My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love | Hacker News Reader

My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love

twicsy.tumblr.com

413 pointsdumbfounder163 comments

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I get that people are trying to be helpful, and think that's great.

But this blog post was awesome, raw, and captured something that so few of us can really relate to.

Dude grinds for 10 years, keeps grinding, doesn't know where to go but will probably keep grinding.

"Twicsy, you son of a bitch. You frustrate me so. I love you, but oh how I hate to love you."

Shine on, buddy. Best of luck!

Agreed. This was a fun read and I really hope things work out for him.

Absolutely - well said.

Don't worry, you haven't seen the last of Twicsy!

I know... his failure has already been more successful than many people's successes.

Spot on man! I gotta admit the website is meh (although what can I say, I've never published+hosted a website before) but that story is pretty amazing!

Maybe OP should try to publish an ebook on his 10 year adventure?

Well put! (and a bit unusual to see such kindness in an HN comment haha)

Kudos to the author, best wishes for the future!

>captured something that so few of us can really relate to. >Dude grinds for 10 years, keeps grinding, doesn't know where to go but will probably keep grinding. >"Twicsy, you son of a bitch. You frustrate me so. I love you, but oh how I hate to love you."

Maybe not the ten years part, but I imagine that a decent number of people here can relate to this (i.e. working on a startup for awhile and having a love/hate relationship with it while it is not yet a financial success.)

I know this man's feels.

4chan is only one month older. It's like we're cousins.

Oh, don't pretend you haven't become fabulously wealthy with all those 4chan passes.

How many of those do you sell, anyway (if you don't mind me asking)?

Yes but you are an Internet god and nobody has heard of me :)

But, I am happy to be considered your cuz, even if it's the one you always beat up and lock in the shed.

The projects I've kept grinding on for the longest have been the ones with the worst odds of making me rich. There are many types of projects that are just too seductive and habit forming. "Just one more tweak" becomes an intellectual challenge or a hobby as much as about business.

Though ultimately I think those kinds of projects are also the ones that often lead people to massive success too, because a lot of projects that are eventually successful takes long enough to get there that you'd give up if they didn't have that seductive effect.

The problem, of course, is figuring out when enough is enough (though the absence of commercial success is not necessarily a good yardstick, if it's still fun)

My general anti-B2C bias may be showing, but unless you've discovered a new core interaction for people (Instagrammy) I'm betting the 6 million visits a month is basically just a function of having a lot of content about Justin Bieber (and a zillion other topics) which is beating Twitter because Twitter has relatively poor SEO (for a reason). This sort of suggests that the momentary attention of 6 million people is worth what people are willing to pay for it.

You're clearly smart and connected. You've built sites this successful before and probably will again. Why not make something which matters rather than aggregating hashtagged selfies? There's more money in things that matter and they are frequently more rewarding to work on.

I will keep Twicsy going until it makes much less than no sense at all!!!!!!!

But, I am already working on the next thing and we have generated more revenue in the last few months than Twicsy/Dumbfind/Searchles did in 10 years.

That's incredible, congratulations!

Care to share what you're working on? Or at least what process led you to the new project?

http://distillerylab.com Sounds boring to most probably, but I love to play with data! And we have real clients!

I do not know what distillerylab.com does. On the site I found only general info about it. Could you say more, what you are doing there?

It's a BI platform for analyzing social media. Unfortunately, it's not presented very well.

At least you understood! To be more specific, we analyze specific topics for companies and quantify their presence in the market. Right now it is still hard to measure ROI on your PR and marketing, we are trying to change that.

I am currently playing in a very similar space - would you care to throw me a bone and give me some idea of how you landed your first clients?

I'm totally stuck in this regard. So much so that I've begun to hate myself.

I cannot understand what service distillerylab provides. Did you get any leads from your web site?

I agree with this perspective. Every idea can't be curing cancer, and many innovative ideas are stumbled on while playing with something else - like Feynman discovering quantum electrodynamics because he was curious about why spinning plates wobble. You need to follow your instincts.

At a minimum, you're providing a service to thousands of people and sheparding a product through its lifecycle. I don't know if working on Twicsy will have any real influence on your future work, but following its story seems more valuable than dropping it to "pivot" off in some random trajectory.

There is also not much money in "curing cancer", unfortunately.

That's non-sense, people (and their pets) will continue to get cancer, even if a cure is found. The Nobel prize alone would be worth it.

I think what he means is that the ratio of the profits to the cost to discover a cure is much smaller than in other industries.

What she meane is that wellness is not a welcome topic in most circles, nor easily monetized. Everyone wants a new drug, literally or figuratively -- a quick fix, easy answer. No one wants to eat right, exercise, make dramatic lifestyle changes, etc. Wellness looks more like religious edicts than it does medicine.

This I cannot comprehend. Compared to the drugs I have gotten off and the potential surgeries I have evaded, what I am currently doing is a pleasant picnic. But trying to share that info has gotten me mostly open hostility. So I took the site down.

I'm not entirely sure what specifically you're talking about but if my cofounders or I can ever help at all, please email me tyler@stayinyourprime.com. I totally agree that wellness is not something most people want to do. We're building something that focuses on a core need some people actually do have with their health (getting their medical records automatically from any doctor) and as we go we'll be focusing more on how we can remove the stigma from wellness and health, etc.

You shouldn't ever have to feel guilty or alienated when talking about your health.

Please note that "cure cancer" is in quotes. I am speaking from (bitter) firsthand experience about some other condition.

I don't expect to ever get the Nobel Prize. I mostly get called crazy.

Well now you have to elaborate?

No, not actually. But you can check my other comment, below, for a crumb more info. I have mostly walked away from this topic. I am getting myself and my son well. If the rest of the world wants to be openly assholish to me, hey, their health issues are not my problem. Paying my bills and getting off the street is my problem.

Can I just say that I love your attitude? A borderline unhealthy sense of self deprecation and just 'doing it' because you can - qualities I wish more tech people had.

what's the reason for poor twitter seo?

Sharing some of the analytics behind how you think people use the site would probably make for a much more interesting discussion around monetization.

