Comment by lpaone | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lpaone | Hacker News Reader

Hi Jared and Trevor,

http://www.stroomnews.com is a bootstrapped breaking news and events focused sharing platform, that allows live-streaming and pre-captured video and image sharing through our mobile app and website. We are also working on an enterprise solution for the news industry that ties into our platform. Our B2C app was released this past Fall, but has shown little traction and we have had discussions with a major news media company about our enterprise product. We believe that signing up users for our enterprise solution will also help grow our B2C platform.

We also have an idea in the area of video compression (both founders have experience in this industry) that we believe could be huge in the streaming video industry. Our initial tests have shown very promising results, but we have not had much time to work on this due to focusing on our platform and enterprise product. The success of this tech does not only provide a large advantage for our business, but opens us up to many other industries and opportunities.

As our ability to bootstrap dwindles (due to amount of savings), do we continue along our path and try to get revenue as soon as we can by working on our enterprise product or do we spend time trying to raise money so we can focus on our tech, which may not produce anything product worthy for a much longer time (or ever as it is still in the research stage)?

Thanks for your time!

What would the enterprise solution do? How long would it take to build the product to the part where it can generate revenue?

For the video compression technology, it's hard to say without knowing more. What does it do, and who would want it?

As cool as video compression tech is, trying to raise money for pure technology, without demonstrating market demand, is almost impossible. So if you go down the video compression route, you'll need to think hard about exactly what products people could build with it, and how you could show that people would buy them even before you can build them.

Getting to revenue and selling the enterprise product is the safer path.

Thanks for the advice.

The enterprise product provides a dashboard that allows a news room to manage past and present media content created through our platform. It allows live modification of stream quality (full bit stream quality control) and description, remote control of the camera, live communication with the reporter/camera person, and some other features we are working on that bring us closer to parity and beyond with other companies in this field. A huge benefit over our competitors is our significantly lower cost and no need to carry around expensive specialized hardware, as we do not require it.

We are probably 2-3 months away from having a revenue generating product. Although we are in conversations with one major news organization, we have found it very difficult getting in the door with other companies.

As for the compression tech, it provides an opportunity to delivery adaptive bit rate video in a single stream. It would significantly decrease bandwidth, storage and compression costs. Anyone who has large libraries of variable bitrate video and is streaming it (YouTube, Netflix, etc.) would be very interested in this.

The news room product sounds interesting, but I'm concerned that you've only got one potential customer. Maybe you could build out your network of news organizations, rather than "selling" a product directly. You could try to meet individual employees (even low level, or former ones) to learn more about how their individual news room works. You could even get a part-time job in one!

If you knew you had several customers lined up, you'd (1) have more confidence going down that route and (2) be more confident that you were designing the product right.

Thanks for the ideas and taking the time to give advice. It has sparked some ideas for getting in contact with more potential customers and getting more feedback on the product.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com