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Ask HN: looking for fresh ideas, my startup is not working

7 点作者 phineas超过 12 年前
I have been bootstrapping a startup for about a year. The startup has pivoted twice but it is not monetizable as I see it.<p>My original idea: My concept is to help people solve their emergencies (not life or death but something that defines a motivated buyer) in finding products or services. I go on Twitter and search for tweets like “back hurts, anyone know a good chiropractor” or “my phone cracked anyone know where to get it fixed.” I would call or email the businesses in their area that could solve their problem. In this email I would say that I have a lead and ask them to reply. All the replies would go on a page where the buyer would be able to easily send messages to the vendors which I had hoped would turn into a chat.<p>The problems: Maybe I am finding products for people that are priced too low because people are not willing to pay for our searching and businesses are not willing to pay for the lead. If I could validate the lead it could help but thats hard to do with people off Twitter.<p>Looking to the future: I would love if I could somehow transition from people off Twitter to the corporate market where I could hopefully charge more and when the products/services searched for would be more repeatable. Do you think a corporation has any needs/emergencies that could be filled regularly?<p>The value I provide: I save time and frustration in searching, calling, and emailing. I also provide multiple vendor options during an emergency. At one point I had hoped that I could even get the people to negotiate on prices with the vendors or maybe that the vendors would compete a bit for the lead and offer discounts.<p>Any help is appreciated. If the answer is drop it and move on to something fresh, it is welcome if you could provide a new possible startup idea. Thank you.

7 条评论

manglav超过 12 年前
Your examples explain it. “back hurts, anyone know a good chiropractor”, and "my phone cracked anyone know where to get it fixed.” People trend to trust other people, so why would they trust you? What curation and validation are you doing on the businesses? If you are rating them, what are you basing your ratings on? These are questions that I think about when I hear your business. Also, it sounds complicated, and non-scalable.<p>What you can do: if the people are already on twitter, go to them. Create a twitter-bot that people can follow, and it automatically follows you back. When someone says "my back hurts", you use natural language processing on their tweets, and recommend a solution to them, gluing together Yelp, Angie's List, or anything else that might be relevant. Offer three months free, if they like it, they pay a monthly subscription. If not, take them off a list. When successful enough with consumers, you MAY be able to turn around and start charging businesses, but then, you have the responsibilities of curation, and I think it's easier to let companies who specialize in that ( like Yelp or Angie's List) do that, and you piggy back off them. Check if you're allowed to use their data, and if they charge for it.
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brudgers超过 12 年前
If a human has to search, call and email, the business model won't scale quickly enough to ever fit the Silicon Valley idea of a startup.<p>Likewise if the business model is addressing unique customer needs one at a time.<p>There's not much value in leads for chiropractors, either. Their business grows largely by word of mouth or broadcast marketing.<p>If you're going to leads one at a time, the sales have to be big. The problems have to be non-trivial, and the actual research more valuable than the localized results from Bing.
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jkaykin超过 12 年前
This is a great idea but as manglav said, people trust the opinions of their network so it will be hard to get users to use it when they can ask their friends/colleagues.<p>Also the solution manglav provides, perfect, if you can do it that would make the process much simpler but it would take a lot of work. Check out <a href="http://chirpify.com" rel="nofollow">http://chirpify.com</a>, they do something interesting with NLP on Twitter.<p>If you want to work on something else, I would be happy to talk to you more about what I am working on. Email is on my profile.
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AznHisoka超过 12 年前
I suggest doing something completely new. Twitter was a good way to get someone's attention in the early days. Now, people are wary of spam and will probably ignore your message. This alone should be enough to make you dump this idea. Even if they listen to your message, they still have to buy what you recommend. Too many if's.<p>Find a problem a core group of people have. Develop a solution to solve that problem, and find a way to distribute that solution.
ssylee超过 12 年前
Stop thinking of your ideas. Just pick a niche industry, and see what problems THEY are having. Only start building the solution when you see a convergence of the same problems.
pknerd超过 12 年前
Make some app that track the intake of diet by Kids to learn what kid loves or not and at what time. It might need a bit of mining, Machine learning stuff but worth making.
hyuuu超过 12 年前
can I see the URL? I would love to check it out :) And perhaps we can brainstorm an idea or two?