I strongly recommend against wading into the complex, political, dominated, corrupt and extremely competitive online ticket sales industry.
I'm a friend of http://guestlistapp.com/ folks and it's a great alternative to EventBrite and TicketMaster. It's fairly minimalist and is still a huge undertaking for several people.
I suggest that you step back, take off your programmer visors and start listening for people who say "I wish" a lot. Chances are that if it's obvious enough to brainstorm, someone has already lost a lot of money discovering that the customers love it so long as it's free. You need to find something that's niche and causing great pain.
As someone in the arts administration world, I can tell you that the ticketing app is not a great shot. I'd never heard of Guestlist, and EventBrite is fairly new but used, but most people these days are using bespoke solutions (TicketMaster, Tessi, etc...) and most midsized organizations I know have floated to Brown Paper Tickets.
However, I think I can safely say most midsized resident arts organizations would love a social media reporting app. Most non-profits can only hold a social media intern for the summer, and they dip off and seem awkward during the main part of their season. To alleviate this would be awesome.
Very good point! Feedback from other entrepreneurs is usually arbitrary, and you usually have to qualify the advice based on each person's unique history/background. It's nice to see if entrepreneurs agree with your idea, but it all comes down to the market agreeing.
Hi everyone I'm Pablo Tirado, the bald guy on the right with the glass of bourbon.
First of all I'd like to thank everyone who has voted for the story, and particularly to the commenters, which we'll be responding to individually; because we really want more feedback.
Second I'd like to give some background on what this is.
Last weekend we spitballed a list of 37 ideas which we thought could be made into something. Some were brand new, some we'd worked on for some time but most were harebrained.
This list of 5 are the survivors of our own elimination process. We made this landing page to send to friends in the industry whose opinion we trust.
Giovanni (flexterra) decided to post it on Hacker News to see what the community thought and here we are.
We have other projects that are very close to launch (receiptsloader.com [if your purchase receipts are a mess, you want this]) and this 5 piece voting site, is to help us decide on what to concentrate our efforts on next.
Again, thanks to everyone for commenting and voting.
Okay, I'll bite. I've researched and critiqued dozens of ideas; I've also had my ideas ripped apart by others. So here's my feedback; playing devil's advocate here because there's no mention of these ideas being a true passion for your team.
Customer Service a la Zappos
I like the area that you are targeting, I think there's opportunity, but I don't see/understand what you're providing that's new. Are you managing/offering awesome people to provide the customer service or is it software that will help guide an existing company's support staff to be awesome? Perhaps a training program with some sort of systematic reminds of how to be awesome (could be interesting).
While You Were Out Notes
I know people use different hardware/software for communications but I don't see how there's any value here. Making voicemail accessible outside the office? If someone visits, do they need to know YOUR system for leaving a note or is someone in the office going to add it to this unnecessary system? There's a thing called email, and it works if you don't suck at it. Not convinced there's a pain/need here.
One Click Social Media Reports - My pick
Another area that is appealing to me, but I'd like to know more. List the kinds of things you'll be collecting. I do think there's data missing from other related services/tools.
Recurly for Dummies
Not to say there isn't a market/possibility to make money here, but doesn't Paypal offer subscriptions. Not everyone is accustomed to using/managing their subscriptions with Paypal but how will you make it any easier with your service?
Online Ticket Sales
Again, with limited information it's hard to see how you're going to approach this differently than Eventbrite. I think the opportunity here is the promotion aspect, but how you accomplish this is a mystery. I just feel a lot of people aren't aware of events in their area until it's too late. However, getting them to subscribe to your service to receive updates about events is going to be hard. You have to solve the relevancy/quality issue in addition to marketing to these people who don't search out for things on their own. Maybe some sort of partnering/incentive program can make this more possible. Make it fun and rewarding.
These are great observations. I visited your website, and you have a pretty cool, trajectory. I'm gonna shoot you an email, I'd like to pick your brain a little more.
I am a big fan of these guys. While engineers are underpaid and schools don't promote the startup culture at all in Puerto Rico, they have stayed loyal to hack and build stuff in their own in the island. They deserve at least your vote or advice.
