Nreduce online incubator shuts down | Hacker News Reader

Nreduce online incubator shuts down

nreduce.com

42 points_lex16 comments

When nReduce started, it was actually really cool. I think a big problem they had was changing a small piece of user feedback that was a slight pain point, but not a major one.

Everyone used to check in on Wednesdays and many were, week after week. They changed it so you could choose whenever you want, and all the teams in my group disappeared. It went from a vibrant Wednesday to dead every day. It was incredibly sad as everyone lost touch with each other.

While it was slightly annoying that I couldn't choose the day, it was working. Its one of those things where when you have a deadline many people will make it, when its flexible, it suddenly becomes really hard.

Good idea. Anyone want to take the opensource code, launch a new site, and fix the check-in day?

I might be interested in helping with something like that. Shoot me an email offline if you'd like.

Would it be worth setting up a quick Google Group or something, for interested parties to communicate with each other?

I'm interested in that too if there's an attempt to redo this again with some changes. My email is just username at pretty much any email provider.

I'm the original dev and I actually am interested in launching it again too (with modifications). Shoot me an email!

I loved it back when it was using a fixed Wednesday deadline and saved bandwidth by linking to private YouTube videos, (rather than hosting nReduce copies).

If you bring it back, make sure you let me know.

That's really great feedback -- I was the dev behind nReduce. I think that makes total sense that removing the hard deadline reduced everyone's motivations.

Joe and I tried to play with a lot of the timing, from first using the notion of 3 month batches, to opening it up for people to join every week (and doing a weekly join session to onboard people), to just opening it up completely.

We didn't see any immediate overall engagement drop after opening it up for people to join anytime and set their own checkin day, but we did notice once people received less than three comments per week on their checkin they dropped off within a few weeks.

Website is down, but here is the email I received from one of the co-founders:

This is Joe, one of the people who worked to build nReduce last year.

I am writing today to thank you.

In traveling the world, I got to experience startup people's genuine desire to help each other. It is an amazing and beautiful thing and I want to thank you for being a part of creating it.

If I can be of help in the future, please let me know.

Best, -Joe

-------------------------------------

And please join me in thanking some of the awesome people who built nReduce

Josh Schwartzman, Jacques Crocker, Ash Bhoopathy , Richard Lengsavath, Raemond Bergstrom-Wood, Clifton Fletemeyer, Elliot Glasenk, Shaf Choudry, Paul Eikelenboom, Louis Sayers, David A. Johnston, Erin Parker, Marcus Smith, John Sechrest, Eze Vidra, Daniel Kehoe, Scott Robertson, David Nagy, Jack Lin, Sam Schillace, Mahesh Bhatia and so many more.

We open sourced the nReduce code here. (You can build on Josh's brilliance)

Want to work on the opensource nReduce? Email me

Awesome other people that are working to help startups :

Angel List - Keeps rockin it F6S.com - Helping Founders Startitup.co - Startup methodology Zana Project - Advice from experts StartupWeekend - Weekend as a Founder Hippflow - Helping Fundraise CofoundersLab - Introing Co-Founders

I assume this is the source code? https://github.com/joemellin/nReduce

I liked nReduce, but I think a lot of the ideas could have used some feedback (including mine at the time), or early pivots, some were very obviously not that great

It might have been good to incorporate some sort of acceptance gateway or idea validation phase.

Maybe something like you create iterations of your landing page and the software auto A/B tests them for you. Once you have X signups for one you can join the others at the next stage. Video posts can also go on your home page to keep your fans informed.

They probably should have taken some small amount of money from users at some point also, even if just to keep the service going

I can't say this is terribly surprising, but it's unfortunate nonetheless.

I hope a successful implementation of the "online incubator" idea works sometime soon.

They had a great team. I think it may have been too distributed. If they selected groups in one location and connected them with the right people it'd be interesting.

nReduce inspired a local weekly startup meetup I started called iterators. Really, I wanted the weekly check in aspect more than anything. It's interesting the bonds that form when you meet more than monthly.

It's too bad to see it gone, but it had an impact, and that's great. There will be others that come and go.

We have a weekly meetup as well running in SF called Tribes http://tribes.techendo.co/

Hey nreduce guys, if you're reading this, I'd love to have you on Techendo (shameless plug: http://techendo.co/) for an interview. please reach out to dan at techendo dot co

I tried nReduce for a little while. I remember lots of interface bugs -- being unable to give feedback to others, being unable to find content (can't remember the details). It was fairly unusable, so we stopped.

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