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by namanyayg 1060 days ago
What all have you tried and how did each of them fail?
1 comments

Blitzer - hangout application, you put a pin on the map that is active for up to 1 hour and then you can meet people for anything. The problem was the geolocation, because it is hyper-geolocated so I would need to get many people in one small place, like one city.

Mimic - if you know what TikTok has duets now, Mimic was supposed to be that before TikTok existed where you imitate a person, mimicking person. The problem was marketing, no budget and no idea how to market.

xoxoSnap - what OnlyFans is now, xoxoSnap used to be where these models could sell their content, but without a subscription. I gave up without a reason, but I had interested models. This was the worst decision I made with my projects.

SMS Schedule - enable people to automatically send some SMS at a certain time, such as for someone's birthday or Christmas, so that you never forget to congratulate someone. I didn't feel like it would be used.

Gay sex site - Current gay dating is all about sex but covered as dating. So I wanted to make it what it actually is, about sex. Mostly profiles are empty without pics so I wanted to tackle that problem. The problem is again location, need to get people from one city otherwise website makes no sense.

JustBelievers - OnlyFans for believers. Type to subscribe to a priest or pastor who preaches. Nobody was interested

Timechat - a chat application that forces you to answer as soon as possible, otherwise you lose points and fall in the ranking. I didn't do it because I didn't know how to promote it

PhantomChat - a chat that has no history, there is already a bunch of it

CryptoAdults - OnlyFans with crypto. Not working because crypto isn't really used and it's complicated for people

A website selling fetish stuff like farts in a bottle, panties, piss and so on. I didn't make it because I want to find supply before I look for demand. So I need to connect with women who want to sell those things. But then again why would they do it through my site when they can do it via IG or Twitter

I see your issue: marketing. Each of your products can succeed if you spent 99% of your time/effort/money on marketing.

Blitzer seems simplifier. You pick a city, a local one would be easier. You join local groups, connect with local media, setup local events, talk to people locally. Put up fliers with qr codes.

Maybe you have a big prize somewhere in the city gl and you get everyone excited to look for it in some geo search game.

Follow that and you will succeed. My guess is you don't want to do that. That's not fun, or technical. That's what it takes to succeed.. and it can work in any industry from selling t-shirts to rocket fuel.

Most people want to come up with a unique idea or twist, create the site/application and expect everyone to come because of the quality of the idea. This rarely works unless your product is 100x better than what exists and even then you still need to get lucky go viral. Meanwhile everyone thinks your idea is great and is now copying it.

Your comment here tells me you understand this: "But then again why would they do it through my site when they can do it via IG or Twitter"

Why would anyone try to sell farts through you? Have you build up a fart audience? That's your first step. Find a way to get people who like farts to visit your fart content farm. Once you built that you can approach fart suppliers directly or buy thier farts and resell at a higher price.

Spend 99% of your time creating a community. 1% of your time coding.

This: these products are all community products, the value of them is in the community, and therefore almost all of the hard work is in building a community. If you don't like working with people... better to build a utility product, or a B2B, or something that doesn't require mass adoption and therefore large amounts of community building work.
Looks like you have experience prototyping certain kinds of social sites, you're looking for subscribers that check in daily for fresh content with a side serving of chat and some sense of fan like interest.

There are wider circles for this kind of thing and it can span countries starting from your region (maybe).

Perhaps look into how people trade and talk about fresh goods daily (vegetables, meat, fish, farm goods), land and houses (real estate deals, land release data from local government), stock and investments (daily public releases from whatever stock exchanges serve your nexus of countries).

That adds to your challenges as you might not know anything about these markets, you are still left with the challenge of finding sufficient core subscribers and promoting for expansion, but it might be the kind of poke in the eye that makes you look about with a different mindset at the wants and needs of those with money doing deals on a daily basis.

Ah yes, those are actually social sites. I never realized I tried to make so many of them. I guess it's because I think that those might drive larger amount of people on the site/app
Dude you need to find girlfriend and normal 9-17h job.

All these ideas just show how immature you are.

My advice is to find real problem that people have in that region and try to solve it.

Why do you assume I don't have a normal job or a girlfriend or boyfriend?
Amazing list. The only one which i think solves a real world problem is the gay dating website.

I think if you focus on the issues facing every day people and try to solve them you'll find a good niche.

I'm in Norway atm, i found an app that collates all the supermarket pamphlets in a nice layout. It's very useful due to the remoteness of sum parts of Norway.

There's an app in Australia called fuelspy that's widely used to find the cheapest petrol/ notify when best time to buy.

These are all small shops creating and maintaining these apps/websites.

Also have you considered freelancing instead of building these apps?

That's quite a list! Congrats on building so many apps.

However, all of them seem to be social apps, though. Have you thought of making apps for individuals? What I mean is trying to identify a pain point that many people face and creating an app around that?

Just my two cents. All the best!

