iamjonlee

I'm watching the link right now- very interesting, thank you.

I think we've truly taken bits and pieces that worked from our failed attempts to build a viable business. We've cut down from what we had before to focus on the core features that we believe will work.

From what we've seen from our signups so far, we're sure that there are enough people who are really to give us support, but they're far spread out and hard to reach. We've had quite a lot of signups, but almost no tweets which I don't understand. Our last revision had a lot more tweets.

PG is right in saying that one of the worst mistakes to make is to build something that we THINK is NEEDED, and not what market actually needs but it's a difficult situation to address. What if your product faces the chicken and egg problem? I'm not sure how accurate I am here, but I wouldn't have believed that the market would actually need twitter. I think twitter believed that people could benefit from their services and find it interesting to use and therefore build their business that way. Maybe I'm wrong, or twitter is a very rare example, but I get where you're coming from.

I think people generally need a way to define who they are. Take mySpace for example. I think they really understood the importance of showcasing a person's uniqueness or individuality. Your profile page on mySpace used to scream everything about you, from your background image to the number of friends you have, your moods, what music you're listening to, the About Me section, your blog- it was basically everything about you. Sure, it's true that mySpace is no longer doing as well as they have since then and they're changing their profile page layouts, but giving back the user focus is what led them to success in the first place.

From what I've gathered (omitting my own thoughts to avoid bias), your friends on Facebook don't know anything about you. Ask most of them what they know about you and they won't be able to tell you much. That's the point we're trying to illustrate. People spend so much time caring about how they look in real life and it's really all the idiosyncrasies that you talk about in life with your friends and the people you meet that make you interesting. So why is the web not picking up on this? With Persona, we want to bring back that very intimate connection you see in real life. We want to make a product that binds people together rather than just another social network about your friends.

We've launched a small Reddit campaign, and we've been getting a ton of signups from that, but the problem is we have no idea how they feel about the Kickstarter. People don't give feedback and Kickstarter doesn't offer analytics to track how many people have seen your page.

So far, we're getting a 10% conversion from people who visit our homepage and do signup.

I'll take your advice on the answers sites and the forums. I'm really looking for a way to promote sharing on twitter though - I feel that it would be the best way to generate more traffic.

Thanks for such constructive feedback.

Of all the dozens of social networks in existence, none of them truly define us. They're always about your friends or family rather than yourself. Persona solves this problem because it brings back the importance of the About Me Page section in social networks with images that represent your life.

You're absolutely right. I never actually stated what my reasons were. Sorry, we had been up too many hours by the time we wrote the earlier HN post so we left out our reasons entirely.

Like a lot of the other startups here on HN, we're boot-strapped. We have basically no funding besides our own personal savings and a dream that we'd like to persue. When you're in that situation, you're forced to really get down and dirty and try to do everything yourself. Nobody will miraculously jump out and offer you a hand, so you're forced to learn everything and try new ways of entering the market by yourself. From each time we've failed a startup, we always learned something new. We took that experience and used it to build what we have today, Persona. It's like riding a bike, you keep falling and injuring yourself but eventually you learn. That's how we feel about Persona. We're confident enough that this is the app that's different from all the other times we've tried.

So back to the topic, because we've gone so far doing everything hands on ourselves, we wanted to try and get funding ourselves without having to rely on YC. We get that YC is a fantastic program and they have exactly the right connections to put you in the spotlight, but if we join YC now without trying ourselves the very last step (getting money to continue), we'll regret that decision for the rest of our lives. Because we'll never know then if we would have been capable of making a dent in the startup community we live in. It'll answer the question "Are you able to successfully grow your userbase and product without relying on VCs or Angels?". Thanks for the heads up!

Thanks for the feedback! I get what you mean but I see it a bit differently. I've pledged on several Kickstarter projects that offered absolutely no incentive besides sending me a thank you email. I do it for the same reason that I donate to charities, for the sake of hopefully seeing an awesome ending/finished product some day. I understand this kind of thinking might seem naive, so I do want to expand on this a little bit further. We chose the rewards carefully because we simply don't have the resources to do much more. Kickstarter + Amazon payment gate way take 5-8% of your pledge money. That money is taxed as income. We're realistically looking at roughly 30% of the pledge money to be taken off from the top before we even consider the rewards. The unspoken rule that Kickstarters seem to follow is that they offer all previous pledge rewards with each reward tier.