EG - I can't figure out how or why 6m uniques would show up here, or what they're doing.

And that's not an insult, I am curious - are they looking for discovery / trends? Are they looking to see all the latest pics of a user? etc?

Those are dramatically different user segments / values.

You've got a bit of a 31-flavors UX where I can do a lot, but as a result wonder if you could massively pare this down, improve focus, and discover monetization through understanding what people actually use it for.

SEO is the largest feeder of traffic for Twicsy. People get there by searching for a very long tail of things. But there are quite a few that return just to browse around it seems, or check out the top photos.

Agreed, the UX/UI is terrible. One big problem is that I am a terrible web developer, I am really just a back end data guy that knows enough to be dangerous on the front end.

But that's part of the reason why I think it has much more potential. The site gets a ton of traffic despite its obvious flaws. If I had the funds to do a redesign and even execute well on the basics who knows what could happen?

I'd love to do a free redesign for Twicsy. Email me (inlith@gmail.com) if you're interested.

My portfolio is at madebyargon.com

Will do!

I'm curious. Why free? Portfolio juice?

I think he'll get money along the way. Link to his portfolio, more followers on Twitter, more people knowing what he does and everything else that comes with popularity.

Free because I think the project has potential but the developer seems to not be interested in investing money on a redesign. If a free design can renew interest in the project, I think its a worthwhile cause.

On a related note, I also do free designs for open source projects (eg. vlc, ack). So if your have an open source project that you think could benefit from design, feel free to get in touch with me.

Working on such project helps me not just get my name out there, but also lets me learn a lot more than I can in commercial projects, since I usually get more creative freedom when I'm contributing my time rather than being paid for it.

it would make sense to hire complementary skills, like UX-design. I hear this is what the usual advices say.

seriously, just put images in divs and use some box to move them around. flat sexy gravity. ken burns effect for web 4.x

Given how long you've been doing this, you've overlapped with my last startup, which had similar issues (Edgeio.com - long since defunct; we started development in 2005; sold off the assets end of 2007; the service was a classified aggregator).

We got a huge amount of traffic via SEO, and lots of long tail traffic (e.g. we'd come up first for a huge number of zip codes). A big problem with our consumer site was atrocious bounce rates: Most people clicked through out of curiosity, looked around on that single page or maybe one more, and left never to be seen again, because we did a really poor job of hooking them unless they happened to be looking for classified ads matching that particular long tail term, which few were. We should in retrospect have treated those visits as someone watching an ad for our site, rather than as a conscious visit by a user of our site, because most of our traffic was from people who likely did not even realise what the site was about by the time they clicked back or closed the window.

A big part of the challenge for you as well, I think, is driving down bounce rates and challenging those users into other parts of the site and to repeat visits by helping them "get" what they can get out of the site other than 15 seconds of looking at that one image.

If I was you, I'd segment users hard on referrals vs. direct traffic and cookied vs. uncookied (assume first time visitors). First of all, are you earning any money on those first time referral users? If not, that gives you total freedom to experiment. But regardless, subject the first time referred users to an absolute battery of segmented tests (A/B or multivariate or whatever scheme you're comfortable you can analyze results from) with pretty much the sole purpose of figuring out how to get more of those users to visit more sticky pages. Especially if people are coming in from long tail searches, I think you'd be better focusing on turning them into users than "drive by" assaulting them with ads like it feels like the site currently is doing.

E.g. consider imgur. Consider users coming to imgur pages from Reddit (consider your specific traffic sources, and whether or not you can do anything "special" for them)- not only do they get an interface to navigate that in many cases are more convenient than continuing to browse the equivalent image reddits, but you can even go to imgur.com/r/someimagereddit (e.g. http://imgur.com/r/pics) and get all the pictures from that subreddit in one place. It's seductive. Then there's ability to comment. The image pages themselves are extremely clean. It's seductive.

While if I get to your site from Google search results (say by entering "twitter babes" and going to the image results - I tested, it gives a Twicsy result high up, in between the porn), I need to go below the fold to even realize that there are related pictures, and there are no "niceties" like being able to use cursor left/right to move through a "gallery", or space to enlarge the image, as on imgur.com (if there are on Twicsy, I didn't notice them). What is there is massively distracting ads.

Imgur is teasing people in when they hit it for the first time, making it very tempting to click one more image, while your site is pretty much bunching people in the face with ads, which makes it hard to even discover the potential.

I agree wholeheartedly with a lot of what you are saying. As I talked to many many people this year about funding and strategy for Twicsy I came to the conclusion that Twicsy needs to start funneling the pictures into topical verticals. I think this would help for 3 reasons:

1. It would increase engagement with users. I think they would finally understand how Twicsy could be an interesting daily destination because they could just focus on their topics of interest.

2. It would allow us to more easily control the content quality and guard against porn, which would hopefully get us back into the good graces of top tier advertisers, and allow us to target said advertising more easily. For popular verticals we could do direct ad sales which would be >100x more lucrative than the crap we serve now.

3. I think it would facilitate media partnerships. I don't want to go into too much detail here, but I think that if number 1 holds true that we could land partners for popular verticals.

The problems are that I basically ran out of time and money to be able to execute on this. I need money for a complete redesign to shift the focus to the topical verticals, and I need more time to execute on the back end tech to fill these verticals (maybe 2 months). I didn't need a ton of money, but even in this "easy time to raise money" I was unable to find an investor. I think the biggest reason for this is that I don't have a well rounded team in place, so part of this year I spent looking for a partner to focus on the business side. I was hoping I would meet someone that saw the potential as I did and believed we were right on the verge of something big. But I never found that person.

On repeat visits, yes the number of people that visit us just once is quite high. 5.8 million of the past 7.6 million visits were just one-timers. But there were over 350k people that visited us 9 or more times last month. And there were over 35k people that visited us 201 or more times. So that gives me reason to believe there are some real Twicsy fans out there! And, as I repeatedly say, we are succeeding despite the glaring drawbacks and problems with the site. Imagine if it wasn't such a piece of crap!