Of course, but in what sense for individuals? Like some tools that they can use without engaging other people?
Dont make any feature that you dont know how you can make it profitable aka estimate the cost and the revenues it will generate
Yes, probably should not do that
Blitzer - Immediate thought comes to me, how are you going to make money. For example, a normal meetup app (with a very original name - Meetup.com) has massive problems on monetization and is basically sold around like a hot potato that nobody wants to have because it's just bleeding money with no idea how to turn the ship around. Your idea is to niche down even more. Are you going to be able to convince a group of 10 people meeting up on your app to each pay you a $ for your service? I highly doubt that. Also, you need to be more active when acquiring users. You said it's hyper-local, well you can start in your local area. You go to your country's subreddits, forums, facebook groups and just start advertising your app. If it gains traction, maybe, maybe you can scale it to other areas too, but again, monetization problems. You probably shouldn't even attempt this idea unless you have a VC person on your speed dial that is willing to burn money on scaling.

Mimic - not sure how would this app work when you are fighting for attention with behemoths like tiktok, youtube, instagram etc. Also no clear business model so the project is already set for failure.

xoxoSnap - unironically one of your strongest chances to succeed. You are making an app in an industry that already has established business model. There are paying customers! And you said you had models interested in your app! There can be more than one baker in town. Onlyfans takes 20%? Well we are only going to take 10%. They run skeleton support crew? Well, we will offer 24/7 support in multiple languages, etc. etc. Yea you won't print money like OnlyFans does, but if you give good enough offer to users (models) you might eat a piece of OnlyFans's pie, and the pie is BIG!

SMS schedule - this one actually sounds the most useful app out of all the ones you mentioned and to you it's the opposite LOL. I assume you are from Bosnia, based on what you wrote. Well, there is a startup from your neighbouring country called Infobip. What do they do? They are B2B company that help companies send bulk sms, scheduled SMS, etc etc. They are multi-billion company so clearly there is a market for SMS services. If you approach it from B2C way, you could have a similar service that you already described and you could expand it so much more. Example: send bulk sms to all your friends 1 hour before you are supposed to meet, as a reminder. Self-reminders, don't forget about X thing you have scheduled. I'm not super deep into SMS myself but I know that a lot of people prefer SMS over pretty much any other form of communication/apps so there is market out there 100% and it's quite unexplored in a world where every company is obsessed with capturing users into some kind of app.

Gay sex site - not really a tech problem, you need read some research on how modern relationships work and read couple of sociology books to tackle this problem. There is a whole science on this, not only on relationships/sex but also how people perceive their own actions and why sometimes we lie to ourselves to make ourselves feel better. Like saying, you are only dating app to get into a relationship but really you are just looking for sex. If you get a deep understanding on this you will also find ways on how to market your app to potential users and find where your competitors are lacking (Match Group).

JustBelievers - Not really sure what the obsession is with the OnlyFans (in the spirit of a pastor I will tell you that you maybe need some deep introspection on what attracts you so much to the OnlyFans and the sex industry). Drop the OnlyFans angle and you might have a good product, the priests and pastors are already figuring that they need to keep up with technology if they want to retain their followers. Have you talked to your local priest/pastor? Have you gave him an option to test it out? Because for example, our local priest is young and very much into social media. He posts daily on Facebook and Instagram. He probably makes more content on social media than person-to-person and do you know what? Religious people in our area actually love it.

Timechat - not really sure what the idea behind this is or what aspect of human psychology are you targeting with this, so I'm not really going to comment on it.

PhantomChat - good idea, but as you already figured out on your own, there is a ton of competition and the whole shebang with needing to get the ball rolling with users AND the whole idea on how to monetize besides selling your app to Facebook.

CryptoAdults - Great idea. You mentioned that crypto is complicated for people like it is some kind negative thing. I would argue that is a positive thing. You need to do things that others (companies) don't want to do. Everybody wants to make the next big crypto exchange/pyramid scheme/scam coin etc., but so few actually want to work on onboarding people into crypto system. Learn how to efficiently teach users to crypto to pay you and you have a good business. I'm not in any shape or form a crypto fan but sex industry is probably one of the better areas to use it as a payment form. You have business giants like MindGeek and OnlyFans getting railed from behind by credit card processors. Using crypto is one of the ways to bypass that problem.

There is limited amount of information on you, but i'm going to guess that you focus way to much on the tech aspect of business. You need to find how you will bring value, how will you present that value to your users and how are you going to make money of your users. The tech might or might not fit in somewhere along that.

Also being a small market (compared to global) can be advantageous I will give you one example from my country. A guy solo made a competitor to UberEats/DoorDash for the home market. One guy vs 10000 engineers and his app was more successful. He said he was profitable since day 1 of launch and later sold the company for good money to one of the big guys in the deliver sector. You know what he mentioned as the hardest part of the company? The programming? The tech stack? The hosting/microservice/cloud computing/(insert latest fad)? Nope. It was onboarding the restaurants onto the ap. Literally the hardest part was getting off his ass, go to a restaurant, talk to the owner person-to-person and teach/convince him to get the restaurant added to his app so people could order online.

The way I see it. You need to rethink how you approach your projects. Sorry for the long post and if the whole thing came off as too preachy.

I'm absolutely impressed by the quality of your answer and the effort put to reply every non-interesting idea of this list.
Great feedback :D it was really great to read this even though I dropped those projects but maybe I can start a new one as a combination of those
Your ideas look quite bad, honestly. I can't see one that would be motivating to work long term, they all seem very meh. Maybe your problem is the lack of a catchy idea?