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by danso
4192 days ago
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A truly epic writeup of the building and closing of a startup...and it's especially a must-read for anyone hoping to go into the content-creator/provider route. This is a good line: > Observing the user behaviour we have realised that there is no community feeling in the app. People simply did not share a common interest to create networks with new people they did not know, because everyone had different personal goals in mind (from running a marathon to climbing everest to mastering guitar or cooking skills). We weren’t able to focus ourselves on one direction, let alone focus our users on achieving their dreams. One of the takeaways is that you can't build a business on such lofty, farwaway goals (e.g. users "achieving their dreams"), just as it's a bad idea to live your life with vague dreams ("I want to be the world's most famous scientist!", "I want to be beautiful and marry a beautiful person")...the success stories we know about came through having and reaching step-by-step concrete goals...Facebook's mission may now be to "connect the world", but it started out as a way to better hookup with Harvard co-eds. And with content specifically, you're just at a major, if not crippling disadvantage. Content is not scalable. Either in its creation or its consumption. I love reading great stories once in awhile...but it's not a daily need. I don't build a habit for it. And Epiclist, being just an app as opposed to a website, even when I want to discover great stories, there's more friction to discover those stories via a narrow app like Epiclist than there is by just opening up Facebook/Twitter/Google. |
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This was the first thing I wondered about their product as well, how would you "passively" consume the content others created? Some kind of integration with normal content channels (weekly e-mail, matched to personal interests, or the option to follow individual feeds of others) would be necessary for me to keep interacting with it. Just another app I might look at every few months and go "hey, this was cool", browse a bit and forget again.
How to make money from it is a whole other problem, I didn't get from the article what the plan was for that.