3 weeks into full time startup, need your thoughts on our project | Hacker News Reader

3 weeks into full time startup, need your thoughts on our project

18 pointscoryl52 comments

Hello HN,

My partner and I are about 3 weeks full time into our startup. We're both 22, fresh out of college and have always had web projects over the past few years. This time its more serious, we want to make a living out of our startup.

Its been a few weeks (including weekends) and we're ready to start getting people to critique, test, and feedback our project.

The site is http://www.howl.com. Its a link blogging service for people who like to share links but are too lazy to start blogging. You just paste the URL and we'll do the rest. We'd appreciate if you could give it a test run, try posting a few URLs, tell us what you think about the user experience and process, and idea as a whole. We can take the criticism :)

I know theres lots of smart ideas and opinions out there, we'd love to hear it. Thank you so much for your time.

PS. If you don't want to register, you can use (demo // asdfasdf) to login.

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I'm the other developer working on this project. Perhaps I can help explain our vision a little bit better.

Our main goal with this project is link sharing and discovery. The platform right now is very early, and we have intentionally left it open ended so that the product could evolve with the way it gets used.

People want to share links - funny YouTube videos, their new photo set on Flickr, etc. Currently, they do it on websites like Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, etc. However, this space is not their focus, and as such, we think we can do it better.

It is not their focus - but remember the users' focus is those sites.

How do you plan to make a living on this website? (And if the answer is "we'll generate revenue with x after we get traction", then how do you plan to make a living in the meantime?)

Why would I use this instead of just sharing links on Facebook or Twitter?

PS - Great domain name. Care to share how you got it?

Advertising, maybe a service like Viglink. We live at home with our parents right now :( We're applying to programs like YC, Techstars, etc.

As for the domain, we contacted the owner and bought it off him :D

You have a cool concept, and I "get it" a little more now that I've read your recent comments on this page. However, it still seems like a longshot. Perhaps you're okay with that.

It's either going to catch on and you'll have to monetize very quickly in order to keep up with your ballooning costs (or get funded and kick the problem a bit further down the road), or it'll fizzle out. I'm having trouble seeing any middle ground.

Have you figured out how much traffic you'll need to be viable on advertising income? Are you aware of how many hundreds of thousands (or millions) of visitors it'll take each month to make a reasonable living that way?

Interesting thoughts. What makes you think we'd have a lot of costs? We hotlink and embed most of the content from other sites, so really, even our bandwidth costs are low.

I'm not sure its really a longshot at all. Its obvious people love sharing stuff, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter are simply evidence of the market for posting cool links.

First, I hope you're receiving these comments in the spirit I intend them. They're meant to be constructive, and I'll be rooting for your success.

You'll have eventually have significant costs because to be viable you need generate 20M+ pageviews/month to make a good living with the sort of CPM rates I expect a site like this to get. With realtime updates and active chat threads, you'll need a bit of server horsepower to keep things moving.

I think it's a longshot because you're entering a market that relies on massive network effects to create a few dominant players, and becoming a dominant player is tough. Plus, there are already "close enough" sites that people are happy using. Due to network effects, you're going to have a tough time pulling people over to your service when their friends are on Facebook/Twitter/Reddit/etc.

To summarize, you're entering a competitive space and your revenue plan sounds shaky. On the other hand, no one ever accused me of being a visionary.

I'm receiving your comments well, I appreciate it :) I'm not defensive or anything, I enjoy reading peoples thoughts.

I tend not to worry about huge costs so early into the project. We can find a way to monetize if we ever get that big. I think your thoughts about the network effect are interesting but pessimistic. We can actually use Facebook, Twitter APIs to our advantage, we don't need to "pull" users from the necessarily, I think that our specific product offering is complimentary rather than competitive.

Who knows if we'll be successful in the end, I just like to take things one day at a time :) Thanks for your thoughts, they're very strategic, but at a level I'm not really prepared to start thinking about yet. Right now the focus is on practicality and applicability.

So, what again is the reason to use your site? The following is my OPINION only (the following may read a bit harsh, but it's late and this is the last thing I'm doing today).

Tumblr provides exactly the same capability and customization takes anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes to pick a new design.

You run exactly the same risk of not getting comments as you would anywhere else. There is nothing to incentivize commenting on link posts. If there were, you'd have Reddit/Digg all over again.

There are many sites that do exactly the same as what you're doing, they just don't publicize themselves very well (or at all). You find out about them from friends and can drop into an already existing community.

I realize you're probably in the early stages of development, but you really need to consider the look of the site early on. It doesn't have to be perfect right off the bat, but it does need to capture interest in some way.