> It would allow us to more easily control the content quality and guard against pr0n, which would hopefully get us back into the good graces of top tier advertisers

I bet this is your main problem. Having experience with a site which has similar numbers (less in fact), I was surprised to know that you are able to generate only so much, as to cover hosting expense. And on that related note, which is another "top tier advertiser" network other than Google's?

The only other reason I can think of is you having a very high bounce rate, something above 90%?

Sorry, for being (inadvertently) blunt. But this is my area of some experience and also interest.

The bounce rate is 60.5%. We do have a lot of international traffic which adds to the monetization challenge.

This is proof of Marc Andreessen's idea[1] that if you obtain good product market fit nothing else really matters. Despite ignoring this product for 4 years and having a totally outdated design the market is compelling this product to exist none the less.

You've basically invented Instagram for Twitter here and don't seem to even realize it.

Please do your users a favor and apply Twitter's Bootstrap to the site ASAP, its really not that hard, you've been at this for 10 years, might as well learn a little HTML CSS you've come this far.

1. "Personally, I’ll take the third position – I’ll assert that market is the most impor- tant factor in a startup’s success or failure. Why? In a great market – a market with lots of real potential customers – the market pulls product out of the startup. The market needs to be fulfilled and the market will be fulfilled, by the first viable product that comes along. The product doesn’t need to be great; it just has to basically work. And, the market doesn’t care how good the team is, as long as the team can produce that viable product."

Well, not nothing else. As the author said, it makes next to no money. And it sounds like the traffic is almost entirely transient, which reduces its value greatly. The site averaged less than 2 visits per unique visitor.

So, while I get your point that an interested audience propelled the site to great use without much work at all, that's not the whole equation, not even close.

The ad placement is basically terrible. You should place fewer ads, but put them nearer the content and above the fold.

For example, get them out of the sidebar and make one banner in line with the content between the navigation and the pictures. Basically get rid of the rest.

Also, have you considered selling ads on BuySellAds.com? With that amount of traffic you should make decent money on a CPM or monthly basis.

I have very little ability to change the UI because I am a bad web developer and every change I make seems to make things worse. But thanks for the placement suggestion, maybe that is worth a try.

I contacted BuySellAds a while back and they passed on the opportunity. They said their target audience doesn't line up well with Twicsy. Or some crap like that :)

@dumbfounder how can i get in touch regarding buying space on your site?

There is an email at the bottom of every page on Twicsy. Unfortunately you need to jump through a hoop after that because I am trying to avoid spam, but there you go!

This comment thread in particular may provide more information about your challenge in finding monetary success than your entire wonderfully written blog post.

Here, in quick succession you first suggest that you have very little ability to change the UI because you are a bad developer, then quickly follow that up with a confession to somebody who wants to give you money, that you've made it annoying to contact you because you don't want spam.

I'm trying to be helpful here, not trying to be an a$$, and I understand that you're frustrated with your current situation with Twicsy and your generally long-challenging experiences making a mint with your startups.

However, take a deep breath and realise you've done 3 times what so many have failed to do even once. You've launched 3 products which have seen some manner of success, two raised rounds of financing, and the other has a good volume of traffic. Give yourself a bit of credit on the positive.

Now the negative.

It is said time and time again, execution is everything. You should know that. I just took a look at Twicsy, and honestly the design isn't that bad, but it could use a touch up. If you aren't good at 'web development', get somebody to help you. I'm sure you can find a local developer who would like to have twicsy on their portfolio, or spend a few bucks and get it done.

Secondly, make it easy for people to advertise on the site. If you are going through an ad network, you're not doing the work anyway or put up a contact form on the site, or even put your e-mail in your HN profile. You want to be a success, ABC/S/whatever. You're missing opportunities where people want to give you money, and if you're missing those opportunities, I assume you're also missing opportunities to sell.

The 'build it and the money will come rolling in' days are long gone. Nobody is an overnight success, particularly those that make it look easiest. If you want success, you'll have to work for it. Or else, you'll have to settle for telling everybody about your 'almost successes'.

As I said, I hope this isn't coming across poorly, as I'm truly trying to help you, this thread just made me make a bunch of assumptions about you, and if I'm right, hopefully it will help you or somebody else.

You've struck a nerve with me here, which is why my writing may have a tinge of hostility, but maybe a small crack of the whip will wake you up to your current opportunities and how you can seize them. All the best.

A. I contacted that guy directly, the response was really for everyone else. All you need to do to contact me is send 2 emails, I was trying to be nice with the hoops comment. I don't consider that a big deal and it makes the spam manageable.

B. Getting somebody decent to help for equity is hard. I have been at this for many years, of course I have tried that. Spend a few bucks and get it done isn't helpful because I am broke.

C. I think I work pretty hard!

D. My email is in my HN profile. Many others have contacted me already.

E. You assume too much!

[I edited out my negative tone. I was originally annoyed by your comment, but as you said, you are trying to help! Thanks for your feedback.]

Some monetization ideas:

* Follow the 4chan's method. Add captcha to search and offer captcha bypass for $15~ per year

* Make iOS / Android app, sell it for $1.99~ (you can make it with HTML/Javascript via PhoneGap)

* Offer API for affordable price

and please change current website design, make it simple and cleaner (Twitter Bootstrap is nice for that job and it's easy to learn)

A few comments from an initial glance:

- Site could be improved a lot for mobile. If you get a lot of mobile traffic, which wouldn't surprise me, I'll bet it massively underperforms desktop traffic on site engagement and ad revenue.

- You need to A/B test your ad locations a lot more. The locations do not look particularly good to me, but then again this does depend a lot on how most people interact with your site (which likely isn't starting at the homepage).

- More ad networks isn't always better. Are these ad networks actually outperforming adsense? Are you banned from adsense?

Edit: Ignore these two below, thanks jim-greer. Twitter is in fact hosting the images!

- (ignore) You probably could compress the big images more to save bandwidth. I don't know how big of an expense your edgecast bill is, but I'll bet you could cut it down by a lot.

