Show HN: I was curious to see what's happening around me, and I created an app
theyhq.com
theyhq.com
I don't think Color failed because of the idea. Their marketing was flawed, and they were trying to create a social network. So are you. I think they eventually tacked their service on top of Facebook, which might be a good idea. I haven't really thought it through.
What's going to be your hook for getting users? I'm assuming the app isn't very useful unless other people are on it, right? Or do you have content from somewhere?
Some peoples told me about Color, but we are a bit different. We don't want to include social stuff like messaging between authors and comments. Keep the app simple, and see what users wants.
We have a new feature is coming. Imagine you are an event hoster, you create an event on ICU and you get an ICU link, people take picture with the app on your event, and in live you will see all the pictures on the link. The cool thing is that peoples would like to retrieve their photos, so they need to have ICU installed.
You're right if nobody is around you, the app isn't very useful. We have couple of cities like Montreal, NYC and Paris.
I spent a year working on a startup doing exactly that. We failed.
The problem we ran into is that it's cool, but Twitter (and others) already accomplish the same thing with hashtags. People just don't like to add new channels to their everyday lives.
Beyond that, it was impossible (for us) to monetize, even though we had connections to creative agencies and large companies that were marketing events. The problem is that we weren't reducing pain points or adding operational efficiency, and thus paying us was never urgent. Meetings would get pushed off by weeks at a time, and it was hard to get anyone to make concrete moves forward.
To give you an idea of what we were experiencing, imagine that you're selling your car. Which is a higher priority, getting a scratch fixed or having it waxed?
It's very possible that you'll make your money back from the waxing when you're able to sell it for more money, but that's only a possibility. You're going to first spend your money on the repairs and then on the appearance. For the business world, increasing operational efficiency is like the repair, while marketing/social media is like the appearance.
People in the business world just don't like to pay out for something that MIGHT have ROI. That's why creative budgets are some of the first to get crunched in a recession.
We then moved to being purely social-network driven. There are a bunch of people in this space. Users submit photos on social media using unique hashtags or whatever, and there's a nice organic sharing effect.
That product (which, again, is available cheaply from various companies now) is great. Every event organizer should use it, since most events, including weddings, will try to have a unique hashtag these days. Why not harness all that content that people are posting?
Our service also supported republishing via a JavaScript and/or REST API, so the content could be used elsewhere.
All in all, it was a useful, simple product. The problem was that ideas (or even finished products) don't mean anything if you can't get some early, paying clients. We had a co-founder who had lots of connections to social-media executives, but he just couldn't sell.
The software (native and web versions) now exist only as private repos on Github.
Keep it like that and start iterate on it as people post feedbacks
Almost right cause your pictures not following you, but they stay where them were taken. So you will see only pictures of clubbing in zone of clubbing.
I saw the same as you, but we are a bit different and we ask people to describe what they see with this sentence : "What do you see ?" It seems to create great new content.