Ask HN: Our Startup is at a Crossroads. What Would HN Do? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Our Startup is at a Crossroads. What Would HN Do?

14 pointswlj9 comments

We[0] have run our photo portfolio service[1] as a side project since November 2008.

Some stats about Photoswarm:

    - 1 million photos uploaded
    - 16,000 customer sites created (free and paid)
    - 530 paid accounts over lifetime of startup
    - 180 current paid accounts

At the beginning of 2013 we launched a separate B2B startup in the construction space which has resulted almost no time to spend on Photoswarm and this looks unlikely to change for the foreseeable future.

We love Photoswarm but we can’t give it the time it deserves.

What would HN do? Find a buyer (who?, how?, how much?). Find someone to run it?. Shut it down? Any advice appreciated.

[0] http://www.photoswarm.com/about_us

[1] http://www.photoswarm.com

View on HN

It's hard to tell what your mix of sales is, but assuming that the bulk of your customers are on the $9.99 or $19.99/month plans, you're probably not grossing more than 3 or 4 thousand per month.

Similar to EverPix, you have storage/bandwidth/hosting fees associated with it, so right now, it's not enough to keep a full time person employed.

Try selling it on Flipppa - because it brings in revenue, you could probably get about 1-2x your yearly revenue as a sales price.

It's closer to $2k per month. We raised our prices recently (e.g. our Pro accounts went from $9.99 to $19.99) but we grandfathered all existing customers at the original price meaning our MRR is less than our current pricing would indicate.

Thanks for the Flippa suggestion...hadn't previously heard of them.

Ask yourself a question: Would it make a difference if Photoswarm was making 2-5x the money it's making now/if it had 2-5x the users?

If the answer is, "No, our new B2B project is too big/too profitable/too exciting for us to devote time to Photoswarm," then maybe the answer is to just let it sit on the sidelines, or to sell it if you can find someone who will take care of your baby.

If the answer is, "Yes, that would be awesome, we'd love to go fulltime on it!" then the answer might be to see if you can 2-5x your revenue. In that case, here are a few things to try:

- Charge more. Double or triple all your prices (for new customers) and add a "Call us" enterprise plan for a few weeks. See if it impacts signups at all.

- Do email marketing. Send out monthly newsletters to your 16,000 customers, with online photography tips, and subtle upsells and discounts.

- Expand your reach. Make some cool photography resources or infographics or do a case study with a successful customer, and post it online. Make it sharable. Offer details/more cool stuff in exchange for an email address. Then refer to the last bullet.

- Do targeted sales. Use Facebook ads/adwords to advertise to photographers. Use LinkedIn mail to reach out to photographers that might use your service. Ask them about their business, ask them for advice for your offering, offer them free months of service as thanks, etc.

- If you have good traffic, do A/B testing. Test the parts of your funnel for maximum conversion: ads, landing page, signup process, payment page, initial user login, lifecycle emails, etc.

If you want more advice in this direction, do another Ask HN. :)

We're committed to our B2B project so the answer would have to be no.

That said, while working part time on it, we've tried the following of your suggestions:

- We've experimented with pricing for circa 12 months. We've tried our Pro accounts at $9.99, $14.99 and $19.99. Both the higher prices have resulted in a significant drop off of Pro account upgrades. We've also had a "contact us" Studio plan at $79.99 with no takers.

- We've been using Ghost Blog Writers[0] to create content on our blog (great service BTW) which has resulted in an upswing of organic traffic. We've also used this content in monthly newsletters to our customers although we haven't really offered up-selling or discounts via this channel.

- We do interviews with existing Pro customers[1] and post these on our blog.

- From 2008 until late 2012 we ran Facebook and Adwords campaigns. A considerable amount of our customers has come from this channel.

[0] http://ghostblogwriters.com/

[1] http://www.photoswarm.com/blog/category/interviews/

Just to say, we're around to answer questions / take general abuse for starting a photo based internet company.

You could link the businesses somehow if it isn't too costly to maintain.

is the service growing organically? How much are you paying in storage costs?

It's not growing organically. Storage & server costs are roughly $150 - $200 per month.

We also have domain costs (we register domain names for our customers so they don't have to deal with the technical side of that) which probably run at around $150 / month.

Could you charge for these domains and the services you're providing? Or maybe drop doing customer domains with your time and simply support CNAME support?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com