- (ignore) Additionally, fix the cache headers on your images (change them from max-age: 0 to cache forever -- they look immutable). This will immediately lower your edgecast bill by a little bit and really help performance.

> You probably could compress the big images more to save bandwidth

He's not hosting the images, Twitter is.

Agreed with mobile optimization, I have over 35% mobile traffic and I am doing a terrible job of taking advantage of this. But I don't know the first thing about how to do this. I have done some research and experiments but honestly couldn't make sense of it.

Yes, I am banned from Adsense, and just about every top tier ad network. There is a certain amount of porn on Twicsy (maybe 10% of overall traffic, nothing earth shattering) that makes it unsavory to many advertisers. Despite aggressive filtering in place to stop serving top tier ads on anything that might possibly be objectionable, and removing 10's of millions of pictures, it seems like every top provider has blacklisted Twicsy.

How much do these bannings hurt your profitability ? Any way to quantify it ?

The answer to this question determines how much you can afford to either outsource or invest in internal deployment of porn detection. Also, hi Chris!

Hi John! We do not download images so porn detection would be a huge endeavor.

Amazon Mechanical Turk could help with this.

Could you load the images from the urls into memory and try out open source code[0] that detects porn (I'm sure there's probably something better out there, but this was just a quick find on github)?

I'm not sure how helpful it might be (false positives and what not), but it could help give you more numbers to quantify whats going on?

[0] https://github.com/FreebieStock/PHP-Image-Pornographic-Conte...

If I knew that would probably make me even more sad!

My gut says I would probably at least triple revenue if I could serve Adsense. Which would be enough to pay myself a bad salary while I continue the fight.

Are you banned from Adsense just because of the porn pics/videos? Or have you been banned for other reasons (e.g. not having your own content, making duplicate content from twitter, copyright issues, dmca, gambling, site quality or other) ?

This happened with me as well. After spending lots of money and time building a complex tech I failed miserably. So on a boring day I wrote some crappy android app. I published it and went to sleep. A week passed and I realized that the app was in first 10 for a particular section in India.

I put Admob ads and suddenly revenue started zooming. My app will not scale beyond a point. It is unfundable. It is really crappy technology (basically a static website put as a webview) but it gets hundreds of installs every day and touching "thank you emails" every day.

I can heavily relate to this with one of my early projects, Jellibug. It aggregated celebrity pictures from Instagram, Twitter, etc and at one point had 1M+ pictures and 250k+ visitors/month. Except it didn't make money and became a "piece of shit startup I hate to love". I stopped working on it about a year ago and finally shut it down last month. Almost all traffic to it was organic, just like Twicsy. And it was mostly teenagers using the site which is a very hard audience to monetize. I couldn't see it as a business anymore so why bother wasting time even thinking about it? Sometimes things fall apart so that better things can fall together. Since then, I've stopped chasing the sexy and cool ideas with no business plan. Today, I run 2 unsexy and boring startups that make money. My advice would be to ditch Twicsy and instead find a problem and solve it.

I can't ditch the piece of shit I love!

What are those 2 boring startups you run?

Also, a sneaky, probably short-term idea for making money is to have sneaky affiliate links with misleading anchor text like "Click to see the image", and point the affiliate link to an Amazon product page or something. Probably an easy few thousand dollars per month.

I am feeling this so hard right now. Same situation except about double the traffic and yet still losing money.

Definitely looking into SAAS as my next project.

Why does he say "really successful" in the title, if it doesn't even break even?

EDIT: Must be the traffic, but these days that's not (that) impressive if there's no revenue model around it. That said, I'd love 6 million users/month.

EDIT 2: downvotes? I guess funding = success still around here, huh?

I'd hate to have 6 million visitors a month if they're viewing pictures (high bandwidth) and I'm not actually making any money from them.

It appears the pictures are actually hosted on Twitter, so not that much traffic.

eh, I'd take it. Bandwidth is cheap... and I have the sort of ego that derives a lot of pleasure from creating something that other people find useful and use.

The ten years included several startups. And while it appears all eventually failed or were put in the back-burner, he did raise $2 million in angel funding along the way. So, at least in regards to keeping himself housed and fed, I guess it was successful.

I actually meant to put successful in quotes but then forgot. The way I meant it is, if you had told me I would be seeing 6 million unique visitors per month when I first started out I would have definitely said that is a huge success. In some ways it is, but obviously not the most important way. I definitely agree that raising money is not success, and actually all of the money raised was prior to launching Twicsy.

Where does the traffic come from? I think I may know.

TRAFFIC

A brief glance at alexa (I know, I know...) shows the source breakdown of his traffic:

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/twicsy.com USA (17.5%), India (13.4%), Indonesia (11.3%), Japan (4.1%)

More interestingly, it lists some feeder pages, and there's one interesting one:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090722010355AA...

Which contains this answer:

"Bonus - This is an easy way to include pictures you have uploaded to Twitter in an easy and automated fashion. Go to http://twicsy.com and type in your twitter username. You will see all of the pictures you have uploaded through twitter. Now scroll to the right and click on the 'RSS' button. Now you can use this automatically updated link of your tiwtter pictures."

RSS FEEDS

So... since people can use twicsy to find all pictures on a certain hashtag topic ( http://twicsy.com/?search=%23cinderella ) or from a certain user ( http://twicsy.com/u/onedirection ), they can include these in their own sites as RSS feeds, thus contributing to his overall server traffic, but perhaps not actual visitors.

BANDWIDTH

He does not actually seem to host (all/any?) pictures himself (i.e. little bandwidth), but wraps twimg.com files in his own RSS tags, adding links to his site.