For your ticket sales idea, I believe Ticketmaster has exclusivity agreements with many venues that will block you out. I remember reading some time ago about a startup (this was long ago, can't remember the name) trying to upset Ticketmaster that ran into that problem.
Your Recurly idea will also probably be a headache regulation and compliance-wise.
Not to say they aren't great ideas, but probably not something you'd want to get in to without investor backing and a specialized team in mind to maximize your chances.
Event promoters need a service that will allow them to sell tickets and promote their events online.
I disagree. There are kick-ass startups already doing this, e.g. TicketFly, Eventbrite, and TicketLeap. That isn't to say that you couldn't beat those folks, but I don't get the sense that there's a desperate need in the marketplace that those companies aren't filling. The real battles for promoters are structural and legal (Ticketmasters long-term exclusive contracts).
ok not a fan of the ticketing idea, reasons have been rehashed here a dozen times (venue lockout, ticketmaster/eventbrite, brown paper tix, etc)
Social media reporting, this is a tough one, as someone who built an early social media reporting tool years ago, I'd say the market is tough to get people to pay for the functionality. However, if you can get the right clients they will pay large sums. The market for this is very fickle and competition is tough (salesforce/radian6 for one). One key thing I learned: small business/midsize biz don't have enough chatter to validate spending on reporting yet (imagine how many people are talking about John Doe dry cleaner in San Juan on twitter on a given day).
recurly for dummies, can't you do that with a paypal widget that is an embed code anyway? right now my fav of the ideas though
i don't see value in while you were out notes system. maybe the way its presented doesn't make sense. i could definitely see a use for a push notification of incoming things (i.e. voicemail to your desk line, package received via fedex at front desk, etc)
zappos customer service one is tough to do, as a huge part of zappos customer service is not the crm they are using, but the policies they've put in place.
You don't know which one is the best idea, so just pick one you most want to finish and build it. Market it. And if it doesn't work pivot or move on to the next idea.
The way I look at it is you build ideas into products and sell those products. Always charge. That way it is relatively easy to turn a small, but meaningful profit. Then, keep building products until you find a "hit".
Even if you don't get to your home run you have some nice cash flow so you can keep doing what you love.
Think of yourself as a band. You love making and performing music. The first record might not be a hit but you keep making music until you come up with something that resonates. Your startup is a band. Keep cranking out albums until something resonates.
I hear so many people saying "just build it". Do these people have so much time in their lives that what they build is irrelevant because they will have time to build everything anyway?
Time is a precious resource to me and if I must build something, I'd rather increase my chances of success by picking the one people need more.
You don't need to build all of them and could still see which one people would buy. You could make 5 websites with some decent SEO, set up a little pitch/video for each application with a download button and see how many people click download on each. You just have an error message when they click download saying sorry, the product is currently unavailable. But you collect the data and see which one wins. Also you could have a comments/suggestion on each to let customers tell you if you're close but they really want something else.
None of them. The only suggestion listed that you seemed vested in was away notes, so do that one if any.
None of the others really cover the main problem you're aiming to fix, and you don't sound like you are excited about the task they exist to help with.
You don't have to be personally invested in a problem to build a winnning application solving it. But you need to have became excited by the possibily that you could solve it - that suddenly, you will be making someone's life better. Withouth this, you'll just repeat the existing mistakes with what's on the market.
Hefty competition on all fronts, I'd probably try looking for another not so congested market if I was you, unless you have some marvelous mechanism big players won't be able to implement.
But if you must I'd possibly look at the social networking reporting for a couple of reasons.
- The market is hot and you might be able to get funding or flick it easy
- It looks like all the other projects are going to need an decent advertising base, and (as long as you build carefully) you'll be able to re-purpose parts of the social networking... so can look at as an investment
I strongly suggest one of you start using a Windows PC, at the very least to experience your app like many of your customers will- that font doesn't turn out so well with Windows' ClearType.
"Customer Service a la Zappos" strikes me as the most interesting of the lot.
The Ticketmaster clone won't work due to venue lock-out, as others have mentioned. "One Click Social Media Reports" seems kind of vague. "Recurly for Dummies" - the name is kind of a turnoff. One would also need a high volume of recurring payments to make such a service attractive. Then it also has to interface to existing accounting systems. "While You Were Out Notes" seems a bit too trivial. Who will pay for it?
