The depressing reality of your startup failing

Look - your startup hasn't failed. First of all, it's not a startup, it's just a project you've been working on. You haven't spent savings or taken debt or investment to do this. It sounds like you are maybe still in school.<p>Second, you put it on HN and on person signed up. This doesn't mean you failed. It is merely the first in a very long line of setbacks that every startup, both great ones and not so great ones face along the way. Figure out why no one was interested in this - talk to potential customers, tweak the product/landing page/distribution channel and tr again.<p>I hope this doesn't come across as harsh because projects become our babies and it hurts when no one else cares, but hopefully you can take a step back and realize there's a lot you can do to remedy the situation.

This is a horrifically dumb article. If you care about the first day, you didn't launch a startup, you launched a <i>project</i>. Submitting an article to Hacker News isn't a launch strategy, it's showing off a cute project you did.<p>A startup is something you fully commit to until you're convinced you tried every reasonable permutation in a scalable market opportunity.<p>The average startup takes 7 years to get to liquidity. That's 2,520 days. You got <i>one</i> day in before throwing in the towel.

The name isn't related at all to your product, it's rather confusing. "Ranking" is in no way relevant to your service. Either choose a random name with no familiar meaning associated or choose one that is more appropriate for what your app does. I also agree that the tagline should be more clear. Also, you got some things wrong: - A HN post (or 2) isn't a launch, how could you expect people to flock to your app if they don't know it exists. Promote it properly; - Launch =/= your first day, first days usually suck.<p>Keep going anyway, the idea is not so bad, although i think there are some other services out there that do pretty much what your app does (but again, that can be said for pretty much every startup :P)

A bit early to declare something a failure no? If I had declared some of the App Store stuff I've done to have failed the same day they went up for sale purely based on watching analytics data, I would have totally missed the media coverage, chart rankings and word of mouth exposure (not to mention the loads of "thank you" emails from users) that occurred 1,2,3+ weeks later.<p>In any case from what I can tell this is exclusive to Amazon right? I'm guessing they have an API for this sort of thing or a way for you to scrape specific products.<p>Can Amazon notify users when prices drop? What makes this system you've setup unique? Pitch me, because it's not over yet :)

The value proposition of the site when you visit rankique.com is not clear enough. Changing the headline to "Track products and get notified when the price drops" and making the headline bigger will help a bit.<p>Driving traffic to the site may be harder. There is no built-in customer acquisition channel as having one user does not lead to more exposure. It might be something that gets some word of mouth once it has made a user happy but that's something you should test.

1) as many have mentioned, submitting to a news site like this does not a launch strategy make. Look into strategic partnerships, try to get some legit press, figure out how to incentivize people to share it etc., virality etc., all the typical stuff that it seems like you haven't put any thought into. It's easy not to, and is perhaps one of the pros of talking to investors actually, they will remind you of your woefully inadequate customer acquisition strategies and get you rethinking them.<p>2) hackernews is a reflection of silicon valley, which is a bit of an echo chamber, keep that in mind. The common behaviors of people using this site are so drastically different than the average person that you shouldn't read much into its success, either way.<p>3) don't give up so easily.<p>4) props for having the balls to put yourself out there like this. Too may people in silicon valley have this facade of success all the time. They are always "killing it." This is somewhat necessary as when we are looking for funding we aren't about to publicize any setbacks, but they are there and good to remind people of.

Jason's comment (as well as others) is spot-on. It's only a project. However, projects are how many sustainable businesses begin.<p>Your project is based on your assumptions on what customers wants. You now need to discover whether those assumptions are true (facts) or completely wrong. If they turn out to be true, then you're on to something.<p>Don't give up. Even if your assumptions turn out to be wrong, 'failures' are part of the process, and you can use what you learned on your next quest for a sustainable business.

You article, while it have been hard to write, probably helped many others who are facing the exact same scenario (or at least will be upon launch). Take a second to think about why you started the site in the first place? Was it to revolutionize shopping? Or more to bring something to life? colinplamondon makes a good point about this being 1 day into your startup, but i'd also add that you're not even 1 day into being an entrepreneur. Failure is good! FAIL MORE ! Every great entrepreneur does, at some point

Upvoted for content but please read this: <a href="http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/621/01/" rel="nofollow">http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/621/01/</a>

You should give it more than a day before calling it a failure.

Hey, this isn't a horrible failure. You might actually have something here. It's kind of like Pricenomics actually, they just went through YC. They're hiring, you should send Omar an email with this link, I'm sure he'd be impressed.<p>They take the approach of price researching plus subscribing to low prices like you. If I were you I'd look into this.

I think there is a site that does this already. Try camelcamelcamel.com<p>Having said that, I appreciate your zeal and effort. No amount of education would have prepared you as much as the workk involved in creating a fairly complicated website.<p>Good job. I might just be using it. :)

Are you a solo founder? You may want to surround yourself with other founders. They will make sure to give you a pat on the back when your real-time Google Analytics dashboard shows 0 active users. Hang in there...

I'm absolutely blown away by a)the hn community b) my naivity.<p>I'd like to thank you all for re-encouraging me and giving me a lot of great input.

Change its name. It's awful. The idea not so much.