Orat.io — The Story of a Startup from A-Z
Founder Bernhard Hauser shares insights on seeing his startup from start to finish
Sleighdogs developed an analytics dashboard for Orat.io last winter. To keep up with our current projects, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.
Interview by Alicia Kroell
Don’t read the comments! In theory these threads should foster discussion. In reality: where there could be conversation, there are trolls. But are the trolls to blame? Or the design of comment threads?
Bernhard Hauser equates the chronological stacking of comments to clutter. It’s impossible to track different points of view when hundreds of people are contributing.
Which is why he created Orat.io, a commenting platform designed for straightforward pro/con discussions. A moderator proposes a question and comments are placed in one of two opposing columns. The project started in college as a programming exercise and grew into a Widget favored by Austrian sports blog.
However after four years, Bernhard and his Co-Founder Dave Pichsenmeister realized that they were fighting an uphill battle trying to reach a larger audience. Online comments matured several years ago and bloggers weren’t really looking to improve what they had. The project folded in March and Bernhard and David are now pursuing other projects.
So was it hard to let the Orat.io project go?
No, it was not like ‘today is the last day we can pay any salaries and tomorrow we are going to shut it down.’
I know how startups work and it’s part of the game — projects succeed and the majority actually don’t. -Tweet This
There’s no hard feelings about that. We didn’t lose any money personally but we established a huge network in Berlin. We met interesting new people. We got the chance to work on a product for more than half a year and gained some experience.
In one of the first Orat.io blog posts you wrote about how you weren’t sure what you’d do if the project failed. But you said, “the only thing I know is that I’m coding every day like a pubescent nerd, and that’s really cool.” I really like how sincere that was. I was wondering if that’s something you’ve thought about since or still think is true in some way.
[laughing] Yes, I mean I still have that same opinion now. After having this experience I must say that at any point I’ve been in my life there were some elements I was able to influence — like the people I’m partnering with and the projects I’m working on the features and so on — and some other things were out of my reach.
But in the end you’ll gain experience. You will gain knowledge. You will meet interesting people. This is actually the biggest benefit with startups. -Tweet This
I now have a network in Berlin and I can go back there with a new project and I will know the relevant people there. Thinking about the future, that’s actually worth a lot.
You started Orat.io four years ago as a side project. How did it change over time?
It actually changed significantly. But the core of the product, the structure of pro and con, remained the same… I started it as a platform and tried to get people discussing things there.
When we did community management, like creating new topics every day and inviting people to participate in discussions, it worked. Yet when we stopped doing it we saw a decline in activity in the platform.
We got some early feedback suggesting that bloggers liked the idea of pro and con discussions; however, they wanted them to happen on their blog, so without sending their visitors away. That gave us a strong hint actually: ‘yeah, we should somehow create a plugin or Widget.’
What sort of bloggers were reaching out to you?
First there were tech bloggers, because we knew them from Austria and the startup scene here. And by chance it was sports and football as well.
It turned out those pro and con discussions were working well with very emotional topics. And football and sports are the very best examples for this! We further pursued the strategy of aiming for football and sports blogs and it turned out it went quite well for some time.
Before Orat.io, our customers were using comment plugins like Disqus or even Facebook comments and on average they got two or three comments per post. And after embedding the Orat.io Widget they managed to get 25 to 30 comments on average.
At a peak — this was with a smaller platform, which was really cool — they got over 200 comments after two days. And it was really fun watching that for us since we didn’t expect it to work so well.
Did you have any expectations for how far the Orat.io plugin would go?
Not really, expressed by numbers or so. We tried to figure out some strategies we could use to let the project get bigger. But overall it would be hard as well, since not everyone — first of all you need to know that there is not a big majority out there who are interested in online discussions at all.
We had some good connections to Axel Springer and to all the media outlets that are under their roof in Berlin. It turned out that a lot of companies there were using online comments, yet they were only using them because they had to.
How did you confront that?
We tried to get in touch with bigger companies at Axel Springer and it turned out there were some open ears listening to us. But the thing was back then we were a small company and we had very limited resources. In order to serve a product to a high-profile company and meet their standards we had to put a lot of effort in developing a product, which they would initially test for only two to three days.
It turned out that yes, after half a year we couldn’t pursue our service any longer because we were running out of funds. And we had other projects we were working on. But still, the journey taught us. It was a roller coaster ride. It was really fun working on this project, but as with many other projects they come and go.
Who did you have working directly on the project with you?
It was only David and me. We were a team of two. And from Sleighdogs we were working with Jirka, our one and only freelancer. And it worked quite well. Together with Jonas, and yeah the whole agency — especially Jirka. He developed an AngularJS dashboard connecting with the various APIs of our backend and third party tools.
It was a pleasure working with him because he definitely delivered on time. He was available, I guess, 18 hours a day. And he was always very nice. It was really a pleasure working with him.
What stage was Orat.io at when you came to Sleighdogs?
We had the idea of giving our customers more insights relating to analytics… We wanted to collect more data and visualize it in order to give our customers a more detailed view about how their readers are interacting with the content.
Did it go over well with the bloggers?
We were not able to deploy it on a wide-range of customers because we had other issues to fix, like keeping the service running and delivering high standards. When we were able to launch the analytics and we were running out of funds and we realized we wanted to pursue other projects.
So coming back to the fact that the project had ended, what are some key takeaways?
The one thing we definitely learned is that Orat.io started as a side project, or a hobby project, and it didn’t start with a valid business model in the first place. And this was definitely one of the biggest learnings.
The U.S. and Europe are very different. In the U.S. you can raise a lot of money on only an idea or on a big user base or the traction you’ve got. But in Europe, from my perspective, things are different. That’s good on one side, because we need some different structures. On the other side, we weren’t aware of that. And it turns out that German investors are open to new projects but they want a valid business model. This is something I now deeply appreciate.
Any tips for future entrepreneurs?
To find good startup ideas you have to be an expert in a specific field. You need to not know, but predict the market. -Tweet This
You need to be the first company or do the first project in a field where you are seeing that a niche is being created. I think this is the only way you can get early traction and scale your startup within a couple of months.
Personally, I think every person is an expert in some field. Like cooking vegan dishes. Or you can be an expert in trading card games. Or whatsoever. In this field I’m sure you are the one who knows how this field and how people in the market are developing over time. You have to be ahead of time in some way.
This is what I learned over time: you have to stay lean, you have to be agile. And take feedback into account but have some personal vision on the project as well. So it’s not only about doing what your customers say and using their feedback, but as well speaking for your customers and having a bigger vision to pursue.
What do you want to pursue in your future projects?
When I first started doing web projects I was in the field of B2C and really wanted to create something with a broad audience. But that’s changed. Now I see my expertise, or my field of interests, in online media.
This was my focus with the accelerator as well. I had a lot of fun there, meeting people, being as enthusiastic as I am about online media and how to get the information out about various topics. And let people be up-to-date about what they are interested in. What I really like is working in the field of online communications and online media.
Bernhard writes about his work in digital marketing, UX/UI design, and all things startup on his blog. Follow Bernhard and David on Twitter for information on upcoming projects.
Alicia is the Sleighdogs Storyteller. She interviews the good people surrounding Sleighdogs for the blog, curates our Bits for the Weekend feature, and spreads the word on social media. Follow @alicia_kroell for the treasures she digs up online.
Keep up with the Sleighdogs and the entire pack @Sleighdogs.
