The Story of My Startup. | Hacker News Reader

The Story of My Startup.

dailybooth.com

79 pointsj0ncc42 comments

After an incredible amount of complications and pushing the launch date back over a year, we've finally just made the site live.

This is blog post documenting the entire story. I'd love to get some feedback from the HN community.

Open articleView on HN

I'd suggest you put a sample animation of the type of result people would get on your site on the front page. I don't think the intro text "your life in pictures" explains it well enough, but if people see even just a 5 frame animation they'll immediately recognize the concept. In fact, I'd stick the picture taking app on the front page and allow them to take a first snapshot before even signing up. Having the first picture there would provide a great incentive to follow through with the sign-up.

Also, if I may, and I know from experience it's harder than it sounds: It seems your concept got way more complex over time, when you really should have launched the simplest possible version as fast as possible and worried about widgets, following, minifeeds, comments, a proper logo etc. later on. Cool that you're online now though, good luck with everything!

I think this is a very promising idea.

I think the idea of an embeddable widget that flips through all your photos (like the videos you describe that inspired the site) would be really cool. I think if a widget like this is done right you could get some good viral growth from MySpace.

I'd think about capitalizing as much as possible on the timelapse concept and stray away from being just another photo sharing site. Right now, users profiles are just a feed of images, which doesn't seem that compelling..

Great work, but ... looks like an example of completely missing the basics of the customer needs. Do we really need good design to start taking shots? Think about us already missing a year of pictures. Sorry for making it sound sharp.

Hi I have to ask because this is the third startup I've seen recently like this - what do you do for the startup? What value do you add? I'm not meaning to be impolite but you hire a designer to design, a developer to develop, someone else is funding it... So you bring the idea, management and evangelising?

Also, I like the earlier designs, especially the first a lot - they are clean and to the point.

Your app went from the concept of 'save a photo of yourself every day' to "Not only that, get your own gorgeous widgets and fleet of social features - free."

The complexity you have added has not only faded your differentiation but now you start to come across as a "me-too Facebook clone". If this was ever going to be part of your app it should have been something you integrated as you actually got a social network using your system - new users don't care about the social features and widgets.

Finally, change your blog so your links are more search engine friendly, not ?p=7 etc.

Without his initiative would the sight have ever launched? It looked like he was the driver of the whole thing. Sometimes software developers can be the drivers, sometimes they go off to tour Europe with their band instead. Neither is a bad choice, but if you want your product launched in this lifetime, someone has got to be the manager and evangelist.

Thats what Product Managers and Project Managers do ..

Yeah, like I thought, middle management in a startup.

I like the post, and sure I guess it's great to have someone pull it together but if that person could also be adding some value to the actual building as well that would be even better.

So let me get this straight: to be valued in a startup you have to actually do the coding or design? There's a lot to be said for the value of vision and passion. They are probably the only two things you can't hire.

To be clear, this isn't directed specifically at the person who wrote the blog post but from my point of view to be valued in the startup you have to do more than tell everyone else what to do. Passion and vision are great, but you should be able to use these to practical value. Anyone can say "let's make this really awesome video game where you can do anything" but unless you are actualy coming up with some practical direction for the team your "vision" is useless.

No one said they just stand there are shout words off a task list.

How many non-technical founders do you know? There are a ton of successful ones out there, and when you meet them [as long as you don't say what you just did] you'll understand why they are successful.

Fair enough. I know a couple of non-technical founders actually and they seem to be focusing on sales and marketing + VC connections. I don't get that impression from some of the founders I'm reading on HN though. I certainly appreciate the stories but the impressions I get, and this may be incorrect, is that they are taking credit for the "design" (in the overall looser sense of the term) of their product when they have just given broad reaching goals and let the actual employees make all the little decisions that make or break the product.

It sounds like you have only ever come across poor business people. It's pretty easy though, they are about as common as poor coders and designers.

Congrats on the launch. Most entrepreneurs know the feeling of missing deadlines badly ;)

It's such a good concept, honestly, I would pay for a private one for my friends and family. The site didn't make it clear if privacy was possible.

One little issue I found. On the user pages if you click 'daily booth' you get sent to /dashboard (even though I have not created an account or logged in): http://ul.mikeyur.com/public/sk/Fullscreen-20090212-232617.p...

And when you get sent to /dashboard while not logged in you get a little error: http://ul.mikeyur.com/public/sk/Minefield-20090212-232757.pn...

Look at twitter... how long was that around before any attempt at monetisation emerged?

Where's the business model?

Couldn't see it either. Why those late nights and stress have been worth it?

It's sort of depressing. A year of struggle and ultimate perseverance against the odds... to release something that doesn't make any money. I mean, kudos for sticking with it and refusing to give up, but... now what?

Good question. I have a few ideas that I'm going to be pursuing.

