Sam, Kevin,

We are building a platform that allows anyone with a mobile phone to earn a living by performing discrete tasks.

Our platform aims to break down complex jobs into easily actionable items, that can be performed easily by anyone, anywhere.

The first vertical we are applying this to is reservations. The Loft Club (https://useloft.com) is a service that makes reservations for you at amazing restaurants every month on your preferred day, saving you the decisions and the hassle. Through our platform, we centralize restaurant recommendations and assignments, before farming out the logistics of making and manging them to our agents.

Our question is: Should we work on building out the generic platform and expand quickly into other verticals, or focus on building out The Loft Club and owning this space first? We've customers paying us for The Loft Club with the mild publicity it has received thus far.

Thanks!

Zhuang and Derrick

Hi Zhuang and Derrick--

I think that 98% of the time, the right answer is to start out and remain focused on one vertical until you take it over. Most startups expand far too early and then fade out everywhere (this is often the fault of bad advice from investors). Facebook started in an extremely small vertical (Harvard undergrads), then expanded to a still-small vertical (US colleges), and then at some point took over the Internet.

Why did you pick this vertical to start with? It seems there are a lot of services helping people get restaurant reservations. The idea of breaking down tasks into small action items and farming them out to people seems good, but this doesn't seem like the most pressing need. What else did you consider as a first vertical?

How many users do you have, how much do they pay you (and how much do you pay the agents per task), and how fast are you growing?

We picked a reservation concierge service first, as it is a vertical that is immediately testable in SF with easy to understand mechanics for consumers. With the increasing mass-media fueled foodie culture, our hypothesis being that people don’t want the trouble of deciding where to eat and making the reservation - they just wanted a curated experience. And that made it a good candidate for our platform.

The other 2 verticals we considered were 1) a marketplace for on-the-ground, region specific collection of data and 2) travel planning in countries with low internet penetration, namely bookings and suggestions by locals.

With Loft, we have 20 customers paying us $10 ~ $20 a month, but we haven’t grown beyond that due to limited marketing, as we focus on nailing the operations side of platform. The agents are currently just the both of us, and we can afford $10 - $15 an hour per agent if our economics hold.

All in all, we have our vision of what the future of jobs can be. Loft is an experiment towards that which has seen mild traction, and that’s why we really want your advice!

If the main thing you want to prove out is that you can build a platform where small tasks can be easily farmed out (which again, sounds like a really good idea), I'm very unsure this is the right way to start. It's well established that you can get people to make restaurant reservations for you.

The best companies do something either fundamentally new or 10x better than existing solutions.

As you think about the future of the world, what can't people do today that they should be able to and that your platform could allow?

Thanks Sam, really enlightening points.

I realize we might have actually gone about it the wrong way. From a consumer perspective, that’s where we were struggling to find a niche to start off with. Our long term goal is to enable people to buy services from anyone in the world, no matter how small or large (i.e. reservations, travel), and it’s on us to make it actionable by as broad an workforce as possible.

We felt we had to prove out the concept of farming out discrete tasks in a straightforward niche like the concierge-space, as opposed to perhaps a white labeled platform. That probably wasn’t the right approach, and we’d appreciate your thoughts on this.

I still think picking an initial niche is a good one, but ideally you'd pick one that represents a complex task that is easier to get done in broken-down subsets, and that customers don't have an easy way to get done today.

Gotcha, that's a really good way of putting it. And I agree that reservations as tasks are not the way to go to prove the concept out.

Seems like we have quite a bit of thinking to do. Any further advice for us? Thanks!

i know of a company doing something similar in hong kong. their niche is to get people in various locations aggregate data from brands by going to retail stores and take photos of their products. each user gets 3-10usd for doing this and the brands save on sending expensive people to each location.

You're assuming that the time/money spent working on web literacy at Mozilla can just be taken and thrown at Firefox to make it better. I disagree, and think that web literacy is a good direction to put some effort towards as it relates pretty directly to our manifesto.

All the major browser vendors (except maybe Apple) are doing similar things, like https://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/Beginners (created by MS/Google/Opera) and http://www.html5rocks.com/ (run by Google). Does that make them "disconnected" too?

They are:

https://github.com/servo/servo

> this just shows how disconnected Mozilla has become from the web in general

Seriously?! How did you arrive at this conclusion?

