Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Re-brand. Create a few bitmaps, logos and such, get yourself a new name, fix your marketing and distribution problem (making the app only "work" for 5 major cities or something) and re-launch. If you think the idea has traction, fix the problem and go forward. If not, don't. Sounds like you made one mistake that's affecting the brand -- not that you made one of the thousands of other mistakes. Count yourself lucky.

With startups, it's never over. That's a good thing and a bad thing! It's bad because you never really know when to quit, and there's always something else to do. It's good because there's always another chance.

Also, I've been thinking about this "solve your own problem" and "build the dream" kind of thinking for a while. I used to be a BIG supporter of this, but I'm not so sure any more. If you look at good investors, they have learned to separate what makes them excited from what the right investing decision is. I think startup founders should be a little more like this: sitting back dispassionately determining where to invest their time and energy. This is probably much more practical than trying to find the idea that makes them the most excited. Build the right thing, the right way, get traction -- you'll get excited. Trust me. Build something that turns you on, you could be in for a LONG slog of self-abuse. Startups are hard enough as it is -- for me, at least, tying my emotional self-worth closely into all that work is a really bad thing to do.

Odds are you will fail. Any amount of fanciful thinking is not going to change that. So, when it happens, it shouldn't be the end of the world. Instead, you should be emotionally in a position where you go, "Interesting! These 7 things worked. These 2 did not. What can I take from this and move forward? New idea? Change brands? Pivot? Etc." Being wrapped up in chasing "the one" only makes this kind of self-analysis extraordinarily more difficult. At least it does for me.

I agree with the Major cities approach. You need to think about cities where a lot of people visit/move to and want to meet new people. The market is certainly there, as my girlfriend and I use meetup.com for exactly this reason in Tokyo.

Sidenote: I wanted try the app out but couldn't find it in the Australian or Japanese stores. Have you limited it to US only? If so that seems crazy to me. So what if there are no other users in the area?, improve the feedback/take that opportunity to get them to spread the word.

I think that's one of their biggest challenges, people are using meetup for this sort of thing. Another thing to keep in mind is 37signals encourage people not to quit there jobs until they have a hit. A lot of people forget that. Their motto is risk adverse, slow and calculated way of doing business. If you read their popular profitable and proud series, majority of the entrepreneur all seem to have work on their startups as a side project until they got traction.

I agree too. Target all your marketing efforts on these cities. Don't even bother about tech news. If it gets popular Techcrunch will want to interview you. Buy ads in the local area, organise events and give out flyers in the city centre.

One company that has done a good job of this is Lovestruck in London. They are a dating site, which isn't really my thing, but in terms of getting their brand known they can't really do much better. They have adverts all over the tube, give out flyers at major transport interchanges, and even organise regular free events (which they need to advertise more IMO).

Just make the damn app FREE for a little while on iTunes. A large userbase is obviously half of your product- classic social networking problem, the service is only good if other people use it- so that will help you establish the userbase you need.

Furthermore, make it free and issue a huge marketing push to get people to download the app. This is the hard part as the programming part was deterministic and easy. People are strange.

Not sure if I agree with the rebrand idea. You don't want to lose whatever awareness you worked hard for by changing the name and logo again.

Move forward. Get localized and make it work in one city first, then move to the next city.

One could do both: Spin off some experimental new brands and try to rehab the existing brand.

The codebase is there. The infrastructure is there. The company has exercised the whole stack from prototyping through to delivery and maintenance. New brands or brand variants aren't cheap, but they might be a lot cheaper than starting over.

These folks can, in theory and provided it fits within the limits of human endurance, build a dozen variants on the idea. They can release the app that specializes in three major cities and the app that is targeted specifically at golfers looking for golf buddies and the app that's targeted at meetups among beer aficionados and throw more marketing spaghetti at the wall for the original app.

(Though obviously I have no idea if any of these things will yield profits or not.)

I like your ideas, but you're not accounting for time and energy costs. And it also seems like they don't have much motivation left in the tank.

This is true. But those of us in the comfy armchair can only throw out the ideas. It's up to the players on the field to decide which are useful.

I would hardly second-guess them whatever they chose to do.

Great insight on founders needing to think more like investors. Something that may help in thinking this way is: If you had $100,000 to invest in an idea (and would not be personally involved beyond that), would you do it, or is there another idea with a better risk / reward profile? Use that as your emotional anchor while you factor in your excitement for the idea.

You're right about traction - it can get you excited even if you're in a mudane industry. That's much better than doing something "cool" that never gets off the ground.

I agree with the above points, and have one more of my own. Try to gather events and stuff from third party services, so if no one is around, you still have 'something' to show your users. Edit: and you don't post popular events on your twitter account? you're not using twitter to it's full potential! (look at what stackexchange does with its many sites and it's twitter account).

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