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Comment by HarrietJones | Hacker News Reader

This is going to be rough sherm8n. Hold on to your hat. I'm sorry if this upsets you.

To be honest, I'm suprised you've received any funding. You're a company that increases Twitter and Instagram followers. This is a deeply dodgy, largely unproven and mostly saturated market and you're charging prices that'll leave you out of pocket. No way are you worth $600,000. There's no way you can get enough customers.

You can spin this as a story about how you should never leave the comfortable bubble of San Francisco, but to my mind it's yet another story of how insane things are over there.

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Unless the followers are actually relevant, interested and verified-as-human-beings accounts. If that's the case then $600k is a fraction of what the company could be worth.

There's a lot of 'ponzi scheme' follower increasing apps and systems ($5 for 5,000 followers, 'team followback', etc), where people sign up to get more followers by automatically following other people who join the scheme, but the number of good applications that can find people who would genuinely be interested in hearing your message is, essentially, zero. There is an opportunity in the space but the problem is a hell of lot harder to solve in a worthwhile way than just increasing the vanity metric of "# of followers".

You clearly get it.

I think it's a more familiar pattern than people want to admit.

We (OP3Nvoice at the time, now Clarify) went through Techstars London 2013. As much as the team loved London and the program, they just couldn't raise there. Fast forward a couple months and they've moved to Austin, TX. (I joined then.)

Moving to Austin created some challenges but within a couple months of restructuring the UK company to a US, the dollars started flowing and within 2 months, we ended up raising about $1.4M.

All of that said, we have some great advisors and a couple small investors from London and they've been insightful and asked some hard questions. But despite both groups speaking English, the cultures and risk tolerances are wildly different.

And yes, Kyle is a great guy. :)

The screenshot in their homepages shows the sales funnel (followed -> visited web site -> purchased). So yes, you are right, seems like they are solving an actual problem. I see how it might useful for e.g. less technical people who find Google Analytics scary.

I appreciate the feedback here. I agree that there are tons of services that will help you increase with dodgy followers. However, that's a different market.

Could you elaborate on that?

What is your market then?

What is your greater goal/long term vision?

Why would I want to hire your company for social-media management?

In my opinion, a successful social-media presence involves direct engagement with customers but most importantly business-specific knowledge.

For example, the Deutsche Bahn has a great social-media presence as they emulate a free and quick telephone service via Twitter. At any time, I can ask them what train I should take, which one is delayed, how I get from A to B, which tickets fit me best, etc. In your eyes, how is this possible using your platform?

This is something on our radar. How do we provide a managed customer service solution? I would run customer service for Deutsche Bahn myself. I'd want to see how well I can match their brand/voice and then write code where possible.

But that is pretty much what any social media agency does or am I missing there something?

Unfortunately, this did not answer most of my questions. Can you give us more information?

I don't know if it is a reflection of San Fransico being insane but it does make me question the Techstars program. They funded a company that sells followers.

We sell a social media product with a market opportunity in the billions. Number of followers is just one metric. These are people that choose to follow you out of their own free will.

I wish that HN would actually enforce the new guidelines against people "honestly" insulting each other's companies and projects.

HN mods: were those just empty promises? Were there actually any changes in enforcement all?

At least could you prevent the most negative comment from always ranking at the top of every HN thread?

It wasn't meant to be an insult, and apologies if it came over that way. If mods want to delete the comment, or want to talk to me about it - I'm happy to do that. I seriously wasn't trying to be negative for the sake of being negative and my "honest" disclaimer at the top was to try and mitigate any hurt I was causing the article's poster.

Can we please, please not make HN into a millennial-style* participation-trophy-giving, we're-all-winners zone of empty positive spin, with neither negative feedback nor brutal honesty?

It's starting to feel like we're trending that way with the new policy and the inevitable, sanctimonious "how could you be so negative!?" outrage comments, but I'd far prefer to see us not pull any punches wrt real talk. Not everything in the world is peaches and cream, and pretending so in print has never made any sense to me.

* I am a millennial, and we have a strange obsession with hearing only positive things

Being positive? You're putting words in my mouth. I'm talking about less whining and insulting toward other people's companies and projects. No need to be positive.

Honesty about predictions is bullshit. You can't be honest about predictions. Predictions are by definition about events that didn't happen yet (what will happen), or never can happen (what would have happened if something in the past had been different).

Real talk? Predictions are not about real things, they are about predicted things.

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