I understand that virality is not going to happen overnight, but I approached the project under the assumption that it's either going to be adopted and spread throughout some niche quickly, or never catch on.
So I'm asking for advice from some of the more experienced founders on HN- am I being impatient? Should I pivot the concept in some way? Perhaps allowing other login options aside from Facebook is the first step to reduce barrier to entry.
If you have any suggestions about either where I should go from here, or specifically regarding the concept, I would be happy to hear them.
Sorry for hijacking your post but my question is similar to yours: what to do when you're not on a first name basis with big blogs editor (and those blogs do not respond to email tips) and you don't yet have a large network ?
1. It's not obvious what you do that's special. There's probably some secret sauce in figuring out who I might have forgotten, but you don't tell me what it is.
2. It would be useful to have a walk through or screencast or something showing how it works. For example, does this thing just make lists, does it manage invites, send emails? No idea from the site.
3. I won't use sites that insist on a Facebook login.
Also, as jgrahamc said, work on your message. It's not clear how much work is involved, maybe a step-by-step explanation. How are you sending those invites? What's special about your app? Do I have to pay anything?
1. I didn't want to add too much complexity to the app by going into details of advanced Social Network Analysis, but I'll think about adding details.
2. Good idea, I'll work on a screencast/walkthrough
3. I understand that, but I have no other solution: having access to the user's facebook friends is an absolute requirement for the app to run.
Nevertheless, thanks for your feedback.
1. It wasn't obvious to me why I would use this when I went to the site. This is just for telling people my mood? I can do that on Twitter. You need to make clear what the difference is. Perhaps even some sort of demo.
2. When I did try to enter a mood I was asked to sign in using Facebook. That's a dead-end for me; I won't give a random company access to my Facebook account.
So now I'm curious, do people in general prefer to make new accounts for new sites, or are they ok with using something they have.
However, when you're operating in untested waters like this, you need to create some sort of platform that allows people to play around with what you have. The moment I saw it, I thought, "oh, wouldn't it be cool if I could see a map that showed a coloration of people's moods in a geographical context?"
I assume you didn't do the above. Virality, press, etc... are often not reliable sources of traffic to build a sustainable group of users in the early stages. At this point, you should go back and find that core group to improve the MVP with and worry about growth once you've worked out all the initial bugs and features users actually want.
Obviously take my advice with a grain of salt as I have no idea what your idea is and just how far you got and this is very general advice (on iPhone and didn't go to your link). You need to make sure people even wants your product
Ways to deal with this sad fact:
* Ask users "how much would you pay for this?" Follow up with "seriously, if I build it, you'll commit to paying that much?" Tends to bring them back to reality, but doesn't make sense for all products.
* Look for external evidence for user pain. If there is no tool on the market for doing X, but users manage to sorta-kinda cobble together four other products to sort of do X poorly, you can believe that they want X.
* Build quick little prototypes, as cheap as possible, and see what users actually do with them. (You've just done that -- good job :))
My suggestions:
1. Make it more fun and social by changing the call to action from "submit" to "Tell the world", "let your friends" know etc. I am sure you get the drift.
2. Use Icons to depict the mood. This smiley --> :) is a LOT more fun than the word ---> HAPPY. icons are infinitely much more fun. If you cannot design, go to dribble and contract one of these guys http://dribbble.com/search?q=smiley
3. Your site should have a mobile version and should be fucking FAST!
4. Have twitter login too
5.You can seek advice directly from Mark Bao http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=markbao he launched Threewords.me that went 'ridiculously viral' (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2051288) so he should have better feedback and suggestions.
Remember, you should be thinking of building a sustainable product that is useful not just something that should go viral.
Here is the very last thing you should do. In fact the thing you should never do: Pity yourself. You are a warrior for taking the leap. You now go and crush it! You can, and you will.
From the about page:
Moodstir is where you give the world a snapshot of your emotions. Tell the world you're [frustrated] because of [traffic], or search [Jersey Shore] to see the variety of moods the popular TV show causes people to share.
Why, exactly, can't we just use Twitter, or G+ or FB to post our mood? There's no value-add here; your service is just trying to further divide your target users' attention and splinter their social network.
Quite aside from the value-add problem is the value proposition itself: what on earth do I provide by sharing my mood with friends and what do I gain by moodstalking them?
Unless there's something hugely complex under the surface that I'm not seeing, here's my criticism:
- This is not a startup, and you're hurting yourself if you think of it as one. It's a simple MVP web project.
