Tell HN: My startup is failing, I need advice.
It's throwaway account, my regular account has a decent 3 digit karma.<p>It’s been 10 months that we are working on our startup and it never gained traction that we would like to see. It’s a social web application. Me and my co-founder are really good friends, we started working on this idea, just after college. We had couple of good offers to join, but we decided to do our own startup. We’ve read all the essay's of PG, we have the hacker’s attitude. We’ve worked our asses off, we got one funding offer as well, but that was too low to do anything, we are based out of India. We’ve all the latest technology stack, djang/jquery/orbited/apachemq and all. We’ve learned a lot of things during these 10 months, I’ve became a different person altogether, from a college kid to an entrepreneur, have came a long way.<p>Coding, testing, deploying, releasing, going to the crowd, iterating, we have learned this all. I’ve worked upon everything, from django to UI/UX, making banners to videos, PR to marketing, support to sales, everything. It’s been a wonderful life so far. I wouldn’t have learned all these things, had it been a regular job after college. I am so grateful for myself and my co-founder for letting me work on all these, all these months.<p>It’s been an emotional roller coaster ride too, many many strange, weird, unimaginable things happened too. We started with very small amount in hand, it was the worst decision among all others. Money started to become a problem of us. But we managed somehow.<p>The story has many twists as well, 3 months back, both of us lost our laptops, yes both of us. It was a painful time. It took us well two weeks to recover from that. We met with so called startup mentors of India, listened all the bad things one could listen, we iterated our product, pivoted again, but it’s a social app, it takes time to take off. Especially, if you are in India ( nothing that I am complaining). We have all the patience an entrepreneur can have. We got covered in national newspapers as well, but nothing big has happened so far.<p>It’s been 10 months. We have simplified our product, removed almost all features, we’ve worked on the design, very hard, it’s come out good now.<p>Lessons that we have learned is, social web app is a saturated market, you are compared with facebook, even if you don’t want, everything can be done by making a facebook app or whatever and you need a lot of good people/networking into the tech world to really get them off the ground. We lack it.<p>Final words, we are not doing good. We are in good state of mind, have taken all the positive things from it, me and my co-founder has a great co-ordination, it’s just that we didn’t pick the right idea or we were too young then. Now, we are at the point that we want to take some decision, whether to move on, do something else or to stick on it for some more time.<p>Personally, I am thinking of working at a startup in SV. The biggest thing I lack is exposure, contacts and the experience of working in a real startup environment. I am not really sure, if that is even possible. But I really want to make things move fast from here on.<p>I need advice from fellow hackers.