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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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?<p>Unless there's something hugely complex under the surface that I'm not seeing, here's my criticism:<p>- This is not a startup, and you're hurting yourself if you think of it as one. It's a simple MVP web project.<p>- You could have - and should have - pulled this off in a weekend.<p>- The 'why' input is too small.<p>- 'Trending now' looks like it's broken.<p>- Everything I click yields a search result. Why are there no profiles?<p>- What am I supposed to search for in the search box? It should give me tips.<p>- Why can't I click photos?
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.<p>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.<p>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
Like others have said, there is no apparent need for it when I can just Tweet/Facebook "Yaay! I am happy because....."<p>My suggestions:<p>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.<p>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 <a href="http://dribbble.com/search?q=smiley" rel="nofollow">http://dribbble.com/search?q=smiley</a><p>3. Your site should have a mobile version and should be fucking FAST!<p>4. Have twitter login too<p>5.You can seek advice directly from Mark Bao <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=markbao" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=markbao</a> he launched Threewords.me that went 'ridiculously viral' (<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2051288" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2051288</a>) so he should have better feedback and suggestions.<p>Remember, you should be thinking of building a sustainable product that is useful not just something that should go viral.<p>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.
My feedback:<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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<p><pre><code> - 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?
</code></pre>
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.<p>In short, expecting a waterfall of activity after three months is very impatient.<p>If you're an actor trying to make it in Hollywood, it's ridiculous to expect to be an A-lister after three months.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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>"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."</i><p>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.<p>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'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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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).<p>Where should you go from here? Figure out a clever way to make something viral, then go do that.<p>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 <i>really love</i> 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 <a href="http://whodidiforget.com" rel="nofollow">http://whodidiforget.com</a> a few days ago, and after getting a little traffic from HN it fell flat.<p>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 ?
I've never made a startup, so I'm talking as a consumer, but here's my honest opinion.<p>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.<p>Are you addressing a need that isn't provided elsewhere?
What research did you do?<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
Where is the schlep? I'd highly recommend this before developing anything further: <a href="http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html" rel="nofollow">http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html</a>
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.<p>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!<p>My 2 cents :-)