The problem I see with recurly for non-technical people is
that non-technical people will find it complicated to embed a widget, tab, javascript etc into their sites.
Yeah, it comes down to execution. But if you can execute it so well that it is dead easy and doesn't require any technical know how, you might win over even technical people.
For a second I thought you made a site where people could contribute their ideas and try to gain public support. At which point I would have just pointed at Kickstarter.
I've found does not matter what you do, what matters is how you do it. IMHO you should ask yourself "Which of these we can make the most kick-ass ever in the world!?"
[+] [-] peteforde|14 years ago|reply
I'm a friend of http://guestlistapp.com/ folks and it's a great alternative to EventBrite and TicketMaster. It's fairly minimalist and is still a huge undertaking for several people.
I suggest that you step back, take off your programmer visors and start listening for people who say "I wish" a lot. Chances are that if it's obvious enough to brainstorm, someone has already lost a lot of money discovering that the customers love it so long as it's free. You need to find something that's niche and causing great pain.
[+] [-] cdcarter|14 years ago|reply
However, I think I can safely say most midsized resident arts organizations would love a social media reporting app. Most non-profits can only hold a social media intern for the summer, and they dip off and seem awkward during the main part of their season. To alleviate this would be awesome.
[+] [-] drewda|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qq66|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Terry_B|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colinwinter|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pabloiv|14 years ago|reply
First of all I'd like to thank everyone who has voted for the story, and particularly to the commenters, which we'll be responding to individually; because we really want more feedback.
Second I'd like to give some background on what this is.
Last weekend we spitballed a list of 37 ideas which we thought could be made into something. Some were brand new, some we'd worked on for some time but most were harebrained.
This list of 5 are the survivors of our own elimination process. We made this landing page to send to friends in the industry whose opinion we trust. Giovanni (flexterra) decided to post it on Hacker News to see what the community thought and here we are.
We have other projects that are very close to launch (receiptsloader.com [if your purchase receipts are a mess, you want this]) and this 5 piece voting site, is to help us decide on what to concentrate our efforts on next.
Again, thanks to everyone for commenting and voting.
[+] [-] david927|14 years ago|reply
Personally I think you'll get much better ideas than the ones you've listed.
[+] [-] colinwinter|14 years ago|reply
Customer Service a la Zappos
I like the area that you are targeting, I think there's opportunity, but I don't see/understand what you're providing that's new. Are you managing/offering awesome people to provide the customer service or is it software that will help guide an existing company's support staff to be awesome? Perhaps a training program with some sort of systematic reminds of how to be awesome (could be interesting).
While You Were Out Notes
I know people use different hardware/software for communications but I don't see how there's any value here. Making voicemail accessible outside the office? If someone visits, do they need to know YOUR system for leaving a note or is someone in the office going to add it to this unnecessary system? There's a thing called email, and it works if you don't suck at it. Not convinced there's a pain/need here.
One Click Social Media Reports - My pick
Another area that is appealing to me, but I'd like to know more. List the kinds of things you'll be collecting. I do think there's data missing from other related services/tools.
Recurly for Dummies
Not to say there isn't a market/possibility to make money here, but doesn't Paypal offer subscriptions. Not everyone is accustomed to using/managing their subscriptions with Paypal but how will you make it any easier with your service?
Online Ticket Sales
Again, with limited information it's hard to see how you're going to approach this differently than Eventbrite. I think the opportunity here is the promotion aspect, but how you accomplish this is a mystery. I just feel a lot of people aren't aware of events in their area until it's too late. However, getting them to subscribe to your service to receive updates about events is going to be hard. You have to solve the relevancy/quality issue in addition to marketing to these people who don't search out for things on their own. Maybe some sort of partnering/incentive program can make this more possible. Make it fun and rewarding.
[+] [-] pabloiv|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aymeric|14 years ago|reply
I am not sure people would pay for it though.
[+] [-] netmau5|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pabloiv|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] voidfiles|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] miguelrios|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acabal|14 years ago|reply
Your Recurly idea will also probably be a headache regulation and compliance-wise.
Not to say they aren't great ideas, but probably not something you'd want to get in to without investor backing and a specialized team in mind to maximize your chances.
