| Word-of-mouth. Say to your users: "if you want this to be useful, ask your friends to use it, talk about it online…". (You'll get low conversion rates from this, but it's free, and it doesn't promulgate an attention economy the way that billboards and banner ads do.) Advertising is effort, but it's not that hard, really: most advertising firms are extremely inefficient at their jobs, but they get paid because the alternative is nobody advertises the thing. It also helps if your service is still somewhat useful to individuals, in the absence of network effects. So, once the core service (organise meetups between users) is implemented, get to work on aggregating and categorising social events that already exist. (Use standard protocols, to leave the ladder around for others to climb, but keep track of your API consumers: some of them might be hostile anti-social entities like Facebook, whose existences need to be nipped in the bud.) Once you have something genuinely useful, pick a small-ish city, and guerilla advertise in it. If you've done things right, that should be enough. Now, leave a skeleton crew on it, and move on to the Next Big Thing. You should be able to maintain three or four pieces of infrastructure in this way, some of which you might even be able to charge money for! (But resist the temptation to monetise and enshittify, or even just excessively-tweak, what you've built.) |
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| ▲ | 9rx 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > Word-of-mouth. If that worked, why would anyone give up their business to VCs ever? Having VCs is not a fun place to be. It is a horrible situation to find yourself in (unless you are the VC, I suppose). There was a time where you could rely on word-of-mouth, but those days are behind us. Everyone and their brother is vying for word-of-mouth attention nowadays. The noise is too great. It takes vast resources to emit a usable signal. | | |
| ▲ | wizzwizz4 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Two reasons: 1. Some businesses can't just be built from nothing-but-software-and-server. You need warehouses, logistics, and all sorts of other fixed costs that exist before you can start recouping your investment. Not everyone has the money to start such a business, despite otherwise having the ability. 2. People aren't entirely stupid. If something's a scam, con, or otherwise a detriment to human flourishing, they're not going to use it unless they have reason to doubt their assessment. Advertising is good at getting people to associate thing with sentiment, which can override their bullshit detectors. Something that's genuinely-useful, and genuinely-better, can spread without any advertising spending, once it's past the threshold where noise no longer dominates. (For example, Plausible Analytics: I poked around their demo, concluded that it was strictly better than Google Analytics, and (after a couple of chats with one of the founders) started telling everyone with a website about it. I was clearly not the only one.) I have no idea why anyone would give up their business to VCs if they don't need investment to kick it off, and aren't running a long con. | | |
| ▲ | 9rx 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > You need warehouses, logistics, and all sorts of other fixed costs that exist before you can start recouping your investment. That type of business is rarely appealing to VCs. VCs seek rapid growth and quick exits. Warehouses are the antithesis of that. Hard to scale and even harder to sell. It is an investible business for the right type of investor, but VCs and investors are not synonymous. > once it's past the threshold where noise no longer dominates. You are technically correct here, but we're clearly talking about the stage before you've already overcome the noise floor. > Plausible Analytics They claim to be self-funded — in other words, acting as their own VCs. Which is all well and good when you're already rich, but if you're already rich (and not looking to get richer) why not just hire a concierge/matchmaker? What do you need a poor man's app for? | | |
| ▲ | wizzwizz4 2 days ago | parent [-] | | You don't need to be rich to fund your own digital service business, if the only costs (while you're small) are a server and your own time. You merely need to be not poor. There are many people unable to do that, but people with the time to post on Hacker News probably have the time to start a business. There are plenty of logistical barriers other than access to money, that prevent people from starting businesses. All these barriers can be overcome by being rich, but that's not the only way they can be overcome. Collectively, we can call these ways-to-overcome-barriers "privilege" (to crib from the language of academic feminism). | | |
| ▲ | 9rx a day ago | parent [-] | | > You don't need to be rich to fund your own digital service business You do if you want to transcend beyond the noise. Which you claim said business has. I'll take your word for it. It isn't technology that makes a technology company. Technology is easy. The hard part is getting to know the world. That's what takes tremendous resources nowadays (as before, it wasn't always so hard, but unless you have a time machine...). |
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| ▲ | openplatypus 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | RE: Plausible, you should have checked their compliance and terms and conditions after checking demo and using it. There are some gotchas to be aware of (lack of DPO, being one red flag). Going umami, matomo would have been cheaper and safer. | | |
| ▲ | wizzwizz4 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Afaik, Plausible doesn't need a data protection officer. See Article 37 GDPR. (But I'll follow that up with them, in case it's an oversight.) I have read Plausible's documentation, and I haven't identified any problems with their practices. Umami's homepage requires JavaScript to load, which is a red flag. And, as expected, there's something wrong: it's owned by a US company, which makes it a no-go. Matomo is excellent and I second your recommendation. |
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