Ask HN: My Startup didn't go viral- what now? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: My Startup didn't go viral- what now?

30 pointsjiganti55 comments

So I launched my startup (moodstir.com) after working on it since November or so and have made a few attempts over the past couple of weeks to try and get a following. It's actually one of the main reasons I decided to take a leave of absence from the University of San Francisco.

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.

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I'm assuming you've been working on this project full time or near full time since November, which is approx 10 weeks. Honest question: is this all you can deliver with 10 weeks of full time work?

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?

Actually I wanted to say the same, but then I hesitated and thought that it may be a little harsh on him.

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.

The best thing you could of done but didn't do would have been to validate the idea before even building it. And by validating, I meant finding a core group of users who absolutely had a need or want for what you were looking to build, not friends or people who thought the idea was cool. This core group would then go on to be your beta (or alpha) users.

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

It was mostly "friends or people who thought the idea was cool". The handful people who were most adamant about the idea were somewhat savvy Twitter users, so I envisioned others having the same passion for the idea.

As it turns out, users lie. They will often say whatever they think will please you, especially if they are your friends. They also have a hard time imagining how they will use products that don't exist, and a hard straightening out the reasons for their feelings. They will say "Yes, I totally want a site that will help me find cool things to do my city!" when what they really mean is "Yes, I wish I had more free time to go out with my friends!"

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 :))

As it turns out, users lie

This can be overcome by explaining to them up front, that you are about to invest your soul in the effort and that they will be doing you a disservice if they are not honest and that failure later will be harder on you. When they realize that they are actually saving you a larger amount of future grief then they tend to be more honest.

Like others have said, there is no apparent need for it when I can just Tweet/Facebook "Yaay! I am happy because....."

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.

Thanks for the response! Submit is a pretty emotionless word- true. Twitter login is a good idea; icons to depict moods is something we have talked about but aren't sure if users will know exactly what emotion is related to a certain face. I remember threewords.me and loved the idea- I appreciate the links.

As for the icons, you can put a word to the face. That is the designers problem. :). I doubt any real designer will have a problem of making smileys 'recognizable'.

My 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.

Thanks for the advice- we should probably have this on the home page. The idea is that there's something specific that caused that emotion. When a number of people start posting an emotion about a certain thing, "Tim Tebow" for example, others could search that term and find the collective emotional consensus everyone has towards him.

And why would I want to know what "the collective emotional consensus" is? What's the pain? How will it get me laid?

I'm envisioning it to be used for this purpose as a sort of review site. Having the "collective emotional consensus" of a restaurant down the street might give you a better idea of whether it's worth trying out than seeing 3.5/5 stars on Yelp will. Showing legislators a "collective emotional consensus" of peoples' moods towards the "SOPA" keyword would be interesting as well.

Why not just try to mine this data from Twitter?

I was about the say the same thing.

Your data set is too small for people to yet understand why they should be using it.

Determining the mood from tweets and linking that mood to the keywords in the tweet - that would be interesting and patterns would start to emerge immediately.

This is just personal opinion but I wouldn't care to see emotional consensus. That does nothing for me. Rather, I would like to see more in-depth reviews and ways to flag reviews.

Taking your example of Yelp. I want to be able to filter out (personalize) my overall reviews by being able to flag reviews I think are ridiculous (such as 1 star ratings base on other loud customers that may not have anything to do with the restaurant or food they are reviewing). I would also like to dive in deeper on reviews such as reviewing specific dishes, viewing full menus online, etc...

Emotions don't tell me how a particular dish tastes. It doesn't tell me why someone reacted the way they rated the restaurant (or whatever). Personally, the collective emotions idea doesn't solve anything for me.

To me, it could be useful for nightlife but for a restaurant it only applies to a certain segment of the market. If I am going to a 5 star dining establishment, on a date, I really don't care about the emotion, because I am not interesting in socializing. Now for nightlife, I would want to be around happy people, but I don't know if that can accurately be discerned. Most people are going to say I am happy at the bar, so all bars are going to be happy.

It seems like you keep looking at this idea from the perspective of what you can do with all the data you can potentially gather, but you need to solve what's going to motivate people to give you a single piece of data.

As much as this may come off as jest, if you app can answer one of these two questions, you are on to something. Your app has to fill a need, if it does not fill one then the need defaults to fun or interesting, which are the hardest and weakest ones to address respectively. If you are targeting fun, then you have to ask how am I going to make it addictive? If you are targeting interesting you have to answer how am I going to keep it from just being a novelty?

It's an interesting point you make about signing in with Facebook. I actually prefer it if a site allows me to login with credentials I already have, it takes away the barrier of signing up. Now I usually would prefer if something uses Twitter, but Facebook is ok.

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.

I don't think your first point is valid. When Twitter was created, many people didn't understand what purpose it served compared to, say, a blog post or Facebook status update.

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?"

Either this is a bad idea, or it's a bad execution of a good idea. I don't really believe in bad ideas to be honest.

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?

I'll give you one point that I noticed. W(hy)TF are the emotions in text format? No one likes to write "happy" when they can ::ninja:: something, also it's much easier to click in a sea of emoticons than to find an arbitrary emotion in a list.

The other feedback mentioned is almost invariably excellent. They're great things to try.

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.

"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."

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.

I appreciate the candid response. The age-old "ideas vs execution" argument is something that interests me, and I've always wanted to start projects that have a neat core concept, where they can potentially get off the ground quickly from word of mouth. However, it's inspiring to see sites like Reddit struggle for long periods before eventually having explosive growth.

