Ask HN: How can we pivot our startup?

Some quick thoughts:

1. I went to the demo page and even though I read the instructions, it still took me longer than it should have to notice the FB stuff. Without instructions and specifically looking for it, I would have never noticed it was there. I guess placement can vary by store design, but the demo would leave me with that worry.

2. From the merchants perspective, I could see the benefits of having users talk about my products on Facebook, but I don't know if distracting a shopper when they are closer to making a decision is worth the trade off. In other words, is the expected value of the links worth the diminished likelihood of purchase? I can't see this increasing the possibility of a sale to the current user. I could be completely wrong and in that case, any data/statistics you could provide merchants would go a long way to convincing them to use Zuupy.

3. To combine 1 & 2 and suggest a potential pivot: As a guy, I am highly unlikely to ever talk about or seek out advice for a general run of the mill purchase. I may seek out the help of, for example, a photographer friend if I'm going to buy a camera, but that may be the extent of it. Maybe I'm just more introverted than others, but going by my FB feed, I've haven't seen it happen much. Judging by the background graphic on you widget, you seem to agree that the target users are women. From my highly unscientific observations of my wife and her friends, they like to show off purchases they are proud of (say they discovered some new fashion and got it at a huge sale). So, what if instead of allowing users to chat with friends before making a purchase and possibly deterring it from occurring, users are presented with a big widget right after the purchase to share and discuss with their friends. You still get the free links plus a stronger social endorsement (this person has just made a purchase) and you don't ruin the conversion funnel. If I was a merchant, I could definitely see myself signing up for something like that (bonus points if it just plugged in to existing shopping carts).

1. That was actually the result of one of the changes we made. Quite a number of retailers have expressed concerns about how the widget was too "obvious." As per the placement in the demo, we are trying to mimic exactly how it would be shown in their own stores.

2. Our hypothesis has always been that we optimize the sales funnel by giving buying confidence, reassurance, social proof, etc. But having tested it out with several retailers, we don't think that's very much the case. We thought that getting numbers to prove an inaccurate hypothesis would be difficult, thus we are looking for pivot ideas.

3. I think that's a great idea, and I have seen many of my female friends parading their purchases to garner comments. We are afraid, however, that something like that might be too replicable. We aren't sure if retailers would be willing to pay $30/mth (our current price point) vs. pay a one-off however-many-hundred dollars to hire a consultant to build it.

That's a good point on #3. Just to toss out an idea- what if the service offered tracking of the referral and could provide some sort of analytics to help retailers optimize their social campaigns.

For example- I complete a purchase on Retailer A and I am presented with your widget and: maybe I get a rebate on my purchase, or a coupon for next time if I share on Facebook, or maybe the rebate goes into effect if a referral completes a transaction. You could use something like bit.ly to track the links. Ultimately, one of my friends sees this on his feed and goes to Retailer A and makes a purchase.

The retailer would be: 1. incentivizing the user to share and 2. be able to see some sort of stats analyzing which campaign is preforming better.

I think I would definitely be tempted to pay for something like that.

Disclosure: I am a director of one of Japan's largest luxury ecommerce sites, so I feel fairly qualified to give feedback about this :)

Firstly, ecommerce + social is a really attractive combination for us. In that respect, don't give up on the problem you're trying to solve - I think there is tons of value there.

Secondly, I will echo the comments of the poster "secret" - from the merchant's point of view the risk of distraction is not one that I take lightly. I'm very unlikely to pull the trigger on implementing something like this without a lot of data to back it up. You need to work on building case studies that I can see, with statistics that show an increase in some kind of metric I can get behind - facebook activity, sales, etc. Work with some ecommerce partners or even start selling stuff yourself as an experiment, then you'll really start to understand the pain-points that you can concretely help with.

Thirdly...

I don't think the current implementation adds enough obvious value. A stream of Facebook comments is very difficult to derive ROI from. If I were to pivot, and had to keep the overall theme of ecommerce + social + facebook, I would build a set of plugins with specific use-cases that work with my store and facebook. For example:

1) a plugin that allows a user to create a "shopping list" on facebook from the products in my store. Make it fun, like a game - perhaps I set myself a budget on facebook and then my friends can vote up or down on the things in my wishlist that they think I should get.

2) a plugin that facilitates a "buy me this" feature. A user picks a product on my store and can send it to their boyfriend / girlfriend / mum / dad on facebook (maybe with a nicely formatted letter-style message) asking them to buy it for me. Maybe the purchase is incentivised somehow, with a discount if you get someone to buy it for you.

Make a set of these types of plugins, then I think you have a business. Give the most viral one away for free, and charge shop owners a monthly fee to use the whole set.

Boom.

Hi, thanks for the elaborate reply.

We clearly have had feedback from retailers that they are concerned that our widget may be too "obtrusive" or "distracting" when they were test-driving it. We are keen on building up case studies, but I think some small pivoting in the product focus is needed or the marketing/sales process is going to be tough.

About your suggestions for pivot, I honestly like both ideas, this is what I set this thread up for. We have trouble focusing on creating experiences that shoppers would enjoy because, frankly, we are not online shoppers ourselves. Perhaps we will come up with one or two plug-ins, as suggested, and we will do some customer development from there.

Thank you for your comment.

Have you talked to your users about this? Try it. Also, prospects other than your users.

I 2nd talking to your users about it.

sorry to plug my app, but I just added the free plan back to my survey app - use it for free to gather some feedback :)

http://goodgecko.com

Hi. Certainly we have talked to our users, but feedback has been sparse, and they don't seem too interested in getting engaged in the process. We have been sending personalized emails but very few users came back with feature-centric feedback, but only technical issues (e.g. "we're not sure how to integrate", "doesn't work via HTTPS protocol", "where do I click", etc.).

What is the normal level of feedback from users? We have set up GetSatisfaction forum, but activity has also been sparse.

One thing that complicates your situation is that your customers are not the users; your customers are the e-commerce sites you sell to-- the end-users are their customers.

This makes "Have you talked to your users?" a bit more complicated.

My pivot suggestion: "e-commerce mixed with social" is a great niche, but I don't think your MVP has nailed it, yet. I'd move away from the emphasis on real-time, and think, rather, about "How can I leverage social networks to support the sales process?" Note that one of the tough nuts to crack is the chicken-egg problem; the more content that's produced by end-users, the more valuable the service is-- but you need to prime the pump somehow.

As I mentioned (via email), I'd love to talk to you in more detail about possible ways to do this in my particular sub-niche (online bookstores), but I imagine that a lot of the stuff can generalize.

Hi Michael,

We are also starting to think that the "real-time" factor may not really appeal to both the retailer and the end-user. We are therefore still hunting for a specific use case or experience that we can focus our product on. We have been seriously considering game mechanics, for example.

I'm keen to learn about your sub-niche suggestions via email.