I'm in Situationship with My Startup

7 points by mahimamanik 4 days ago

I love building product as soon as I stumble upon an interesting idea.

My idea was to come up with icebreakers based on person's profile. I built this tool: getdatahawk.ai without any customer calls

I have around 150 users, none paying & almost no daily active users. 2/150 people agreed to jump on customer call.

I am wondering if this is a big enough problem for people to care about or should I move on. How do I decide?

csomar 9 hours ago

It is a big enough problem but your problem is that you don't have a product. Did you try dog-fooding your own product? Have you tried to get a friend to sign-up and use it on their own?

bruce511 4 days ago

>> I love building product as soon as I stumble upon an interesting idea.

This isn't a bad trait. It makes for an interesting hobby. I do the same with my hobbies.

You don't really say why a lack of users is a problem, so I'll have to guess.

I'm guessing that you'd like to make a profit from these projects? Or that you're hoping to turn your hobby into a business?

If that's the case, then you need to stop doing the easy fun stuff, and start doing some of the work stuff.

The work stuff in this cases means talking to people, finding their pain, connecting with a market, getting a deposit, all before you write the first line of code.

The work stuff in this case is discarding 99 ideas in every 100. By all means have ideas, but do the work, and discard them quickly, until you find one that meets the 3 rules;

1. Have a product people want and 2. That they can afford, and are willing to pay for and 3. You can reach to let them know of your solution.

Your idea might encompass 2 of the above, but without all 3 you just have another flop.

Flops are really easy to code, but a lot of fun. And hobbies should be fun, thats kinda the point. But hobbies cost money, they don't make money.

  • mahimamanik 2 days ago

    Haha I will always remember this - "Hobbies cost money, they don't make money"

fdlaks 2 days ago

A lot of times the actual business emerges from something that started out as an idea that wasn't working. If you are still enjoying working on things in this space and it seems like this idea is running out of steam, pivot to something close to it and see if that has any effect. The one thing you do need to do is treat these pivots like an experiment so you actually learn something from them and can measure success.

For example maybe your hypothesis is that pivoting to an AI tool that will scan your profile and give you a score back as to how optimized it is for finding new jobs would increase the amount of people willing to pay 5 dollars to have their profile scanned. Maybe this is something people are willing to pay for more since you can justify it costing some small amount of money for potentially a much larger return for the user if the suggestions help them get more interviews or become more discoverable to recruiters, etc...

  • mahimamanik 2 days ago

    I like the approach of small pivots & experimenting. Yes, I still love the idea & the product I have built.

KomoD a day ago

I tried it, it gave me the wrong person twice. I entered jeff@amazon.com but got a profile for some delivery driver instead of jeff bezos. I tried sundar@google.com too and got some random software engineer instead of sundar pichai.

Maybe inaccurate data is the reason people aren't paying or using it?

GianFabien 4 days ago

Once a person generates a personalized icebreaker, they probably keep using it and don't bother generating a new or different one.

As you admit, you did your project without customer calls. Which means that you didn't validate the idea and didn't confirm that it was something that people would pay for.

  • mahimamanik 2 days ago

    yeah, I don't see users coming back/recurring on the tool. I am finding ways to deliver more value through email & I can also develop slack integration - but I am not getting string enough signals to keep building there.

muzani 4 days ago

Very often the problem is the customer acquisition channel too. HN might not be a good place to ask as we don't normally approach strangers needing to know anything about them. LinkedIn might be a better channel.

  • mahimamanik 2 days ago

    Fair point. I did post on LinkedIn & X, got 60-70K impressions. Do you think I should go for PH launch too before deciding on the idea?

    • muzani a day ago

      PH is no longer about people finding products, more about people launching them. It has become mostly new founders and PMs. If that sounds like your target market, go for it.

dustingetz 4 days ago

if you can’t prove there’s something there then there’s not. Proof can come in any form, revenue, daily active users, upvotes on show HN but you need some sort of accountability to combat founder delusion which is the default, and on top of that, your metric needs to accelerate fast enough to keep you alive

  • mahimamanik 2 days ago

    Makes sense. I am looking for signals either from metrics or customers telling me what to build or iterate next. Just deciding on how long should I keep looking. As you said, I want to accelerate the process on knowing faster.