Ask HN: Review my Startup, Entitea | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Review my Startup, Entitea

entitea.com

24 pointspfx35 comments

The site seems easy enough to navigate and the messaging is straight forward. I don't know enough about the tea market to know how big the niche is (although there is a ton of search volume on Google Trends for tea related keywords, which is a good indicator).

Regarding monetization- I noticed you are using adsense. Your content is so ultra targeted that you would probably make a lot more money with affiliate or revshare deals than with adsense. Here is a list of tea related affiliate programs (I have never used any of these and am not affiliated with them in any way, just thought it would be a good starting point).

http://www.associateprograms.com/directory/food-and-drink/te...

Thanks for the input, and for the link to the tea related affiliates. I definitely think that is a better way to go for monetizing the site, I'll be looking over those affiliate links.

I liked it, here I was slurping my Irish breakfast tea and it struck an immediate cord ;)

I second the affiliate wisdom.

All teas are not created equally, so one of things that is important to me as a tea drinker is sourcing good teas, as part of the recipe's would be great if I could identify and get high quality components or teas based on recommendations.

To me at least, bags of tea doesn't really sound appealing and isn't specific enough to make these, eg do I use earl grey, irish breakfast, scottish breakfast, ... I would characterise these as flavoured teas, but there's also tea recipe's using components, eg 1 part assam to 2 parts kenyan (or a strong black) with lemon rind for example which is kind of the level of detail I'd be looking for.

Searching for ingredients with assam currently doesn't find anything, so could be a tad smarter maybe, eg find all recipes with black tea in this case. Also brewing etc is really important so I'd be interested in things like brewing techniques as well as recipe's etc.

Thanks for the specific feedback.

If you wouldn't mind being a little more specific about about the tea bags vs raw ingredients, I'd like to incooperate this in some way but I'd like to get a little more detail on what exactly your view is here. just drop me a line at justin@entitea.com

As for the searching, I plan to add a smarter search very soon, so that it can recommend other keyword searches based on what your original search was for (ie searching for assam will suggest searching for 'black tea', and so on)

I do like the idea; however, the site has aesthetic flaws that need to be addressed.

Notice a site like adagio.com (which sells loose teas): earthy colors combined with attractive closeups of leaves & herbs.

As a tea drinker, the design & color scheme you've chosen really does put me off. Remembering that tea is typically made by steeping leaves, buds, and flowers from nature itself, the abstract graphics and pale blue/white motif feels wrong.

Also, the example recipe on the front page (in addition to many of the contributed recipes) remind me of noncarbonated sodas (or nonalcoholic cocktails), not teas; very sugary, and reliant on extracts and juices (whipped cream?) for flavor. Perhaps you could seed the "teas" section with actual tea blends?

The website is gorgeous and the interface is fantastic.

Honestly, the main problem with this website is that gourmet tea lovers don't use recipes. They buy rare and expensive teas and use time-tested ancient brewing methods to get the most out of their treasures.

If you want to cash in on a niche connoseuir [sp?] market, you need to cater to the people who are willing to spend the big bucks to get quality teas. People looking for cranberry chai tea will produce a lot less revenue than those looking for a rare cake of pu-erh tea that is over 80 dollars.

I would say to angle it more towards quality tea and reviews of such tea, not a search engine for recipes.

Check out teaforum.com to learn more, and if you have any questions, ask.

Is that a big enough niche to make any money from?

if the stereotypes are true, he'd be able to market this to the entire population of Great Britain

Not this Britisher. The only way I can stand to drink tea is the Indian way, stewed and with half a ton of sugar in.

You should try other teas, like green, white or even red. I always hated the normal black tea and had to use sugar or milk with it, but now I drink several cups of green tea a day.

The British just drink the cheap Lipton crap largely. They had to, as tea wouldn't remain green on that long of a voyage.

Quick question: how big a niche do you think "software for elementary schoolteachers who want to use bingo as an instructional tool" is? Got a mental image? OK.

Did you think that there was enough of a market for one firm to make $30,000 in sales? Yeah, really. http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/sales-by-month

Now what if I told you I'm probably only the, oh, call it fifth largest player in the space?

I look at "tea" and think "Aww heck how would I ever compete in a market that big?!" Seriously, tea is a multi-billion dollar industry. Of course its going to be big enough to support an extra person or three. The surprising bit is that, at Internet scales, businesses you would never have expected to be viable are big enough, too.

