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Comment by joshsharp | Hacker News Reader

I think what a lot of people are missing in this post (and maybe this is my fault for not making it quite clear) is that I do know marketing is the missing ingredient. I'm entirely aware that you can't build something and just hope that people will come and use it. Even if I didn't want to think about this initially.

The problem with saying "you're almost there, you need marketing" is that I am done. I don't have the effort for marketing. I started the site for fun, to scratch an itch, and that has passed. Maybe I'm close, but in all likelihood I could've done everything right and still got nowhere. I need to draw a line in the sand, and this is it.

However, it's nice to have people acknowledge that the problem is most likely marketing oriented, rather than a fault with the site.

It is a pretty nice site.

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No, the problem is not marketing. The problem is that it is a product designed without profitability in mind. Making it profitable would require a fundamental change in the product itself. That it is why you are lucky this did not grow more than it did. It would have left you with something people use a lot but without any way to make money off of it.

Making it profitable would require a fundamental change in the product itself.

Not necessarily, this is just speculation.

While designing for profitability is definitely the better way to create a product, there are plenty of successes which have simply aimed for millions of users and figured out their monetisation strategy afterwards. This seems particularly true for "social" products. It may have worked for blaster.fm, it may not. We can't know.

You make a good point but it is flawed. The startups that have been successful without a revenue model are an itty bitty little minority. Compare to those that have failed without it and you can see that the pattern is clear. You need to design with profits in mind. You don't open a pizzeria and give away pizza. You give samples once or tsice but you charge for pizza from the start.

But I'm not blaming or shaming you. Your project got further than most. It was very good learning experience which has give you a lot of tools you did not have before. Tools that will help you on uour future endeavors. Just make sure to starting charging from the start next time.

You're totally right. You can make money but only once you can reach a critical mass of others (read: lots). It's far harder to carry you there if you don't have a revenue stream for a small amount of users. That's why lots of peeps are fan of SaaS products. Money coming in from the first user.

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