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Commerce · December 19, 2013

KO

Killed our 6-month old photo startup, and this came out of it

My co-founder and I saved up enough money to quit our jobs 6 months ago and go full-time. We began working on, while bootstrapping, a photo sharing startup. Unfortunately, after many iterations, it wasn't working well enough and we decided to kill it. However, through that process, we conducted a lot of user tests and interviews, and realized that finding users to test is a pretty hard problem. That's why we made Gemba, Japanese for "the real place", which is a service that connects companies to testers on demand for in-person interviews. URL: http://gemba.me Would love your…

Killed our 6-month old photo startup, and this came out of it launched on December 19, 2013 with 34 votes, #400 of 927 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches.

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In plain words

Gemba is a service that connects companies with testers for on-demand in-person user interviews. It was created by founders who discovered during their photo startup work that recruiting users for testing was a significant bottleneck. The service addresses this pain point by streamlining the process of finding qualified testers for product research and validation, helping companies conduct user research more efficiently.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

In the maker’s words, at launch

My co-founder and I saved up enough money to quit our jobs 6 months ago and go full-time. We began working on, while bootstrapping, a photo sharing startup. Unfortunately, after many iterations, it wasn't working well enough and we decided to kill it. However, through that process, we conducted a lot of user tests…

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Source: Show HN post ↗ · launch text quoted in part

Launched alongside, December 2013

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