This means that the sticker, 5 business cards (after paying for shipping of cards to my house) shipping of those items to you and including the hours it will take me to write the ebook,we're barely left with enough to pay for development costs. Having to need to create fancier, and more seemingly valuable rewards will definitely attract more users, but require more time from us because we'll need to do most of the work by ourselves. This ultimately cuts down from our development time and time is money. I would technically have more money to contribute to the app than the $60 pledge if I worked by the hour. The only problem then is that I wouldn't be working on the app, which in turns makes the whole project pointless.

I would really love if I could do more for the people who are helping out and supporting my cause, but I just have my hands tied. I sincerely appreciate your honest and open feedback because it really helps to let me understand what people's first impressions are and it'll help me try and figure out at least some kind of solution to this problem. Thank you!

I guess Persona is still a pretty enigmatic topic. We're trying to build an app that focuses on you rather than your friends. In other words, it's an about me page, in pictures.

Through pictures, you're able to learn hundreds of things about a friend that you might never think of asking. What's their favorite color, their allergies, what do they like to do on the weekends? Rather than a timeline, Persona encourages users to post photos of anything that makes them who they are.

Persona asks people "What does this photo mean to you?" because when you answer that, it's no longer just a photo sharing application. It's become an intimate bond that people can connect to. Do you like eating cold pizza? I do too. what other things do you eat cold? I think cold rice is disgusting though. It's at that moment that I can feel a more personal connection towards a stranger that I've never met by talking about the idiosyncrasies that make you who you are.

Persona is everything you are, in pictures.

Persona [http://www.grooovy.me/persona]

A bit of shameless plug, but I really do sincerely think we've outdone ourselves this time. It's fun even for us after playing it a hundred times. We've tried to really push the limit for interaction while keeping it relevant to our site by turning our homepage into a game.

Thanks zarroba!

Excellent feedback, I'll make it a little more clear what visitor is expected to do. On another note though, you not finding the hidden images for at least a minute meant the game worked ;).

We're starting with iphone, but unsure still as to what other platforms we'll expand to. You know, the usual budget problems, hiring more people, etc. To clarify, your problem with a three month old baby is already solved with Persona. Persona focuses on things that are about you that make up who you are and defines your life. Photographs are stored in "slices" of your life which can be named "Growingup" or "proudtobeafather". You can name that part of your life anything you'd like. Within those slices, you would store the photos of your baby so you can visualize he/she growing up day by day.

Welcome to Persona. It's everything you are, in pictures. (sorry, had to throw in our tagline, it just seemed like the perfect time to do it :-)).

yep, we used http://minimal.be/lab/jQuery.eraser/ and modified it a bit.

We do plan on posting a full guide on what we did with a homepage, but it'll come at a later point.

That's a very valid point. Our problem was solved, this is just another problem. I didn't just focus on a specific city, I chose SF Bay Area- this was because most people who tested this product were interested in meeting elsewhere (such as driving to a specific restaurant or location to meet people) or attend events within a reasonable driving distance.

While I understand that choosing SF may have a lot of competition, most of the advertisers I've talked to don't have good stats on any of the surrounding cities. I'll look into this and see if there's a better alternative.

Your API idea is pretty interesting, I didn't think about using other APIs because our focus was so different.

We didn't have prior experience with any programming or design experience prior to this app. While we are considering eventually learning Android, it won't be for a while because we'd have to start from scratch again and it would be better to find a way to the app to work for iphone for now.

Yep! lesson learned. We're already looking into geotargeting advertising but it still seems that it'll be beyond our budgets before we can reach that tipping point where everyone can utilize it fully. We'll continue to think of alternatives, thanks!

