The depressing reality of your startup failing
spotbloq.blogspot.de
spotbloq.blogspot.de
Second, you put it on HN and on person signed up. This doesn't mean you failed. It is merely the first in a very long line of setbacks that every startup, both great ones and not so great ones face along the way. Figure out why no one was interested in this - talk to potential customers, tweak the product/landing page/distribution channel and tr again.
I hope this doesn't come across as harsh because projects become our babies and it hurts when no one else cares, but hopefully you can take a step back and realize there's a lot you can do to remedy the situation.
I'd start out by doing some user testing. Have people look at your site and tell you what they think. Then maybe a bit of usability testing - tell people to perform actions (like signing up or adding a product to their list) and see where they get stuck. This is called funnel optimization.
Then you can focus on finding channels - ways people discover you. You'll probably want to spend some money on google adwords, but definitely also try to get some press through traditional media and blogs.
You haven't failed - you just started!
A startup is something you fully commit to until you're convinced you tried every reasonable permutation in a scalable market opportunity.
The average startup takes 7 years to get to liquidity. That's 2,520 days. You got one day in before throwing in the towel.
What you said is correct. Said differently (i.e. in a more kind manner), it also would have been a good example of really helpful mentorship.
I overreacted and maybe this bit of public embarrassment was necessary.
Thank you.
Keep going anyway, the idea is not so bad, although i think there are some other services out there that do pretty much what your app does (but again, that can be said for pretty much every startup :P)
In any case from what I can tell this is exclusive to Amazon right? I'm guessing they have an API for this sort of thing or a way for you to scrape specific products.
Can Amazon notify users when prices drop? What makes this system you've setup unique? Pitch me, because it's not over yet :)
I tried using Amazon's builtin wishlist feature, but never recieved a notification (I had the items in my Rankique wishlist at the same time and got one).
Jep, this is exclusive to Amazon, but I planned to implement BestBuy and whatnot if the concept seems to work (the backend is designed to manage multiple data sources).
What makes this system unique is, that I have no interest in squeezing everything out of a customer (that may be because I don't need to make any money from this). I try to minimize the time you spend shopping and I wan't you to pay the lowest price.
The replies here got me thinking, this is the first time I'm doing something like this, and I think I overinterpreted what Eric Ries has thought me about pivoting...
I'm increasingly feeling naive here... (which may very well be)
It's a pretty interesting problem, but to be honest I never could see it as a product in and of itself. A lot of people have tried. Some spun it as a way to track things you've already bought in case you might be able to get a refund/rebate when the price dropped, which was a nice spin on the idea. But, to my knowledge none of these services have taken off.
Fundamental to all of this is that if you want to launch a consumer service and have it "take off" you need to figure out distribution first. If the idea doesn't have "social built in" and if you don't have lots of money to spend on advertising and marketing (which, in the consumer space is considerably more than if you're in the b2b space) it's Really Difficult to get attention.
That's the biggest thing I'd recommend to anyone in the consumer space... before you build it, figure out how people are going to hear about it. Most of the consumer business models require millions of users to pay off (ads, freemium, affiliate, etc). So, no million users, no business. Andrew Chen wrote a great article about how programmers can (and should) mitigate that problem these days: http://andrewchenblog.com/2012/04/27/how-to-be-a-growth-hack...
Driving traffic to the site may be harder. There is no built-in customer acquisition channel as having one user does not lead to more exposure. It might be something that gets some word of mouth once it has made a user happy but that's something you should test.
2) hackernews is a reflection of silicon valley, which is a bit of an echo chamber, keep that in mind. The common behaviors of people using this site are so drastically different than the average person that you shouldn't read much into its success, either way.
3) don't give up so easily.
4) props for having the balls to put yourself out there like this. Too may people in silicon valley have this facade of success all the time. They are always "killing it." This is somewhat necessary as when we are looking for funding we aren't about to publicize any setbacks, but they are there and good to remind people of.
Your project is based on your assumptions on what customers wants. You now need to discover whether those assumptions are true (facts) or completely wrong. If they turn out to be true, then you're on to something.
Don't give up. Even if your assumptions turn out to be wrong, 'failures' are part of the process, and you can use what you learned on your next quest for a sustainable business.
They take the approach of price researching plus subscribing to low prices like you. If I were you I'd look into this.
Having said that, I appreciate your zeal and effort. No amount of education would have prepared you as much as the workk involved in creating a fairly complicated website.
Good job. I might just be using it. :)
But I also can't deny that camel^3 looks like a (much bigger) competitor. I've some ideas to improve what bugs me about Online Shopping, maybe one of them can differentiate me enoguh.
As I learned today: No reason to give up
I'd like to thank you all for re-encouraging me and giving me a lot of great input.