If they're too lazy to blog, they're likely too lazy to post a link. You need to make it painless (a single button in the the bookmark bar that posts to the site would just about do it).

If you're building this to generate revenue, you need to consider the business model early on - it should shape how the entire site comes together. You have to have something to convince your investors to put money in it.

Hi, thanks for your post. I full understand it.

Tumblr is super powerful and very simple, we like them and they influence us. But tumblr's focus is different; they cover all kinds of blogging. Posting a link on Tumblr isn't as easy as posting a link on Howl, try it. We use services like Embedly to embed things right on the page. Theres less clicks in the process.

On Tumblr, every blog is really its OWN blog. We prefer the standardized look (Facebook vs Myspace) which lets the focus fall on the content.

As for incentivizing comments, one of the cool things about a feature we have planned (unified discussion) is that you kind of automatically link to the discussion page along with everyone else on the network. So anything you post might already have a discussion going.

Thanks for your opinion, much appreciated

So I just posted a link to Khan Academy (linked here earlier).

So tell me, how is your service different and more exciting than say Reddit or Digg or this site? I noticed I could not add a custom title and custom description.

I do like how it grabs the webpage info, however I have seen other link aggregators that do the same thing. Most of them would be called 'social bookmarking' sites. Reddit and Digg and HN are more like 'social bookmarking' + 'commentville'.

If I could add a suggestion.. do 'social bookmarking' + 'your secret sauce' that is magical and team up with some marketers who will spread your shit around the web like wildfire so you can get some traction and then throw up some ads on there if you want to pay for the bandwidth and hopefully a sports car.

Also: fuck that guy who said "get another job". Never back down on your entrepreneurship because you WILL make it happen. It might take 10 sites to make money, or 100. Just don't give up. The world needs more people like you, and more like him to pay us smart guys. :)

One last thing: kudos on the 4 character domain.

Noticed I could go back in and edit my post title after I submitted the link. Maybe make it optional up front?

This is actually something we've been juggling with for the past few days. We like how it is quick and easy (1 click) to post a link, but as you mentioned, requires more work if the user is not happy with it.

What are your guys' thoughts on this?

Hi Bones, you're right, we're the same as a lot of services, we looked at the way Digg, Reddit, Stumble Upon, Delicious, Facebook Links, Tumblr, etc., work and we decided to focus on an area none of them focus on.

I like sharing links, I post funny videos on my Facebook account all the time. I like the way its quick and easy. But sometimes I don't get comments because my friend circle is small. I don't mind if its public. I read reddit everyday, I love their sense of community. But I don't post on Reddit because I would never get upvoted enough to make it matter. Yet still, I have a desire to share content in a public way thats is quick and easy.

We call them "link blogs", kinda like Facebook Links + Twitter. We could then link posts by different people (to the same source) to a unified discussion page, like the way Reddit comment pages work. So I post an Obama article, you post the exact same article, but our followers get to discuss it in the same comment page.

Just a little taste of what we're thinking about. Thanks!

If I read this right it sounds intriguing. One of the problems with Reddit for example is tons of people compete for the exact same link with clever(read:usually horrifically melodramatic overstatements of truth) titles and only the one guy makes it to the front page.

So you are saying that exact same links will be somehow connected - like on the Obama article - everyone will see whoever also linked the same thing?

Yep, the technicals would have to be hammered out, but imagine the comments page that also shows, "People who also posted this", and lists the users. Also the ability to 1 click repost to your account to repost it on your blog.

Good idea.

I don't think this will bring in a liveable income, but it's work experience and a resume booster.

I would suggest that you get some sort of part time job to make sure that you have your loans covered at least since you just graduated college, assuming you are living with parents.

Otherwise, keep plugging away and keep creating shit you are young and have nothing to lose.

Hi, thanks for the reply. What you see now is obviously early and I noticed you didn't actually try the service, so I would say try it!

The upside is the space we can evolve into: link and content discovery (like a feed of posts), unifying comment pages so that discussions can be merged around URL strings, etc.

Great name ... but I can't see why I would use howl.com if I already use facebook, twitter or tumblr.

First, you need to work on what makes you distinct. Focus on the differentiation. If sharing links is going to be your core competitive difference, make is easy to use, make it mobile friendly. What would be interesting if is you could link duplicated urls that multiple users post into a single unique entry and tie all the comments together, or automatically dive down to the original source if the submitted link is on reddit or digg.

Secondly, build your monetization engine into place early. I don't see how you'd make money, but I trust you have a plan. Build that into the mechanism before you get sidetracked by features.

I'm a failed entrepreneur from the first .com bubble and I just got my MBA ... I wish I knew then what I know now ...

