Backstory: We run a media company and we've put more than $200k of our own savings into Listnerd - not counting the thousands of work hours we've also invested. It's a list blogging platform / social network centered around top lists. We're growing extremely slow, so after 1.5 years in the grind, we've come to the conclusion that our site sucks. Please help us out by destroying us with your criticism.
First of all - when people visit a new site for the first time and see familiar stuff, instead of new and exciting stuff, they tend to leave before they even dig deeper on the site.
The design is fine, the layout is difficult - you should use rectangles of different sizes and backgrounds to make it easier for the visitor to focus on content that are more important, new or viral.
What is dangerous about the assumption that the most popular things are the most written about, are that you ignore new things that MIGHT get traction, what you'd need is a time-machine - list things before they get HOT HOT HOT! So that people who visit the site have a larger reason to do so.
And think about what kind of users you want, the middle-aged people that love lists? Or the lazy teenager who love trends but feel that lists are for shores.
Already answered this, but I'll comment because you bothered to. Sure :) We're basicly two founders that have done most of the design and project management of the site. In addition, we've outsourced some design and all of the programming to Ukraine, including the mobile version. The outsourced development itself runs into the 100k's over the stretch of 1.5 years, and in addition, we've done some marketing (40-50k) and had some administrative costs (lawyers, offices, etc.). I don't have an exact sum, but it's anywhere from 190-220k.
I'm a designer and previous developer myself, but the site is actually quite broad. There is a lot more than meets the eye, such as:
- an administration area
- caching and indexing mechanisms
- web scraping robots
- various other agents and robots to update user feeds, top lists, etc.
- algorithms to calculate relevance and weight for the items on each list
- Wordpress plugins, possibility to embed lists, etc.
...and so forth. It's a pretty big site.
It's funny to see many people giving their "expert" opinion about how expensive your web site was, just by looking the design. It is very easy to say when:
1. You are not the one developing the site, thus You have no commitment.
2. You ignore all the other project requirements (already mentioned above) just by looking to the presentation layer.
If the project was too expensive, blame also the founders , which may have asked for a MVP bigger then the necessary.
Sure, but from the looks of things this is a pretty generic web site. If you have been doing development for a while that figure would be an instant red flag. Not blaming either party.
The 'additional' requirements that were listed to justify this such as administration area, caching layer, feeds, etc are really basic items.
So unless they wrote their own web server I don't see any issues with flagging this.
For all you know that figure could have been made up.
It looks like you're a Norwegian company? Surely Norway has programmers who can handle this at equal or surpassing quality for less money? What was your rationale for outsourcing to begin with?
In Norway a dev starts at $100k a year; or you can pay roughly $250 an hour for freelancers. Labour laws in Norway are very strict, which means hiring someone is a big step. When we first started the project we didn't really foresee how big of a task it would end up as, so we went with outsourcing. If I had to do it again, I probably would have hired one in-house dev.
Well, our last really successful startup was called Biip.no. It was a social networking site very much like Facebook, only for Norwegian teenagers. We built a lot of traction, eventually grossing 10% of Norway's population as members, with a annual revenue of 3m USD - mostly from advertising and mobile payments. Then we had an exit of $12m USD. We started in the social media space pretty early (2004/2005), so we always regretted not going international earlier. Listnerd is kind of our shot at redemption; because I think social e-commerce is at the same stage today as social media was in 2004.
Agree on the last sentence (although it might be better to just say eCommerce and drop the "social") so I figured I would comment.
The site definitely reminds me of PG advice about made up startup ideas not solving an actual problem. Social networking sites helped users connect with their friends online easily. Not sure as a user why I should signup to your site and start building lists of knowledge unless I am getting something (business, revenue cut, etc).
You might look at instructables. People want to show off the things they build so they create tutorials about it. Pretty good community. There's probably room to sell the supplies in an e-commerce store and maybe give the authors a cut of the revenue. Seems much less forced than "build a list and share it with your friends!"
My own shot at this is in Halloween/Fall/Events. I envisioned some sort of way to find events, meet people and get the knowledge/stuff you need to attend. We are still in Facebook's "adding the course catalogs" stage though. Add dot com to my username and then let your imagination really run. We've spent around 10K but have put in a lot of sweat equity.
If social eCommerce becomes huge, I think it will transform Halloween costume sales online and we will be better positioned than a traditional costume shop. Can you say the same about listnerd? If no, then you need to pick a different area to start building a community.