TRAFFIC 2

By the way, his assertion of 6MM visits a month is reflected in the quantcast numbers:

https://www.quantcast.com/twicsy.com#!traffic

DEMOGRAPHIC

Also, pretty interesting affinity sites and demographic (younger males, no kids, not wealthy, college educated, more than avg african american and hispanic visitors) with a strong affinity for O'Reilly Automotive (perhaps not very similar to the audience of this site, hence virtually unknown)

https://www.quantcast.com/twicsy.com#!demo

GEO

Geo findings of Alexa seem to agree with Alexa, though strangely enough, India is missing from the top countries. Quantcast claims only 56k unique cookies from India. Perhaps someone one is using his site and responsible for a lot of the Alexa 13.5% ?

https://www.quantcast.com/twicsy.com#!geo

MONEY MONEY MONEY

If my theory of above average RSS traffic is right, only he can tell, think he could make more money if he inserted some adverts into his RSS feed. Not sure how well this would go over with Twitter, since he's not doing (most of?) the image hosting.

I also get the feeling something is amiss. The Alexa and Quantcast numbers are significantly out of whack (13.4% of all traffic from India, yet only 56k unique visitors) strikes me as odd. He may be spending a bunch of money on servers whilst others save money on using them as a tool.

On a personal level I find the design very unattractive and out-of-date, which may prevent the site from becoming much of a destination and could be linked to the 60+% bounce rate. If I were him I would figure out what competitors do ( like twitpic, which according to compete is an actual competitor: https://siteanalytics.compete.com/twicsy.com/ ) and take it from there.

Access to actual analytics could provide more ideas for money-making (or -saving).

For those interested (notlisted appears to be!) here are some actual numbers from Google Analytics for October:

Unique Visitors 6,461,357

Visits 7,592,870

Pageviews 28,461,178

Avg. Visit Duration 00:02:07

Geos

USA: 1.6m visits Indonesia: 687k Japan: 569k not set: 513k UK: 369k Mexico: 261k Turkey: 247k France: 232k Germany: 213k Spain: 185k

And an amazingly long tail from there. So that is definitely part of the problem when it comes to monetization. There are 120 different countries that had more than 1000 visits in October.

-----------

I do not actually believe that rss produces a significant amount of traffic for Twicsy. I don't see any evidence in the stats it has much of an impact at all.

I just looked how much we made in Google Adsense in Oct based on the number of unique visitors we received. I calculate that we would have made roughly $42K in Oct based on your unique visitors value. This sounds nonintuitive, but its my opinion that you actually have too many ads on your site to make any money from them. My site is fotoblur.com. You can reach me through the support page if you'd like to chat. I'd love to help you if I can.

Really like fotoblur.. amazing

I am. Like digging through analytics. Some people pay me for it (not a hint, just a fact).

I feel something is missing in this story...

Google has very few sites linking to yours (~35 pages, mostly garbage pages), reports a huge number of indexed pages, but actually shows very few. Why? Hummingbird update or something else?

A search for Twicsy links in twitter finds hardly anything, except the site name in combination with a link to http://po.st.

You have 30k followers on Twitter, quite a few but not humongous, so your top trend tweets won't generate major traffic. 24k on FB, but most status updates get little or no comments, likes or shares.

I see a bunch of twicsy-'hosted' images on pinterest and tumblr. Most PG-18 search terms on your site are blocked, but when I do a google image search or twitter search, quite a few, I'd say 1 in 20 are of an adult nature (which perhaps doesn't help in terms of getting advertisers).

Is the real reason for your success & traffic really... pr0n?

Edit: One of the reasons I ask this is the source of your traffic. Would visits to your site allow Indonesians to bypass their 1MM site pr0n filters?

hmm, you've reaffirmed my suspicions. The image suggestions for a google search of Twicsy was just adult material.

The TechCrunch article in 2009 criticised the website for being creepy http://techcrunch.com/2009/06/19/twicsy-is-a-killer-and-kind...

"As you might imagine, this service pulls up a lot of slightly personal pics, such as couples being all cutesy together. Since you don’t know any of them, it’s slightly creepy. But hey, if they don’t want those seen, they shouldn’t be sharing them over Twitter in the first place."

I regularly review the most trafficked pics on Twicsy and my rough estimate is that about 10-15% of the traffic is porn. But it is hard to know exactly because there is such a long tail of activity. My theory for why the associated words are usually porn is that there is less of long tail of activity when it comes to porn searches than regular searches. It didn't use to be this way, I think that 2 years ago roughly half the traffic was porn and when I realized this I was quite disheartened. I started taking aggressive steps to remove it and mitigate it and traffic suffered for a while, and I thought that was the end of Twicsy. But it bounced back after a few months and kept slogging on...

I would bet the top search on google is something simple porn related like "sex" similar to Twicsy. But that doesn't mean google is a porn site that no one should advertise on.

I'm not blaming you in any way, nor do I have a moral issue with it. I suspect the percentage is higher though...

As you indicate advertisers have a major issue with it. The site being what it is, a search index of unfiltered twitter picture streams now hosted on your servers, you probably can't prevent it either… Severely impacts your ability to make money on it, unless you were willing to go over to the 'dark side' and get 'content-relevant' advertisers… (don't ask me how they make money, it's a mystery to me, I've never paid for it)

Sorry, didn't mean to sound defensive :)

The problem with "going to the dark side" is that I would be serving porn ads to all the Justin Bieber and One Direction fans in the world as well as the porn hounds. That would just be plain wrong.

Great research. Now its not difficult to see why the traffic can't be monetized.. The traffic stats looks way off and not organic.

Forget Twitter Bootstrap, if people cared what a site looks like - explain Craigslist..

You may want to rethink the ads on the home page. Text link below the banner center, remove the image boxes. You should be getting at least $3-4 per 1k imps. Maybe dropping the 'no ads when sign in'. Show ads to everybody, but very few ads. 1 per page, maybe 2, but that's it.

How much money does Craigslist actually make, though? Also not every Bootstrap site has to look Boostrappy, people just almost never bother to change the colors at all.

I agree with moving the ads though. Users who've shown enough interest to click into a page might be more amenable to target advertising.

Craigslist makes somewhere in the range of $100-150 million a year, they charge $25-75 for job ads in major markets and $10 for broker-listed apartments in NYC.

Oh, wow. I honestly thought it wasn't profitable for some reason... thanks.

Make a Twicsy app, price it at a dollar, push it through the site and you're set.

