What a Week Running a Startup Looks Like | Hacker News Reader

What a Week Running a Startup Looks Like

wesleytansey.com

44 pointstansey10 comments

The article was very interesting, as it highlights the specific bipolarity of having a startup, but when I actually visited your site I was confused.

I like the idea of your app. I really do. But I had no idea what the hell Curvio does from the splash page,

The first thing I read when I hit the landing page is: "New shows are being added all the time, Sign Up to be emailed when they are!" -- When I read that I thought this website was some sort of a tv guide. It emails me whenever a new show is made or released on television.

The second line wasn't much better: "Find great looks from your favorite TV shows:" I was confused from the first line, so I didn't understand the context of 'looks'

It wasn't until I clicked on a show and saw that you were indexing specific outfits from specific episodes that I truly understood what you guys were doing. Otherwise, the home page didn't tell me anything.

Just my two cents.

That's a great point. We have that signup header on every page for non-users, but it does seem confusing for first-time visitors on the homepage. I'm removing it now.

Hopefully every week a friend or relative isn't getting divorced or ending up with a terminal illness. Sorry to hear about that.

The AWS issues seem very solvable though.

Aside from what's mentioned above... that seems like a not so bad week.

> The AWS issues seem very solvable though.

Well, solvable at a cost (in both time and money).

> Aside from what's mentioned above... that seems like a not so bad week.

Yep. As I noted in the end, this is really not that extreme of an example. However, most people who have never run a company probably would rank that as one of the more stressful weeks of their year.

Organic traffic drops 50% - what number of organic visits are you getting daily? If its low (in the hundreds) a 50% drop could mean nothing at all, just daily variance. Our organic traffic fluctuates up to 20% during the week (~7k organic per day) and it's very cyclical as well (we expect the same pattern the following week).

I don't think it's worth stressing too much about an odd data point, always best to look retrospectively at the bigger picture!

About the organic traffic, this has hit me before. I think it has to do with the freshness categorizations google has. If you put in new content, it gets a bump because it's fresh, but then the rank for pages that stay the same dies down after a while, and quite suddenly.

Adbrite was no big loss. Most of their CPMs were so small as to not be worth the bandwidth of the link.

Are you still running Curvio? I couldn't find anything newer than November 2012 on the web site.

Yep, it's up and running. We stagnated a bit over the holidays because most shows were over or on break. Then January we were slow to start back up because our co-founder got engaged. We're pushing several new episodes this week though.

We've reached a point where our revenue growth may finally take us to truly cash-flow neutral (i.e. paying for server and content costs). If we can hit that target in the next couple months, we'll start pumping out content much faster. Stay tuned! :)

one word - ditto!

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