I've read all the feedback, and agree with much of it. But I think I see something here that a lot of people don't see. At my school one of our simple routines is to go around the class a couple mornings each week, and have everyone say their name, a number from 1-10 representing how they're feeling that day, and maybe respond to some prompt. It's a silly, cheesy, touchy-feely routine on the surface, but when done right it does a lot of good. If someone is low, it's good for others to know that. We give that person some space, and make sure someone checks in with them, without suffocating them. If someone is having a good day, we use that person's energy to push projects forward and help other people out.

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.

If you want it to go more viral you can always go the usual route: integrate aggressively with facebook, twitter, and other social networks. Use "rewards" in terms of points or medals or achievements to encourage users to spend time on your site.

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.

Same thing here, I launched http://whodidiforget.com a few days ago, and after getting a little traffic from HN it fell flat.

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 ?

My feedback:

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.

Thanks for your feedback !

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.

If you tell me upfront, maybe near the signup button, that you need access to my facebook account in order to run "advanced Social Network Analysis" AND I'm sold on how your app is going to help me, I would have no problem signing up.

I've added an explanation on the how/why on the front page. Thanks !

It took me a while (more than a few seconds, in which case a regular user would be gone by then) to figure out that I'm supposed to click on the right balloon, which is identical to the left balloon. I think you should add more contrast to your call to action.

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?

How does it work? I'm logging in to do what?

I've blogged an explanation of what it does and how it works over here : http://friggeri.net/blog/who-did-i-forget

I've never made a startup, so I'm talking as a consumer, but here's my honest opinion.

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.

I think you should pivot.

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.

Right, if you want to continue with this idea, I would suggest building out a structured front end for twitter that formats posts and collects the data from twitter to make the reports. You could do this very easy with a hashtag. It would have saved you the trouble of building out a back end.

One of the key ingriedients to virality for sites, is Anonymity. If you can incorporate that element into the site ,your chances of going viral will increase drastically. If things stay the way they are than you going to have to do things the old fashion way ie beat the chicken egg problem ,gain users over a long period of time and let the network effect kick in.

I guess you need to provide some reasons for your users to use your site? And maybe you should try some more marketing strategies? Your UI looks fine, but rather simple - maybe too simple. Looks more like an experimental side project to me. It simply doesn't have the "official" look to it. That's just my humble opinion. I'm not an expert or any sort, I'm a user.

Just had an idea: what if you changed the "happy" "because" to "x made me happy by". Then people could thank each other that way, instant virality. Although they could still just do the same on Twitter or Facebook.

But I think there might be some way to redeem your site, by giving a crazy reason for doing mood checkins.

Don't want to be too harsh, but why would people use this over Twitter or FB status updates? I think the biggest weakness here is that the other users are people I have no connection to whatsoever. What was your reasoning that this would take off, and was there any niche you had in mind?

I just ran across this, wanted to say that it looks like an interesting project - not sure however what advice to give you. I can however say, that I m a student studying NLP and I like the way users self annotate their moods based on their statements. Good luck.

Like others have said, I don't understand what value this adds. Second, I don't have Facebook and won't give my twitter login to an random site..... at the same time, those 'social' networks seem to be what gives this product value.

7 years ago,who would have though that tell your friends ''Whats on your mind''So who know maybe dude is on to something.

Where is the schlep? I'd highly recommend this before developing anything further: http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html

You want viral? Ask yourself: Would this appeal to a 13-15 year old? In the web, these are your mavens for viral.

Clickable: http://moodstir.com

What's the value-add you're offering users?

The philosophy was that people use twitter to convey their rational conceptions of things (140 character explanation of their thoughts) while there was no medium for telling the world what you're feeling and why. Since people love posting their thoughts on twitter, we imagined there would be a market for those who want to let everyone know what's causing their emotions.

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.

>The philosophy was that people use twitter to convey their rational conceptions of things (140 character explanation of their thoughts) while there was no medium for telling the world what you're feeling and why.

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?

Say you had a great experience at a coffee shop- you post [satisfied] towards [Velo Rouge Cafe]. If enough people do this, anyone who wants a quick snapshot of what people have experienced in Velo Rouge might just search for them on Moodstir. If there are a lot of [satisfied] emotions posted, or a lot of [frustrated] ones, it imply certain things about the cafe. Different than a Yelp review site, in that it takes the aggregate feelings of all users, rather than a simple X/5 star system, which is a more limited glimpse into peoples' experiences.

I get it, and dig it.

Aggregating moods would be useful on a site such as Amazon, where, depending on the technical level of the product, reviews range from sharp and intelligent to blunt and kneejerk. Having access to sentiment analysis would help consumers to quickly see whether or not the product/service being 'mood reviewed' solves their problem or not.

Written reviews are full of conjecture and anecdotes, 5-star gradings may as well not exist for 2-4 stars, so mood is another great metric to add to these tools.

I still don't get it: moodstir has no context such as you describe. There's no reason I'd go there to post cafe reviews nor would I visit the site expecting to find such. Near as I can tell what you have here is a micro-blogging app whose functionality is entirely dominated by existing services.

I'm not trying to troll here: I genuinely think it's important for you to have convincing responses to this kind of critique.

Although the website looks good but you cannot call it a startup right now. It is just another website or app that lets me do something. You should understand the difference between a startup and a simple web app.

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 :-)

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