Good luck! I hope all the best for you guys!

The domain and beautiful UI are the most valuable parts of this. If I were you, I would find another problem to solve, as your current MVP/iteration gives me no return on investment of time or money.

As a business owner, I want to increase reach, increase click throughs, and increase conversions. Or, I want to get to know my customers better, and which elements of our marketing messages work the best.

I could not accomplish any of those goals with this tool, and I won't be back again unless you change the Howl concept. Love the UI and the domain, so try something different that solves a real pain point and gives me an obvious ROI.

Google Docs and Dropbox are two great places to save collections of links.

Good luck!

Hi Daniel, thanks for your reply. I'm not sure Howl targets business people/entrepreneurs in any such way. Its more of a "for fun" thing, for posting and sharing interesting links. Sure you could use google docs and dropbox, but those aren't for sharing links publicly in a nice looking way. Thanks

I signed up and posted a couple of links but I'm not really convinced why I should use your site. I think I understand the problem you are trying to solve because I use Tumblr and Twitter to do (what I understand to be) the same thing.

Here's my use case in case you're interested. I wanted a place to post links to articles related to startup info that I found interesting. It would be something I could look back on to find old articles, and a way to share links with friends who may have a similar interest. It took me less than 5 minutes to set up the Tumblr blog. And everytime I want to post a link, I open a new browser tab to Tumblr, click on the "post link" (once in a while i post a video) button, paste in the link, type in a title and hit publish. I think it's easy and I'm happy with the process.

In addition I also use Twitter in a similar manner. I only follow around 30 people. And the reason I follow them is that they post interesting links that I want look at. So my only use for Twitter is to share links.

So all that being said, I have two systems that I use solely for sharing links. I don't know if I would want to sign up for a third network that doesn't (seem to) offer much differentiation, which would also require me to build a new social graph.

I guess if you can offer some more differentiation, I might reconsider, because I do like sharing links. If you already offer differentiation, I didn't get that impression from your main web page and you should try to emphasize it more.

Hi Scott, thanks a lot for the reply, great points. I think our link spider is a lot better than Tumblrs, and will show better, more accurate posts through a vary of URLs.

As for differentiation, we think comments will be a big difference on our site as compared to Tumblr. We plan on using two types of comments, Direct and Global. Direct are comments on your post from friends. Global is an aggregate discussion page across the network for the same URL (if a bunch of people post the same URL, they can discuss in the global page). Any other suggestions? Thanks for your thoughts

A WordPress widget that showed a user's recent links could be a nice addition to how people can use this.

Sometimes people are not really too lazy to blog, but just don't want to write a post about every link they would like to share with others.

Nice domain.

Critique:

1. By default share publicly, rather than privately, and build a community.

2. Start small and focussed by segmenting your market clearly. e.g. Howl is like Delicious but for Extreme Sports Fans.

3. The home page gives me very little to action on. It is said that there are 100 viewers for every 1 content creator. Without some focussed examples of what kind of community it is, it is difficult to tell whether the site will be relevant to me or not. For example, HackerNews is a link blog, but imagine your reaction if the front page is a bunch of unimaginative links.

Couple things:

1. I logged in with Facebook.It now shows my location as Toronto. I am in California.

2. Couple display issues. In Firefox (I haven't tested other browsers) a long link (i.e. to an article on Yahoo News) runs over the side and looks really bad.

3. Others have said it but why would I need this over something like Digg? I don't like Digg (mainly because I remember when it first launched and I don't like what it has become) so I don't see why I would use this. This is more like sharing links on Facebook so why wouldn't I do that?

Hi paradox95.

1) Yep, still a really early version of our product and we havn't implemented the location yet.

2) Thanks, will look into that now.

3) Our service is more personal than Digg. Digg is all about getting voted up by the community to be seen. Ours is more of a personal sharing thing, where you'd follow people that interest you, and post things that interest you to build your own followers (twitter). You'd get new posts from your stream. We are highly influenced by facebook links, but FB links is limited because its only reaches your friend circle, and can disasppear in the feed stream. And link sharing isn't FB's main focus, but it will be ours.

Sorry to say you have a lot of bugs going on. My location was automatically set to Toronto (I'm in Australia) and when I go to edit the first link I added it tells me I have 371 links posted.

It's also not clear how I go about deleting links.

EDIT: Maybe I'm missing something, but your scraping of media needs a bit of work. I suggest starting with http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Facebook_Share...

Haha, actually, these are still features we are working on as we speak! Not sure if this was mentioned yet, but the product is far from ready. But seeing as how HN is about startups/development, we thought we would get some really early comments and suggestions :)

Thanks for the link, will take a look.