[+] [-] aymeric|14 years ago|reply
What if you simply run on top of Paypal?
[+] [-] jack7890|14 years ago|reply
I disagree. There are kick-ass startups already doing this, e.g. TicketFly, Eventbrite, and TicketLeap. That isn't to say that you couldn't beat those folks, but I don't get the sense that there's a desperate need in the marketplace that those companies aren't filling. The real battles for promoters are structural and legal (Ticketmasters long-term exclusive contracts).
[+] [-] brianbreslin|14 years ago|reply
Social media reporting, this is a tough one, as someone who built an early social media reporting tool years ago, I'd say the market is tough to get people to pay for the functionality. However, if you can get the right clients they will pay large sums. The market for this is very fickle and competition is tough (salesforce/radian6 for one). One key thing I learned: small business/midsize biz don't have enough chatter to validate spending on reporting yet (imagine how many people are talking about John Doe dry cleaner in San Juan on twitter on a given day).
recurly for dummies, can't you do that with a paypal widget that is an embed code anyway? right now my fav of the ideas though
i don't see value in while you were out notes system. maybe the way its presented doesn't make sense. i could definitely see a use for a push notification of incoming things (i.e. voicemail to your desk line, package received via fedex at front desk, etc)
zappos customer service one is tough to do, as a huge part of zappos customer service is not the crm they are using, but the policies they've put in place.
[+] [-] sushrutbidwai|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] programminggeek|14 years ago|reply
One at a time.
Until you win.
You don't know which one is the best idea, so just pick one you most want to finish and build it. Market it. And if it doesn't work pivot or move on to the next idea.
The way I look at it is you build ideas into products and sell those products. Always charge. That way it is relatively easy to turn a small, but meaningful profit. Then, keep building products until you find a "hit".
Even if you don't get to your home run you have some nice cash flow so you can keep doing what you love.
Think of yourself as a band. You love making and performing music. The first record might not be a hit but you keep making music until you come up with something that resonates. Your startup is a band. Keep cranking out albums until something resonates.
[+] [-] aymeric|14 years ago|reply
I hear so many people saying "just build it". Do these people have so much time in their lives that what they build is irrelevant because they will have time to build everything anyway?
Time is a precious resource to me and if I must build something, I'd rather increase my chances of success by picking the one people need more.
[+] [-] SeanWG|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] madmoose|14 years ago|reply
A Psychological Tip:
Whenever you're called on to make up your mind,
and you're hampered by not having any,
the best way to solve the dilemma, you'll find,
is simply by spinning a penny.
No - not so that chance shall decide the affair
while you're passively standing there moping;
but the moment the penny is up in the air,
you suddenly know what you're hoping.
[+] [-] FeministHacker|14 years ago|reply
None of the others really cover the main problem you're aiming to fix, and you don't sound like you are excited about the task they exist to help with.
You don't have to be personally invested in a problem to build a winnning application solving it. But you need to have became excited by the possibily that you could solve it - that suddenly, you will be making someone's life better. Withouth this, you'll just repeat the existing mistakes with what's on the market.
[+] [-] cryos|14 years ago|reply
But if you must I'd possibly look at the social networking reporting for a couple of reasons.
- The market is hot and you might be able to get funding or flick it easy
- It looks like all the other projects are going to need an decent advertising base, and (as long as you build carefully) you'll be able to re-purpose parts of the social networking... so can look at as an investment
[+] [-] dkordik|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] callmevlad|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Andi|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gallerytungsten|14 years ago|reply
The Ticketmaster clone won't work due to venue lock-out, as others have mentioned. "One Click Social Media Reports" seems kind of vague. "Recurly for Dummies" - the name is kind of a turnoff. One would also need a high volume of recurring payments to make such a service attractive. Then it also has to interface to existing accounting systems. "While You Were Out Notes" seems a bit too trivial. Who will pay for it?
[+] [-] prpon|14 years ago|reply
Yeah, it comes down to execution. But if you can execute it so well that it is dead easy and doesn't require any technical know how, you might win over even technical people.
[+] [-] marknutter|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LarryA|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dazzer|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abbasmehdi|14 years ago|reply