I didn't realize that color.com had a similar problem. The only thing I remember about them is that they spent 350k purchasing their domain name. We did have features that allowed people to share events but didn't actually offer any incentive to spread virally. It was something we should've done, but we couldn't think of what we could do- there isn't really a incentive we can offer to joining an event. We could give our free drinks- but there's a limit of how much freebies we can provide. The idea was that once they actually try out an event in real life, they would find value and find it worth it to share to their friends then. I admit though, this should be a much bigger priority on our list.

Thanks, we do realize now that no matter what, just like our first failed startup- it was a learning experience and will allow us to not make the same mistake in the future.

We took our Facebook page down- it was mostly spammed by robotos and advertisements. We saw much more success by having just the tweet button alone.

Thanks for the support! Well look into the YouTube videos and Adwords budget but it could be difficult to gain traction with many other similar advertisers our there(higher cpc and smaller budget to compete with), but I totally get what you're saying. I'll brainstorm some ideas, thanks!

Very good reading, thank you. We did launh an update to focus in only SF bay areas for now but will still need work to securing users.

Thank you! It really makes us feel better to know someone else is out there with a similar background.

Fantastic advice from you and Instakill, thank you. I had never even considered starting in another country besides the US. It definitely sounds like a starting place to seriously consider. I agree that the copy on the site needs to be redone- I actually had a copywriter do that, and even though it didntl completely feel right with us, we went along with it- after all, the copywriter (no names) was a highly sought after professional with a solid track record. Thank you for the kind offer to mention to your colleague, it would really be appreciated if you could do that. Even if it doesn't increase conversions, it's still worth a definite try. Please feel free to reach me by email if you need more information. Thanks

Yeah we originally planned to allow it for all of US but because of the sparse users all spread out, we quickly focused on San Franciso bay areas first. The niche does sound Like an idea to consider though, thank you.

I could, but even with a new name and relaunch it wouldn't fix the problem of the users being too far spread out sparsely in te US

I did consider it but it would still be meaningless because there would only be tht one person attending that event. The problem is that the downloads are too sparse within the US, so users aren't able to join each others events as they're too far.

Hi, this is our first startup that we started 6 months ago. Would love to see what you think!

Hi All, we've just launched our iphone App! We're feeling good about this app from the responses that we've gotten from our beta testers so we hope everyone will love it. Thank you for any feedback!

Hi HN! This is our first mobile iphone app we've developed. Look forward to your feedback, thank you!

The funny thing is... I'm one of those non-alcoholic people you mentioned and on a caffeine break so I'll be taking that milk ;)

I hate to self-promote, but I sincerely think you might find our startup useful. I built it for the EXACT same reason as you mentioned above. If you're up for it, let's grab drinks sometime as well when I'm back in the bay area.

http://www.grooovy.me

Hi Mike! Thanks for displaying such unselfishness and support. It's really people like you who begin making a difference.

If you don't mind, I'd like to get some feedback for the landing page http://grooovy.me . If this is something that you might be interested in, signups would be appreciated. It would also help immensely if you can spread the word about us in any way you can!

Again, thank you for taking the time out to do this. You're amazing.

I'm sorry that the app doesn't have any usefulness for you. Thank you for your feedback anyways!

I believe the email submission area is actually one of the first things I notice when I visit the landing page. I'm not sure if the problem is the email submission area. Does anyone else have a problem with this? I agree that the response after sending the email is dry- I'll figure out a better message to thank the user for their submission in the next revision. Thanks for your feedback!

You've made a good point. I should have clearly stated the differences as a selling point in the landing page. I originally thought that it would be alright to just let the visitor read about app and be able to spot the differences on their own, but it takes too much time to do so. I probably wouldn't scroll all the way to the last page myself.

We're different than the alternatives because we allow you to take control. You decide on the location where you'll meet for breakfast, lunch, coffee etc., when you have the time to meet up, and how many people you are comfortable with meeting at one time. Other people come to the event to meet you.

You can say that we're trying to make it comfortable for the user to meet new people by allowing them to create events at their pace, in their neighborhood at their favorite restaurant.

Thanks for the feedback, very useful!