- Setup a deal with flipclips.com (or someone similar) and let people purchase a branded flickbook of a period of their lives.

- Maybe potential for some kind of picwing.com affiliate deal / application.

- Some kind of "pro" account with more features (more picture widget output options etc).

- Display advertising (yeah, know).

They're a few ideas I'm toying with.

The pro account is the best idea. Stay away from advertising, IMO, it looks cheap and turns people off. Personally I absolutely hate advertising and won't use any site with it. And I doubt much would come from the book idea/affiliations.

I would take it nice and slow. Wait until you have some serious users who have put a lot of time into the app. Obviously you and your friends have to catalyse that, looks like you already are which is good. Once you've got some nice multi-month videos to show, and perfecting all the little niggly bits about working with it (which YOU will be doing), try to get some publicity. It would be really helpful if you know some girls who will do it, your digg/reddit/etc-fu will be greatly increased if it's a girl.

Anyway, then start introducing new options. Pro members can get better quality video out - free is just the flash video, pro gets a full on quicktime version. Free has one "stream", pro can have several - they might want to do their cat or family members or something. Free can embed the flash output on their blog, Pro can embed the picture taking app on their website and make a "my blog visitors" stream .. or something.

Pro is $20 once off fee. Get a bit of press exposure and who knows, it could really take off. The Pro account taking pics of their families sounds like it could have real potential. Maybe a family package deal - $50 for a year of photos including a printed book?

Anyway congratulations on the launch, many people don't know how hard it is to take a decently sized project from idea to fully realised implementation and release. It's fucking hard and even more so if you're running on nothing but your own internal motivation. Good shit and well done.

> Stay away from advertising, IMO, it looks cheap and turns people off. Personally I absolutely hate advertising and won't use any site with it.

I don't like ads either, but we (who actually care enough to e.g. install ad block+) are a minority.

You need money. Advertisement might help and it will only repulse a relatively small portion of the population.

</devil's advocate>

I love ads. And the cash they make. I don't think they cheapen a website at all, and you'd be hard pressed to find that many websites without some form of advertising.

Try them out, and see if they work, and see if your users find them useful, or horrible.

Also do the maths - how many Pro accounts would you need to sell to make the same amount as sticking a couple of adverts up?

> hate advertising and won't use any site with it.

Wow, that excludes a pretty large portion of the internet. No Google, no Yahoo, no online newspapers, not many 'blogs'...

In a year's time, you could make an absolute killing by selling a $49-$99 DVD service to users who actually kept taking photos. Their photos, turned into a DVD movie, in a nice case with their name on it, etc. (You could outsource this and make a killing on the difference.)

People will buy these not just for their own safekeeping, but for grandmas, to keep for future generations, and so forth.

Actually, mentioning such a product could even get slightly less netheady people to even use your service. You want the comfortably-off soccer moms, grandparents, and so forth, using this product. Can you imagine how awesome it'd be to have had a DVD of a year or two of your grandpa? Big selling factor in here.

Keep in mind that you don't have that much time. More than one RoR bastard will know about your website soon and frankly it takes only couple of weeks of fulltime developement to produce a service like yours.

Copying stuff well is not so easy.

Year. But its the essence of the evolution.

Charge for private accounts.

Awesome story, well done, and great execution. Site looks good. Don't listen to all the naysayers about monetization. It is important (the most important thing), but if you are living/breathing/eating your business, you will come up with proper revenue channels. I'm sure of it. Good luck.

Thanks for sharing and being open about all the problems you encountered. Launching an application is definitely not easy, nothing takes as long as you hope it will (even if you pad for unexpected problems) and it's really hard to declare something "done." Congrats on your launch.

This is awesome. It's great to hear a story that isn't just "we did this, and bam, we launched and either a) lost all our money or b) we made $200m in the first day" :)

whoa, it's the guy that made grabup -- love that application (amusingly I emailed them a few months ago asking to advertise (paid) on their site -- never got a reply)

great story, will be sure to track his blog and progress. Great to see awesome projects from fellow brits :)

Great story Jon, I really enjoyed the read and found it quite inspirational. The launch video at the end with the music was classic, especially the 404 at launch and the music running out!

Best of luck with the site, looks like a lot of hard work has gone into it.

Great read. Congrats on the launch.

Kudos on the launch. Looks really great. :)

Is there anyone else doing this? Just curious.

I seem to recall reading an interview with SkinnyCorp (Threadless.com) where Jake or Jeffrey said they had once built but then scrapped a similar project. While googling for that, I found http://www.flickaday.com

I like it.

One thing: I can't find a way to delete my account in the settings panel.

Why would you want to delete your account if you like it?

Because it didn't work for me, I already have an existing way of doing this and I hate leaving stray accounts littered across the web.

Thanks for sharing, very candid and interesting.

the date on your site is 13th February 2009+1900

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