My personal favorite Internet anecdote, from the Dot Com days: there exists a farm which sells tumbleweed. Because if you need tumbleweed, and who doesn't, where are you going to get it? A tumbleweed farm, of course. Most of the Dot Coms have since Dot Bombed, but the Prairie Tumbleweed Farm is still going strong. The address is, naturally, http://www.prairietumbleweedfarm.com/ .

My favorite Japanese Tex-Mex place is a little shop in Gifu City called El Paso. They have tumbleweed, for the authentic Tex Mex feel. Stop laughing, the owner thought it was important to look the part. And where did they get their tumbleweed? Well, where would YOU get your tumbleweed -- they went to the acknowledged Tumbleweed experts at the Prairie Tumbleweed Farm. Which, helpfully, has pages in Japanese because El Paso is far from the only Japanese establishment that craves the authentic Western look.

Heh, I was actually thinking of writing a followup when your site came to mind (really).

The difference so far though is that this tea site at the moment only has adsense, whereas you and the tumbleweed guys actually sell something.

How the heck did you come up with the bingo card idea anyway?

You can read the short version on my About Us page at the site and the long version on the About page at my blog. Both are linked from my HN profile.

[Edit: incidentally, I agree, "charge money for value" will almost always be my #1 suggestion for a business model. In this case, value probably means "a tea I have never had before". Nobody says you have to grow or ship it yourself.]

That's a cool story - I submitted it here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=392642

On Tumbleweed site: "Our Prairie Tumbleweeds are 100% Y2K compliant"

:) -- Now I see why they survived the dot com crash around year 2000

It's also great to know that success does not require a fancy looking website. My eyes hurt

Like the idea - tea would appear too be the worlds most popular drink after water if you believe wikipedia. I've no idea about the size of the specialty tea market but assume it must be big enough to well in financially.

I'd take a second look at those images on the left side of the page - the writing in them is a bit too small to read.

If you expect a lot of german visitors, you might want to partner up with http://allmytea.de/ ... a site that lets people mix and then order their own tea.

I showed this HN posting to a friend of mine. His reaction was basically "OMFG THAT WAS MY IDEA!"

When I looked at your domain name, prior to clicking on the link, I thought, that's a pretty cool domain name -- must be doing something with regard to the semantic web -- silly me!

I would consider adding top-rated recipes to the front page.

Left after 5 secs because I didn't like the colors.

I drink a lot of tea, but mostly just buy varieties off of Adagio. Don't really mix and match. Perhaps I should.

agree with the first two.. overall i think a tea site could be aesthetically a little nicer because I imagine the audience your targeting are not for example twitter users, but still very niche. best of luck

when I clicked on an ingredient it showed me 3 other teas with that ingredient but it was titled "3 other ingredients" instead of "3 other teas/recipes" as I would have expected.

Good point, I didn't even realize that. I'll get that fixed to avoid confusion.

I expected to see information about that ingredient when I clicked on the ingredient - such as what it is, where to buy, how long it could be stored for etc. If this is where people come to learn about tea they surely need to learn about the ingredients.

is this just straight adsense for revenue? (though I guess you could obviously sell tea...)

As of right now yes, but as answerly mentioned going the affiliate route for tea-specific things would probably be a much better way to go.

Very nice website. If you could add coffee, you could count me as a lifetime member. Oh. I would change the color scheme. Maybe adding some brown would not hurt or making the green more minty.

I drink coffee too, but are there really enough different coffee recipes to have a social network around them? (I'm much more into tea than coffee, and have just in the past month started on coffee so this is a serious question for you). I like the idea of having maybe different categories, tea, coffee, but would there be enough variations of coffee to do that type of thing?

Coffee can fit nicely here I believe. After I graduated, I started drinking coffee and fell in love with it. (My GF believes I have an unhealthy relationship with trying different blends and styles - ie latte, mocha, etc). However, there's a fairly large market for coffee lovers when it comes to blends and also coffee machines.

Do a quick search for "coffee machines forum" and you'll see what I mean.

Your layout gets broken when increasing the font size (Ctrl +).

Other than that, a great website!

is it april 1 already? TEA RECIPES????

This is a nice idea and as another mentioned tea trends in Google Trends.

Adding coffee would be good too, as well as others mentioned adding earth tones to the design.

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