Ask HN: How would you market this?

[BerkLee19]

Hey folks,

This post is a bit of a last resort since we've been running out of ideas to market our startup.

We're building a service that scrapes the internet for data on how others have built successful businesses and uses AI to filter through the information and find the most practical insights.

Then the insights are made available to our members in an easy-to-digest format.

We've tried a couple of strategies so far (Joining communities, getting on 1-on-1 calls, going to events, etc).

If you had to market and get sales for this service, what would you do?

(This is the website btw: ostradis.com)

[999900000999]

30$ a month is way too much for this, Wall Street Journal is 1$ a week for the first year and probably has more relevant content.

Assuming you can prove it's value to customers 10$ a month would be much more palpitable.

Ironically this looks like great advice for your startup. https://ostradis.com/sample-01/

[BerkLee19]

I see what you mean. We've been testing prices to measure perceived value.

I appreciate your honest feedback!

[ushercakes]

Did you do any validation before building this? Does anybody want it?

I just feel like "AI generated business advice" is so generic and I probably wouldn't pay for it. It would need to be somehow curated to my specific business.

I.e, I describe my business, and it pops out ideas. Even that I probably wouldn't pay a monthly membership for.

Edit: There are a lot of typos on your website

[BerkLee19]

Yes, we did receive validation in the early stages.

It's not necessarily "AI generated business advice".

It uses AI to filter through information and find the most helpful business tips from successful entrepreneurs.

I do appreciate you taking the time to comment, it truly means a lot to me.

[logicalmonster]

> We're building a service that scrapes the internet for data on how others have built successful businesses and uses AI to filter through the information and find the most practical insights.

Are you talking about essentially creating a blog, possibly with a paid member's only section? Not sure that's worth paying money for, but I think that close to 100% of people here would check it out.

I'm skeptical about your comment about using AI to scrape/find/filter the stories. It's going to find a lot of shitty and boring SEO content without intense human curation (probably).

[BerkLee19]

Normally we positioned our service as "our team finds the content and goes through it to find relevant insights".

We only recently started incorporating AI to our pitch but seems like it wasn't a good move.

I really appreciate you taking the time to reply tho!

What are you working on btw?

[logicalmonster]

Personally I'd say to not give up on the idea of creating your own site with these stories. I'd find it useful, particularly with a bit of categorization and analysis, and would check it out. I could be very wrong, but I'd just express a healthy bit of skepticism about it directly being a monetizable business through people giving you money for access or if AI is the right tool for gathering these stories. Indirectly though, there are probably ways to make money off of this such as turning the stories into a nice book with easy to digest chapters on each story or theme.

I don't want to dox myself, but I am working on an online store, hacking away on my main startup idea, currently searching for some kind of full-stack engineering role, and amusing myself (and hopefully others!) by shitposting on the Internet. Thanks.

[elorant]

I don’t think insights are that great if there’s no context. That’s why sites that have interviews are more successful in this niche.

[BerkLee19]

What do you mean by context? As in specific topics, business models, and industries?

[elorant]

As in describing the project more specifically. Unless I know what someone's referring to, insights aren't useful by themselves. I need to know how I can apply them in my case so detailed project presentation is more useful.

[wspeirs]

Is there an example of this service somewhere?

I would think you'd need to identify your target customer. Build a profile of them. What do they like to read? How do they find new products? Is there a magazine (old skool) or trade show or are they government customers or universities. Then copy how others are marketing to them.

[BerkLee19]

We should have built an in depth profile, thank you so much for this. Truly appreciate you!