- You could have - and should have - pulled this off in a weekend.
- The 'why' input is too small.
- 'Trending now' looks like it's broken.
- Everything I click yields a search result. Why are there no profiles?
- What am I supposed to search for in the search box? It should give me tips.
- Why can't I click photos?
By the way all your points are valid.
Also, If you want to quick tasks outside your work. What you are looking for is consulting/freelancing not a start up. Start up will chew up both effort and time in large magnitudes with a river of failures heading your way. Simple Android/iPhone apps. Small utility website, are Ok if your want to make some money with Google Ads. But they are not start ups.
By the way these there is a huge tendency among people to call even 100 line scripts as projects and weekend apps as start ups. The sooner you face the reality and set you expectations right, the better.
This is a silly and immature approach, in my opinion. Such an approach is only suitable if you either have loads of time and money to throw at projects just for fun or you have a pet project that requires extremely minimal resources and effort to get off the ground.
The de facto approach to just about any web business should be to imagine it like a mom and pop store or restaurant. You'll spend a lot of hard work on it, it'll take years to get into the swing of things properly, and if you're really lucky you'll just barely do a bit better than keeping yourself employed at a reasonable level of pay.
What your site allows users to do is one of the many things people can already do on Twitter and Facebook much simpler, without the use of dropdowns, just by typing whatever they feel like into the share box. You're adding very little value (if any), but want to create a separate walled garden against one thousand pound gorillas mentioned above. In fact you're subtracting value because users aren't on Twitter or Facebook where their friends actually see their shares.
There's no real experience here, as well as no real novelty. I have my own ideas of how this might be made to be useful, but I think you should give a real hard think as to the following questions
- what is, step by step, the user experience like?
- how are they getting to your page in the first place
- what is their response when they see your page
- what is their response when they use the page (what do they click, read etc)
- what brings them back the second time, time after that?
- why would they refer others to your page?
- what problem are you solving for them and how can they not get this anywhere else?
In short, expecting a waterfall of activity after three months is very impatient.
If you're an actor trying to make it in Hollywood, it's ridiculous to expect to be an A-lister after three months.
Similarly, if you're a band that was in a garage in November, it'd silly to expect to be headlining Madison Square Garden in three months. It even took Rebecca Black longer.
These things can take an absurd amount of time. You could be around for five years before "going viral," but will feel absolutely fresh to those seeing it for the first time.
If this whole "patience" thing is a hard pill to swallow, take an honest look at what you're doing and how your expectations align with the harsh realities of being an entrepreneur.
Good actors love the craft and would be perfectly content to perform in their local theatre for peanuts for the rest of their lives. While capitalism means the same can't be said for an entrepreneur, the principle is the same.
Sure, people could do this using facebook or twitter. But they'd have to use those general tools for this specific purpose. There could be some strength in simplicity here.
That said, this will not be an overnight success. If you want to make this into something meaningful, you've got a bunch of iterating to do. You've got a lot to learn about what the specific strengths of this concept is, and cut anything that doesn't build on those strengths. You've got to make it work with fb and twitter, because it probably won't stand on its own.
Good luck, it's an interesting concept.
Also think really carefully about what your target audience is, what value you want to give to people, and how you plan to (eventually?) make money. I agree that a startup product like yours has to grow big fast. So the important thing is the viral part, the rest is pretty much irrelevant (once you have a bazillion users it's easy to build something they want).
Where should you go from here? Figure out a clever way to make something viral, then go do that.
Feedback regarding the product? I don't see how it can ever generate passionate users. I can't imagine anybody saying "Moodstir is the GREATEST PRODUCT EVER, because...". Twitter was the first social network to do one-to-many broadcasting right. Facebook gets people laid. Linkedin is a social network for business purposes. People really love those products, and it's very clear in what way they bring value to the user. This too is something that you should probably think about.
I don't want to use your service, I have no need for it. I have four other services I can use to vent, and I only use 2 of them.
Are you addressing a need that isn't provided elsewhere? What research did you do?
If I was you, I think I'd be researching until I identified something people actually need or want, and I'd re-use some of the code from this project for connectivity.
Also, I'd allow people to use more than just Facebook. Maybe I'd rather have a unique account on your service that's associated with my email, but not discoverable by absolutely everybody.
But I think there might be some way to redeem your site, by giving a crazy reason for doing mood checkins.
Just building a web app will not make your idea into a business / company. You need to chalk out marketing strategies, revenue streams etc. Most importantly you need to get users to use your site without much force!
My 2 cents :-)