I agree this idea has potential, and I have thought about it, but I am a bad web developer, and an even worse app developer. I have been looking for a partner to possibly do it with a rev share and I have contacted numerous people, but no takers...

I'd love to help out with doing some of your web stuff if you are interested. Shoot me an email, anhkiet(at)gmail

Happy to help you with some of your web dev and design issues. Check out some of my work at http://www.duetapp.com, http://www.getsoloapp.com, http://www.23andwalnut.com. Shoot me an email at from any one of those sites if you're interested.

If you are interested, i can develop NATIVE android/ios mobile html/web based app (similar to phonegap with embedded socket server) based on Xamarin.Android/Xamarin.IOS for FREE (looking to publish a portfolio of case studies). If interested contact srid68 at gmail.

I don't understand if it has 6 million unique visitors a month, how can he not monetize this? This seems to be more about how the revenue via advertising has dried up. Can barely pay for the servers !?

6 million unique visitors a month are seeing nothing they can't see for free on Twitter. The problem of how to make money on aggregated content is an interesting one (and relevant to more than a few struggling entrepreneurs)

You should be making a lot more than you're making. With a few tweaks to your ad placement you should be making more than enough to live off of.

I only say this because your current ad placement is kind of annoying and intrusive (especially on the content detail pages), yet they seem to be placed in some of the worst places to actually generate clicks. Of course, I don't have specific data or testing from your site to back that theory up, but if your site follows the trends I've seen in other sites this is certainly the case.

Feel free to reach out to me at the email address in my HN profile and I'll help you get them placed right/help you test out placement to start generating some real revenue. 6 million uniques is nothing to turn your nose up at, and it should be enough for you to make a living off of quite easily.

It was once told to me that after 2 years a startup is no longer a startup, it's just a failed business.

You have an awesome opportunity with your startup. I'm sure you'll turn something around with the lively discussion you kicked off.

Have you considered non-ad-network revenue sources? What about running affiliate offers?

I used to make 4 to 10 times more as a publisher with affiliate offers than adsense or other ad network placements. I don't affiliate (or publish) enough now to know if that would still happen or not.

A quick idea for an affiliate test, although you may have already tried this:

Given 6MM+ uniques/mo, and a somewhat adult-oriented audience, you may have a decent opportunity to push native ads with affiliate offers toward dating sites, event-themed sites (costumes for halloween trends), and more.

Native ads could be custom, animated banners you create and fill the first, second or x picture spot in your search or tag results. Does that make sense? Your banners would be 100px x 100px on your home page and fill a standard picture spot or two or five instead of the images that might ordinarily go in that space, 150x150 banner ads could fit in well in random places on your tag image pages, etc.

Also, advertisers might like to participate in native advertising on your website if the opportunity were available.

Good luck!

I can tell you're frustrated with this Project, but I still think you deserve some congrats. Good job! It's not easy to build something and get that much traffic. I think the frustration stems from the platform it's built on, and how hard it is to monetize on that platform. Since the content is basically given away for free, advertising is your only option. And since they advertise as well... it’s tough to pull it off. I can think of three basic options here (and I'm sure there are many many more):

1. Keep it running, keep it free, and use it as a "Bullet Point" project to increase your perceived value on other projects that have the potential to monetize more successfully

2. Go the complete opposite and just start charging money for it, and see what happens. Of course you risk losing traffic and/or the whole thing imploding, but you never know until you try

3. Just scrap it and re-use the Tech to build a different product that is focused on a niche market that you believe can monetize better. Perhaps News related businesses that would find value in an easy /easier way to find Images for the stories they write

He could do something like the new Pinterest ads. You search for a pic on Twitter and inside the results is a picture with an ad with a relative theme.

Pinterest is so hot right now. Twicsy is so not hot right now. That makes a huge difference when it comes to launching products like that. They also have much better engagement.

It's full of (crappy - sorry) ads that probably don't pay much. Perhaps less is more? I'm not really a Google advocate, but how about switching to text-based ads only and focusing more on showing the user real content instead of large, annoying banners?

I have tried at least 50 ad networks and what I am using now seems to work the best. But I am always willing to try something new...

No ads if you sign in with twitter? Maybe that's the problem, since it's a search engine specifically for twitter...

I'd be curious to see some information regarding the number of ad impressions/clicks too. The only ad on the homepage is way at the bottom (I think).

This is something that I have thought about a lot recently because I've been wanting to start my own company as well. I don't plan on making money from it right away. I would love to, but at the end of the day.. It comes down to what is reality, which in this case for me is that I will not be making any/much money off of my site. I've looked at alternatives to how I can change this and will continue to do so. Kudos to you for managing to keep your idea going for this long with little to no hope. Maybe I will have to be just like you and just keep at it only because of the love and passion you have for your own product. Best of luck to you on your new project(s)

I don't use twitter much.

But recently there was a large tanker crash near where I live. The truck had exploded, and there were lots of people killed and hurt.

I wanted to see some pictures, but one hour after the incident the story was not (yet) on the TV news. So I turned to twitter, and using the standard twitter search, I found a few ransoms photos of the incident.

What I needed was a better way to search twitter for photos, with a specific tag or time frame posting, and perhaps even a geographical filter too (since the incident was at a specific place).

I'm sure other people would find this useful, especially when large events unfold live (I.e boston bombings, plane crash etc etc)

Time & Geographically based searches would be a moneymaker, no doubt about it. Could be something that Twitter would buy up themselves too

Actually I just found this: http://nearbytweets.com/ - seems someone has already done it (for free). You can change the location to anywhere in the world (not just 'near' you)

I actually do this on Instagram. It's not so effective for breaking news stories but it can be fun at music festivals and other entertainment type events.

And this, boys and girls, is what entrepreneurship looks like more often than not. The "over the weekend" stories are rare corner cases. In the vast majority of cases you have to be prepared to slog it out for an extended period of time before you start to see success. And that's one of the huge reasons for which most new businesses fail. Not everyone has the intestinal fortitude to, in the face of adversity, keep pushing forward.

