the user doesn't want to, he can hit proceed and move on to the next page. I haven't made it compulsory to do that. To be honest...that page is one of the reasons for the significant increase in signups.

I mean when you authorize someone through twitter, you can ask for read permissions or for read and write permissions. Right now you're asking for read and write, which always makes me suspicious - "will this application post something on my behalf?" :(

Hmm when I look at I don't see any difference between this an frid.ge, etc and there seems to be no way to look closer at it without signing up to yet another service.

So how does this differ from the rest of the group chat systems?

I had come up with this because I had some friends who were on Facebook but nothing else, there were some without Facebook or Twitter and only used Gmail. My idea was a way of setting up a 'group chat platform' where users can come in from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Gmail and still be able to interact with each other in one place.

How do you solve the problem of users signing up/logging in with say their Twitter, but later also signing in with Facebook after logging out?

Wouldn't there be a user account collision of some sort? Sorry if it's obvious, I haven't had a chance to check your site out.

Good luck and wishes of great success to you.

I think its a useful application. Hope you can add a way for users to invite others to their pack manually by entering email address (instead of directly importing contacts).

Thanks! Actually that's on the to-do list. I will make users be able to add others via their username on wolfpacktales rather than having to go to the sites to import. At the moment, it works nicely because of the early virality that brought on board.

While I understand the reason to support social network sign-ins, I'm certainly tired of seeing sites that require it. Hopefully this trend will end at some point.

Wow! That's a serious jump in traffic over 3 days. Do you plan on making it into a mobile app? seems like that would help a lot.

Yea seems like that would be the way to go.

Yes, I do plan to do that in a few weeks.

Good stuff. It's certainly a good idea, and it gives me some hope! lol. Over how many days did you pitch the blogs?

To be fair I pitched in batches over the 3 days. Started on Friday night. However, i must note that I don't think all the signups are because of the blogs. They did give some initial visits, but I also did invite alot of my own friends, and as you see, the site needs you to invite ppl to interact with. It's got virality built in it anyway.

Congratulations on launching and finally going live. Expecting big things in the future!

thank you, thank you!

Link: http://wolfpacktales.com

Cool site. Congrats!

Thank you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com