Opened a paid web service, and then what? Psychoanalysis for a startup
Questions will be at the end of the post, but first a bit of a messy story.
Oh, how many ideas and projects I’ve already tried, how many lines of code have been written down and spoiled by human nerves, how many hopes have been destroyed, but my soul hasn’t abated - the glory of Mark Zuckerberg does not allow you to sleep soundly! I am sure there are many among you, you probably will understand me. I wrote about a part of my projects at the Habré, everyone went into oblivion for one reason or another. Over the past 1.5 years, I have retrained from a stupid customer to an independent web developer, mastered programming itself and with grief in half, “design” and now, as in a psychiatric hospital, I invented it for myself, wrote it myself, and used it myself.
So, in short: having lost the main source of income and significant savings, I suddenly ended up on Earth and realized that the dream of opening a second facebook or google is better to postpone - the probability of a shot is small, and there will not be enough resources. And I decided to return to the good old method:
And what did I find? I have several friends who own popular photo blogs with non-unique content. The content for these blogs comes from other blogs that take this content from somewhere else. I will tell you America: in the blogosphere the principle of "robbed loot" is often applied and all copy each other without any permission. Not a very ethical area? I thought too late about whether my service would serve the Forces of Good, but, looking ahead, I will say that I am categorically against copying content without the permission of the author, which is reported to users. Okay, I hope you forgave me - let's go on. So what is the problem with these bloggers? Many people copy pictures with their hands, and those who are more advanced use programs for parsing pictures, download them for themselves, upload them to the server, create a post with links to pictures with their hands. There are also very expensive and obscure WordPress plugins that do not quite what they need. In general, I took and made a service that allows you to:
Actually the service itself is smallninja.com
And it looks something like this:
(by the way, thanks to my friend pupsor for a free account on vimeo)
Then I screwed on the paypal, made a test free period and ... and sat down. What's next? How to look for customers? How to promote? And here I realized that every time I came across the same problem: having implemented the project at some minimum, I did not know how to attract people there, made a couple of uncertain moves and as a result threw. So this time I decided to fight a little longer. Of course, the users of the Habré are not the target audience for this service, so I’m ready to give you an account for free. Now registration is open and the default is 100 free attempts. If not enough - write in a personal, I will make premium.
Now questions:
Oh, how many ideas and projects I’ve already tried, how many lines of code have been written down and spoiled by human nerves, how many hopes have been destroyed, but my soul hasn’t abated - the glory of Mark Zuckerberg does not allow you to sleep soundly! I am sure there are many among you, you probably will understand me. I wrote about a part of my projects at the Habré, everyone went into oblivion for one reason or another. Over the past 1.5 years, I have retrained from a stupid customer to an independent web developer, mastered programming itself and with grief in half, “design” and now, as in a psychiatric hospital, I invented it for myself, wrote it myself, and used it myself.
So, in short: having lost the main source of income and significant savings, I suddenly ended up on Earth and realized that the dream of opening a second facebook or google is better to postpone - the probability of a shot is small, and there will not be enough resources. And I decided to return to the good old method:
- find narrow area
- find weaknesses and problems in this area
- make a paid web service that solves these problems
And what did I find? I have several friends who own popular photo blogs with non-unique content. The content for these blogs comes from other blogs that take this content from somewhere else. I will tell you America: in the blogosphere the principle of "robbed loot" is often applied and all copy each other without any permission. Not a very ethical area? I thought too late about whether my service would serve the Forces of Good, but, looking ahead, I will say that I am categorically against copying content without the permission of the author, which is reported to users. Okay, I hope you forgave me - let's go on. So what is the problem with these bloggers? Many people copy pictures with their hands, and those who are more advanced use programs for parsing pictures, download them for themselves, upload them to the server, create a post with links to pictures with their hands. There are also very expensive and obscure WordPress plugins that do not quite what they need. In general, I took and made a service that allows you to:
- parsing pictures from any page and display as a gallery (extra pictures can be deleted)
- allow you to download pictures in one archive to yourself or upload to the server via FTP / SFTP
- automatically generate, edit and upload a post with pictures to your hosting with WordPress (you must first upload them there via FTP / SFTP in the previous step)
Actually the service itself is smallninja.com
And it looks something like this:
(by the way, thanks to my friend pupsor for a free account on vimeo)
Then I screwed on the paypal, made a test free period and ... and sat down. What's next? How to look for customers? How to promote? And here I realized that every time I came across the same problem: having implemented the project at some minimum, I did not know how to attract people there, made a couple of uncertain moves and as a result threw. So this time I decided to fight a little longer. Of course, the users of the Habré are not the target audience for this service, so I’m ready to give you an account for free. Now registration is open and the default is 100 free attempts. If not enough - write in a personal, I will make premium.
Now questions:
- Does the idea have potential? Is it possible to earn something with this service or should I proceed to the next idea?
- Is it ethical or unethical to create such services?
- The only question is for designers: is design and interface really ridiculous or tolerable?
- What would you add / change in the interface, functions?