@dumbfounder

First of all, I wish you had chosen a different handle on HN. You are not dumb at all. You are, in fact, a real asset to anyone who might want to launch a startup or get behind a difficult idea. I don't know if you project will ultimately succeed. Hard to tell. You, on the other hand, are an absolute success.

I know that from your current perspective it might seem you wasted a decade in this journey. I simply don't see it that way.

You've received plenty of design and functional advise on this thread with regards to twicsy. The first thing I thought about was something that came up in a discussion on HN a couple of days ago. Here's my short comment on that thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6647818

In my view that still rings true for twicsy. In other words, you have to deliver value that is not found elsewhere and that people are willing to pay for. Im my post I speak of the fact that the vast majority of news websites are regurgitated versions of the news item source, whereas there are a very few who provide you with real incremental value by taking the time to research and give you perspective.

If you are still interested in making twicsy a success perhaps you should start thinking laterally rather than vertically. In other words, don't stay on your current path. Explore other paths. I know that's easier said than done. For example: How might corporate marketing programs be able to use your service? Celebrities? Bloggers? How about a path to licensing some of these pictures? Not through you, through whoever owns the rights with you making a small percentage on the sale.

Don't give up. Pivot.

Have you thought of doing in content ads when people search specific things? I.e. If I look up "party" maybe there's an alcohol ad or an ad for a local bar. I have so many ideas around this.

More ads man! I had a site that had 1 million page views per day and we generated about $1500-$3000/day off the ads. Placement of the ad is imperative.

Can you email me? I've got a site that does high pageviews that I'm struggling to monetize.

Interesting... HN seems to be more responsive to stories of failed start ups than averagely successful businesses. Is this because most are reluctant to tell the world they've failed? Doesn't this go counter to the failure-is-good argument.

It's as if one comes out more genuine iff bad news are shared rather than good news. FYI, I don't personally see OP's app/outcome as a failure in itself.

Finally, a website that lets me search twitters massive database of stupid pictures people take of themselves. How are you not a billionaire?

... It also lets you search for things like LAX, which might have been handy the other day.

A quick search for "thinspo" shows Twitter has a lot of work left to do if they want to stop people using twitter for pro-anorexia messaging.

Launch a contest, some folks would probably be willing to solve the monetization problem for a percentage of the revenue. I'd love to work with you on this, that kind of traffic isn't easy to build.

I'd also spin off a separate product for marketers (based on the same engine, but without the global trend noise), make it useful (there are a few ways to do that).

Then I would have 50 ideas that I don't have time or money to execute on :)

idea being you let them execute for rev share :)

I am unconvinced that traffic is all a site needs to be a real business. Sites like pinterest & snapchat convince us otherwise. And those business operate at a loss. Trying doing that as your side project...and you probably wont go very far unless you have VCs with some deep pockets...or publicity from sites like hacker news & tech crunch.

You are making me love my little enterprise startup.

10 years, no funding -> $750K/year.

Of course, that one company is AT&T. We help send about 1/3% of all direct mail advertising in the U.S. (Sorry about that -- we are trying to get them to switch to digital but it's a hard sell to when that's what they do for a living.)

The real problem here IMO is that the focus is on the investors and making a product that will attracted such.

There's something fundamentally wrong with the approach when the major focus is on something else than earning money.

I know, I've been there too.

loop "Build something you can sell. Find a customer. Send a bill. Get money."

Its a cheesy video but if you can force yourself to watch to the end there might be a couple of points to make your time worthwhile.

6 Ways To Make Money Online http://www.shoemoney.com/6-ways-to-make-money-online

(Yes I know its Shoemoney)

You ever think to ask your users with a survey to see why they came there in the first place?

Do you have some analytics to see what they are doing on the site? I mean is 60% of it searching for popstar images and then browsing from then?

Once you know this you can start to steer this firehose into a funnel.

The idea seems like a good one but you are not solving any problem, it is just a cool way to discover photos on twitter. If you have 6 millions unique users, can you charge businesses to feature their photo on the home page and charge per follower you give them?

If you want some cricisim, the website style might be turning people away. http://twicsy.com/ The colours, contrast, and various sizes/spacing of things are somewhat unsettling.

It could be a lot cleaner and calmer

Yep, his first hire should be/have been a designer. People only care about interfaces, they couldn't care less how great the backend is.

Thanks for this post, especially for all the details. Been building a site as a side project, mainly to get it out of my head and the incidental learnings. Reading about your strugle and the hardship of moneytisation was very enlightning.

Honestly speaking I've used the website a lot, but only recently I started thinking why doesn't the founder take it to the next level? It's an amazing website!

Why would you need funding? Your product seems "finished" and you have a ton of users. You just need to monetize better than crappy ads

Because I have 2 kids and I can't afford to work for no salary anymore! And the site needs a redesign.

Just some honest constructive feedback here.

Kinda just seems like an excuse to me...I don't have kids, so I can't empathize, however, it couldn't take THAT much time to work on monetization strategies. 6 million uniques on a consistent basis is pretty substantial attention, and attention = power, nowadays. Plus, why would an investor want to throw any more money at you when you've already somehow dropped well over a million bucks? I think if you just put some elbow grease in, you'd make it work.

All that investment money went into previous products, only the underlying tech was taken to create Twicsy. Only about $30k was actually invested into Twicsy itself after that (just to pay my terrible salary). Since then I paid to keep Twicsy afloat out of my own pocket until this year when it finally started breaking even on raw costs (still can't afford to pay myself a salary).

I certainly understand needing to support your family. But I understand why investors are so leery. Additional $$$ in the business and a redesign would probably result in more users but probably not a substantial increase in revenue. Your monetization strategy is not working at 6 million(impressive btw) users then why would it work at 12 million users. There is a very small ROI with the current strategy. Properly monetizing 6 million users would result in alot more than just beer money.

what you've done is awesome. With a few tweaks to the business model you could generate real revenue without needing to raise investment capital.