This service does look very similar to Delicious. Obviously Howl is displaying links per user, but the end result is the same.

You say that it isn't the focus of Facebook/Twitter and your right, but it doesn't need to be. Why not make your site plug into Facebook more? Allow people to like each post, or cross post all links onto Facebook. That way your integrating but still differentiating.

Good work on getting it all of the ground though, and good work on the domain name. Keep at it, something good will come from it.

Thanks, we plan on more integration so that a post on howl automatically goes onto your FB/Twitter. We're also stealing Tumblr's reblog feature, so people can repost good links onto their blog from other people.

Good work on all your responses also. You haven't just posted this and sat back, you are actively responding to everyone.

I think that makes a big difference, and being responsive and pro-active like that will manifest itself in other area's of your startup.

Interesting idea. Can people can use delicious to sort of do the same thing? I think at least for now, you should have it post-through to a person's twitter/delicious/facebook. I have followers on twitter that might be interested in my links, but if I post them on howl, no one will see it (because you just started and there aren't too many users). It's also better than twitter because it pulls images and text like Facebook does. Pownce also did this type of thing, so learn from their experience. Good luck!

Delicious is less social and has a different focus, so no, they don't do the same thing.

We thought about building the service directly around Twitter and Facebook like you suggested. We could integrate them so that whenever you post on Howl, it posts to your Twitter/FB through the API. You're right about how its better than twitter, after all, who wants a stinkin shortened bitly link and a description? Give em big images and embedded video! Thanks.

Couple ideas to add:

1) Being able to share links to a group of people. Often i'll share links with coworkers, and it'd be nice to have a record.

2) Custom lists. So I can make shareable lists of related links.

Yeah, definitely look more into unifying and integrating facebook and twitter.

Great ideas - added them to our ideas document. Building out these sort of specific features around link sharing is how we are going to differentiate ourselves from FB, Digg, etc.

I applaud the effort you've put into this, and encourage you to keep building awesome stuff. However, this is not going to let you quit your day jobs any time soon.

There's no clear reason not to use Delicious, Twitter, Facebook or Tumblr to accomplish the same stuff. I can't imagine paying to use this when I already have all of those other services.

The domain is very valuable, however. You could get a LOT of money for it.

Thanks. You won't have to pay for the service, it would be free.

As for accomplishing the same stuff, here's a bit of rationale we went through when planning it.

Delicious: not social, can't comment, doesn't embed videos/images into posts, hard to add followers.

Twitter: text only, usually shortened bit.ly link with description, no thumbnail, don't know what you're clicking.

Facebook: great for posting, but not public. only reaches your circle of friends. might not get any comments from friends.

Tumblr: awesome site, but do you really need a full out blog just to share links? takes time to customize.

Tiny suggestion -- maybe make the default avatar gender ambiguous? Or pull in Gravatars at least.

edit: Minor quibble -- Sign-up now! should be without the hyphen -- sign-up is a noun, sign up is a verb.

Also -- facebook connect seems counterproductive. Does it just post the link to your facebook feed or is it only for getting a user name? It just doesn't make sense to me to link those accounts.

When I post a link, it should add 'http:// at the from automatically.

Also, could you give an RSS export link for user? So maybe someone else can subscribe what I submitted.

Bug: When the first letter in the URL is uppercase, e.g. Http://news.ycombinator.com I get a Url not valid error.

How is this better than delicious?

Delicious is less social and more work to post (you have to insert your own titles, descriptions, tags). They also do not embed content like videos and images directly into the site. You also can't comment on bookmarks, or discuss them.

Its just not social, but thats ok because thats not their focus.

The one-click / ease of share is an important and interesting focal point. A bookmarklet - ~"submit to howl from any page with a single click" - seems a logical step for you there.

the ability for me to provide context for my shared links - through profile info, general insterest statements, etc - might make sense later.

good luck with it

Clickable: http://www.howl.com

Don't completely get it. Website should explain why I need this.

Good point. Would it suffice to say it helps you store and save links for later, and helps you share cool links with friends quickly?

Needs to tell me why I should use this over Facebook and Twitter.

Interesting. I would scrap the "save links for later" part of the pitch. That's not very interesting to me as a user. Yes, your product is a subset of Facebook, but you should start thinking about how to differentiate it. One good company you should look at is Plancast. They do events (which Facebook does), but it's a different use case than Facebook events. Feel free to ping if you want to bounce ideas, good luck!

I would have a big link-sharing box on the top along with a tagline, then use the bottom to show recently shared items.

This way a small percentage of users may find a few articles they like.

I don't get it

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