FundersClub Unveils Venture News | Hacker News Reader

FundersClub Unveils Venture News

venturebeat.com

41 pointssusanam17 comments

Not only is there a chicken-and-egg effect in creating a successful Hacker News spinoff, but looking at the sample content on Venture News, it seems that all the content on VN is redundant with content that generally hits the Top 5 on Hacker News. (Are people who use FundersClub and Hacker News different demographics?)

Compare with the launch of http://www.usv.com which nowadays appears to consist of mostly stories and comments by USV employees/partners, with a low volume of posts in general.

I think the mirrored content is an indictment against how mainstream HN's news is - we get most of our news from the biggest news publications and tech blogs. Right now we have the BBC, The Guardian, WaPo, Bloomberg, NYTimes, Wired and CNBC on the front page.

> which nowadays appears to consist of mostly stories and comments by USV employees/partners

At its inception, Hacker News (then called startup news) was intended primarily to share stories amongst the y-combinator network. Reddit was used for this purpose earlier, but due to its rise in the mainstream consciousness, most stories were no longer geared towards hacker/founder-focused YC.

If you view HN's early days on the internet archive, you'll see that a large portion of content came from yc-affiliated folks. So clearly, a news site for a small community can have value for that community, irrespective of mainstream adoption.

FundersClub's community (though it shares a lot of YC dna for obvious reasons) is distinct from HN in that investors & founders of funded startups are the largest component. Of course there are many of these people on HN as well, but they are a small minority. A glance at "venture news" demonstrates that the focus is much more startup/industry focused than HN.

The difference is also clear from the name: "hacker" news vs "venture" news.

On the chicken&egg problem, imho a front page with the 1st news having 2 comments and all others with just the button "discuss" is a first evidence of missing community.

I'd consider hiding that at the very beginning in favor of other signals that actually show the presence of the initial community.

At Theneeds.com, where we aim to create a HN-like for "normal" people, i.e. no hackers (and no ventures :), we started with a facepile that generically represents users that interacted with the content, wether they simply upvoted or actually discussed it. I understand that the style here is less graphical, but I think the idea can be elaborated to reduce the "sense of desolation".

Well, it's actually Monday night... good luck for tomorrow morning ;)

Hard to read. The colors for the fonts are just too light. Its pretty, but not very readable. At least for my old, tired eyes.

This is Will from FundersClub. Thanks for the feedback. We will consider ways to improve contrast and legibility.

All you need to do is darken the font to the content-related links. If you want to keep it stylish and a dark gray will match with the gray-ish blue you currently have. It will be a nice contrast, and will improve readability while keeping the style intact. #222 is what I'd suggest.

I made the changes to show what I mean. Please refer to: http://imgur.com/6ombpd7,IdjJn6x#0

"People who are interested in angel investing often do not have the time to source deals and conduct due diligence on their own."

^ That's a shame. IMO if you're gonna do it, you should do it right.

I'd really like to see less FundersClub header/footer/sidebar spam on the page. HN itself has very little from yCombinator on the site, but subtle is powerful.

Alex from FC here. Good feedback, we'll work on this.

Here is the link in case anyone is interested in checking out the site:

https://fundersclub.com/venture-news

The chat box give the impression that it might be a spammy hard-sell feature.

What am I going to get from a one-on-one chat with [faceless website]?

A sales pitch? What headless collective entity will I be conversing with? How many people can see the message queue I'm dumping chat messages into?

Haha, nice catch, that's not supposed to be there (it's for other parts of our site). Our dev team is removing.