If they are doing their best to make a great platform (Firefox, and the web in general), doesn't it make sense to tell people how to use it? I refer to the MDN all the time for JS and CSS documentation, and documentation is a necessary part of living in a software ecosystem. I would rather have people studying from MDN than W3Schools.

they're working on servo(written in rust) as pointed out already, but firefox continues to be the choice for power users, no other browser allows the same level of addons and being so customizable

also, you don't sell your soul to google as a plus

The landing page doesn't tell me what this does at all. I get that it does alerts that somehow get onto the apple watch, but nothing else.

"Discover our channels" --> what are channels?

Ah ok after watching the video I get a much better idea of how to use the app. I'm curious to know how many people actually click on the video to watch it. IMHO good direct copy on the landing page is worth more than a video hidden behind a click.

You're totally right. Let's change it :)

Awesome I see you changed the copy :)

Can I suggest you change the headline to "Discover our alerts - subscribe and get notified on your Apple Watch!"?

We are thinking on removing the watch from that image as people may think its "just for watch" (whatever that means). What do you think?

Scrolling with the mousewheel is funky in Chrome. Hate when websites hijack the scroll event and misuse it.

Looks like someone took "mousewheel" a little too literally.

    $(document).bind('mousewheel', function(event, delta) {
        if(delta > 0) {
            upPage();
        } else {
            downPage();
        }
    });

This is the first time a product page has made me want to complain on HN about hijacking the scroll event. I just cmd+f'd for "hijack" and knew I'd find other grumblers here.

I abandoned the website in less than 20 seconds as I couldn't navigate the page below on Chrome.

While it sucks, why didn't you just try the arrow keys? Works perfectly fine.

Perhaps because there's a dozen ways to scroll a web page and we shouldn't have to try every method until we find one that works?

I'm not defending their decision, it sucks that they did it like this.

But reading the comments, people seem genuinely interested in the product but leave the page because they think it is "impossible" to navigate it? Come on..

How many ways to scroll a webpage are there anyway? Wheel/trackpad, space and key down. Are there more? Even if there is, these are the ones you'll obviously try first.

Page up/down, the scroll bar, click-and-drag to select and scroll are three more off the top of my head.

Also, in the land of UX, your "obviously" is not always everybody else's.

Fair enough, although I'd still imagine the arrow down goes before any of those for most people.

Most programmers, perhaps.

I'd actually pin that on most non-programmers. Arrow down is the most intuitive as far as I've seen. I've never seen anyone not "tech proficient" use anything else anyway.

Same. Awesome looking watch, but after trying to scroll up and down a few times I was like welp guess I won't be finding out more about this watch! Impossible to find out what's in the middle of the site

Me too. Which is a shame because the watch looks nice (for a smart watch). It seems like something that an adult could intentionally wear in public, unlike many of these gadgets.

I thought they had done a good job with scrolling because I was using the arrow keys, then I tried mousewheeling on a magic mouse and I kept flying to the top/bottom.

only if you are used to scrolling with a keyboard, most people use mouse or trackpad though

scrolling on my trackpad is whacky too. terrible experience. Have to use arrows. worst page i've ever seen

Same with Firefox and OS X. A tiny move and I am down at the bottom.

Same with Chrome!

Same on Firefox. Just using arrow keys till fad fades.

PS: Remember how magic* was praised for simplicity of home page? Yeah, we are getting there. I guess.

* http://www.getmagicnow.com

At the arrows work...

I like the idea of a style guide. Looks a lot like an internal Twitter Bootstrap.

Yeah. For a startup it could make sense to start with bootstrap and add a couple patterns/tweaks on top of it rather than re-inventing everything. Similar to what we do in Python.. Pep-8 but X,Y,Z.

Same. Stylesheets can become sprawling messes as you gain more developers who may not be aware of what's already in there. Plus, this makes on-boarding so much easier.

I love how Apple takes common sense (in retrospect) to extreme levels. Not only do they do that well, they excel in thinking out of the box, for the simplest of things. Color me impressed.

adding a testimonial from the paralyzed man and any other satisfied customers on your front page might go a long way to show how your app can be useful to certain niche markets.

I don't see why this should be controversial, it's so easy to switch to Haml, Sass or jQuery when you need/want to. The defaults are there to get the uninitiated off the ground as quickly as possible, and is in keeping with the 'rails way'.

I, on the other hand, have my 'own way', and rails doesn't in any way prevent me from implementing that when I start a new rails project.

Forrst has been a source of inspiration for my work ever since I started using it. Honestly some of the designs I see there are so polished and refined that it makes me (a developer trying to improve on my design skills) feel downright design-dumb sometimes.

Congrats Kyle!