As someone who is in "this space" and a product guy, @Dumbfounder, needs to refocus then rework the design. Its not much many to edit a decent psd designer then get it chopped off and ready for xhtml.I've done many Its a cheap way to get a slick new design in no time at all. Refine later. I have access to some who do high quality psd+css w/ good turn around time. You tell them what you want, toss around ideas and you get yourself a final product that needs little work. I

His pages have too much going on. Less is more. You should be able to clean things up and drip one 250x250 px ad for say 10-15 cents. Once the ui is reworked this will come to life. I like what he is going but right now he is doing too much. If you want to chat him me up. I am a front end dev and we could probably build some interesting things.

I am pretty sure I could bring its full potential out within 2 month of so while not spending much month at all.

@dumbfounder. If passionate. Reach out to me today.I have some free time this week to dicuss if you want.

A redesign is only a piece of the puzzle, it will not make the site suddenly fundable. I need the time to work on a few fundamental things to position the site to be more attractive to both users and investors, and time is money.

I just reread what I wrote. Yikes! Please excuse all the auto-correct typos. Is this a "new" startup or is it part of your previously funded searchles company?

I completely understand that a redesign is only a piece of the puzzle but when dealing with visual site... design can be a huge piece of puzzle. It can also make a big difference in revenue.

I dig your passion.

Question: what CPM are you getting for your ads?

Depending on how much you're getting, I may know some people who would be interested in beating that price.

On average less than 10 cents.

Hmm, interesting. I shall contact you by email!

What CPMs are you getting in the US? If 17% of your traffic is US, even with one ad per page, you should be getting ~4,760,000 pageviews per month.

have you ever tried to outsource your ad operations? that kind of inventory could be worth worth enough to live on comfortably.

Just keep growing the traffic however you can while you break even and figure out how to turn it into something profitable long term.

Could maybe time-delay search results for free users. Premium users (news companies etc) pay for more real-time service.

Note to "10x founders": both "twitsnbieber.com" and "titsnbieber.com" are still available.

/bin/anothergreatidea < '$$$' > ~/Desktop/Trash 2> /dev/null

someone's bad at being greedy

Successful? No ... Potential? Yes

Find real problems first, then solve them by creating a Business™

Just wanted to say love your post. It was fun and educating. ;)

I sent this to the blog author, but then felt maybe someone else might get something from reading it. My offer stands for everyone here. Most of us are going through or have gone through this same struggle eloquently written in this post. I'm here to help brainstorm or chew on any problems any of us are working through. Just need to email me. nate.kontny gmail

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

I really enjoyed your blog post on Hacker News today about the trouble of running Twicsy.

Here's just a few spelling/grammar corrections:

https://draftin.com/documents/168810/changes_to_savepoint?sh...

I definitely understand what you are going through. I had a successful attempt at starting a business with Inkling (http://inklingmarkets.com, which still runs profitably today), but then wanted to try again. So we started a branded games company where companies could stick there own brand images into a bunch of games we made. For example, our version of Bejeweled but with pictures of the latest sweaters at the Gap. And we did some revenue making deals. But the deals were tough to get, and the investors didn't care.

I didn't have the passion for this project like I did with Inkling to see it through. So I gave up relatively quickly. Took a break and worked on the Obama campaign. But then I started Draft (http://draftin.com) about half a year ago, and that's been a considerably different project in terms of success. It's surprised me how much people enjoy it.

One thing that's really helped me is Kathy Sierra's advice (http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/0...): to find something where I'm making people better at something. And let that guide all my decision making.

For example, If I were trying to sell cameras, I'd wake up and just focus on helping people become better photographers. With Draft I focus on helping people "write better", and every feature or decision I make for the product has to have that as its mission. And it continues to serve me well.

As I briefly look at Twicsy, I can't help feel there is something here about helping people get better at something. Maybe it too is about getting better at taking photos. You must have a lot of data (i.e OkCupid) about what types of photos get traffic. Maybe with that data, you could make companies better at sharing images of what they do to get more fans. You obviously have skill getting SEO traffic, and managing a large image site. Maybe there is a kernel there that you'd be excited to productize.

Anyways, I know the feelings you are going through. I'm not going to say just keep going, because obviously you have. But I am confident, that eventually there is something you are exploring here that could be turned into something that can sustain itself.

I'm here to brainstorm or chat if you need me. Happy to be of any kind of help. Please feel free to ask. No need to feel like you are toiling at this alone.

-Nate

-- http://twitter.com/natekontny http://ninjasandrobots.com

Best title ever.

A few random ideas in no particular order

1) Paywall. Even if 1 out of 10,000 people agrees to pay, you will have 600 paying customers per month.

2) Sell analytics / data on what's trending.

3) Offer to make prints of the images.

4) Branching out #3 - not just prints, but fridge magnets, tiles, mugs, whatever.

I suspect #3 & #4 would incur legal liabilities that far exceed the revenue they generate. I'm thinking about copyright infringement.

You may be right about #1, that was to be my next attempt at monetization. Right now you can only do keyword searches on the past month, I was going to offer a service to let people search the full index for maybe $10/month. But I am now involved with another startup that is taking all my time and I am not sure when I will get the chance to try this.

I have talked to many people about #2 but was unable to figure out something compelling to sell.

Tried #3 with Peecho for about a week, not one sale!

Who can you sell analytics/trending data to?

You should make it look better, imo.

How would that solve the issue of it not making money?

Depends on how he decides to monetize it I guess. But at the very least a better designed site gives the impression of professionalism and security, and users who trust you will also trust you with their money. Also a better organized (I think less noisy) site would make the ads easier to see and more relevant.

Although for me, the bigger issue is finding what Twicsy offers that's worth paying for?

Twitter Bootstrap, a developer's greatest ally

It might solve the "unfundable" and "piece of shit" adjectives in the title.

pretty much the whole Internet is built on the idea that if you can get metrics like his up, and get funded, you can figure out monetization with the help of your expert investors.

That's not going to help his revenue problem, probably. The only thing I can think of is if he--in addition to making it look appealing--somehow places targeted ads based on user queries, in the midst of their search results. This is essentially the "killer" strategy a lot of companies like FB and Twitter have started using. Make ads a seamless part of the scenery. Not as annoying sidebar shit that no one ever looks at.

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