Comment by kintamanimatt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kintamanimatt | Hacker News Reader

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Yet another company I've only heard of because they're shutting down. This seems to be a recurring theme on HN and I think such companies should be a kind of cautionary tale to the rest of us. If people are only hearing of you because you're closing up shop, there was something wrong with your marketing plan. At least on HN, nobody was talking about them with sufficient frequency.[-1] [0]

In my humble opinion, this shouldn't be the last month for them. They should correct what's deficient in their marketing and business plans, and keep the show going even as a side project until it can sustain them and their families. To quote Tim Gunn: make it work.

Second point, it's really hard to get to their main site from their blog. There's no clear link and this is going to almost certainly profoundly negatively impact conversions. Visitors are lazy; don't make them work.

Lastly, to the founders of Work For Pie, I'm terribly sorry you're closing down and I truly wish you well. If this is Work For Pie's final month, I genuinely hope you go on to found new, vastly more successful businesses in the future and can look back on this as an amazing learning experience.

[-1] http://i.imgur.com/UDPouuM.png

[0] http://i.imgur.com/UHaEGRu.png

"If people are only hearing of you because you're closing up shop, there was something wrong with your marketing plan."

I mostly agree with this, but as someone in tech but outside of the direct SV bubble there are also lots of companies being acquired (eg. approximately half of the Yahoo acquisitions) that I only hear of as they are being acquired. So it is possible that if the goal of these companies is a quick acquisition or bust, maybe their strategy was sound but they just didn't happen to be one of the chosen ones.

However, I still think that such a situation is long-term toxic for the overall market of startups. I never use small non-established startup SaaS products anymore due to being burned too many times due to quick shutdowns due to both lack of traction and/or talent acquisitions that involve quick shutdowns of the previous service.

Yeah, finding the homepage should probably be easier to do from the blog. I normally try to link to the homepage in the first couple sentences of the post, but not always, and not in this case unfortunately.

Edit: and I agree we could have done more with marketing. We were new entrepreneurs at the outset of this, and did a lot of things that I would completely change now that I'm a bit more seasoned. Marketing would be one of those things.

I know the founders and have been enjoying watching my Work For Pie score grow (but unfortunately did not find a job through them, as my score is just starting to gain some merit). I think if they had been in a more tech-friendly city they would have been in a better position to develop successful marketing campaigns. Unfortunately, Memphis does not have the best climate for startups or tech businesses. I wish Brad and Cliff the best on their future ventures!

Can you elaborate on why you think Memphis was a bad idea?

With the ability to talk to people anywhere by phone, email, Twitter, forum, blog post, etc, what do you think is the drawback to being in Memphis? It seems like their customers are geographically dispersed, rather than concentrated in a more tech-friendly city.

I guess since I've moved to Portland, I've been spoiled with what a thriving tech scene can be like. I also went to a hackathon in Nashville right before I moved away and was impressed by their community. Brad (one of WFP's founders) is the organizer of the Memphis Python user group, which is (as far as I know having moved away from Memphis mid-May) one of Memphis' few tech meetup groups. There's a reason that a disproportionate number of startups come out of Silicon Valley. The culture there feeds into itself, and networking opportunities are orders of magnitude greater. You mentioned that you not hearing of them was indicative of a marketing failure on their part. My own take on it is, if they had been in the silicon valley area, they would have had many more opportunities to get their name out. The Memphis tech scene is too far from any of the big hubs, and, yes, it's true that anything that can be done in person can be done over the wire as well, but in practice, not having the ability to put yourself in meatspace with people who might be interested in your product/startup is still a huge disadvantage.

I guess I've never thought of it that way. I've always been quite happy to talk to people from far, far away.

Agreed - basic internet marketing could've helped them. You can't just build a product and hope that word-of-mouth scales you.

You can click the logo, but in this case that doesn't make sense as the "header" is much larger then the logo. But it's still standard practice for a logo to get you to the homepage.

I didn't realize the logo until I went back and looked for a link (the first time I gave up after mousing over a few of the links above the blog header).

The logo looks like a header for the sidebar; having never been to "Work for Pie" I'm not familiar with their logo.

It would help if:

- their logo on the sidebar had a solid background

- their logo was on the tab for the blog instead of the generic WP logo (I don't know how hard this is to do, but frankly this looks sloppy)

- they had a small "Work for Pie" + logo link above the blog header

It took me quite a bit to find the link to their homepage. I made two misclicks and then moused over every link in the header to try find the correct link. There was no such link. I eventually had to edit the URL to get to their main site (no visitor should ever have to do that!), but went back to their blog to figure out whether there even was a link to their homepage! That's when I saw the hyperlinked logo in the left sidebar — completely unintuitive.

Getting from the blog to the main site should be one of the easiest actions a visitor can make. It should be so very obvious how to do it with one rapid error-free click.

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