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Ask HN: How to get users/traffic who are actually interested in this webapp?

5 points by oms2010 ↗ HN
Hi HN,

I've launched a web application earlier this week called www.organizemysearch.com

The idea is to let users organize things like used car searches, apartment rental searches, or other types of searches they do online.

For example, if someone is looking for a used car, they will go to several different sites and look at various car ads. This website allows them to save all the ads found on different websites (automatically loading all the data). This way the user can more easily see all the ads he is considering and have everything in one place to sort and compare all his/her options.

The problem is I can't figure out what keywords I should use that would actually represent what the application does accurately, which is "a tool for organizing your online searches" (eg. organize your used car searches, organize your apartment rental searches, organize your search for 'blueberry muffins',etc)

I would like to optimize the site so people who are actually looking for such a tool will find it easier in search engines, but I'm not sure what approach I should take. I don't even know what category this web application falls into?

Most searches about 'organize' on google are things about physically organizing your garage, home, garden or apartment. And anything with 'search' in it gives very generic or non related results in google searches.

Example of some keywords I've tried:

organize search [very generic, most google results are articles about seo and search engines] organize car search [1 hit on google] organize appartment rental search [no results] organize shopping items [tons of articles about how to organize your groceries]

Any ideas on how I can better market this web application, or optimize SEO for this website so I can attract people who are actually looking for such a tool?

16 comments

[ 200 ms ] story [ 1084 ms ] thread
JarekS
Excuse my buzz word but I think the only way you can make it spread is to embed a virus. One of the things you can do is to enable user to share his search with friends/family over facebook, twitter etc. They could help him adding additional elements to the search (i.e. if they find something on the web that user is looking for they can submit a link), or give other advice.

SEO will not work - as it didn't work for Dropbox. Nobody is waking up one day and start searching for such a tool that you provide.

oms2010
"Excuse my buzz word but I think the only way you can make it spread is to embed a virus".

I guess I can't take that as a compliment, but will acknowledge much room for improvement of the website :)

As for SEO, I'm not just looking to optimize it for SEO as the main method of 'putting it out there', but rather looking to figure out ways to market it and place it in it's niche (which I'm still not sure of).

imp
I'm not sure who your target audience is. I've searched for apartments, a car, and a house. Every time I used a spreadsheet to keep track of those things and it worked great. From my quick look at your site, that's all you really seem to be offering. I'm not sure what extra value you're adding.
getonit
That you used a spreadsheet puts you in an incredibly small minority. His target audience is going to be those that can see (or will instantly recognise when shown) the benefits of such, but without the motivation to take on the hassle(1) of organising it themselves - people who keep it in their heads, or scribble on whatever scraps of paper etc. they have to hand.

Take the endless 'to-do list' type sites as a comparison: They basically offer nothing (or are not generally used for anything) that couldn't be handled by a carrying around a small notepad with a pen shoved down the spine.

(1) Minor hassle it may be, but magnitude means nothing to a great many people.

imp
I may be in the minority (not incredibly small though), but if someone isn't comfortable using a spreadsheet, they're probably not going to be comfortable using a web app either. Spreadsheets are pretty ubiquitous.
getonit
I didn't mean comfort (although I suspect that it may come into it more than you give credit for).

I meant hassle; effort - should I just scribble notes, or will I spend a couple of minutes thinking about what info I want to record before I see it on screen? I could knock up a quick spreadsheet of the relevant comparison points pretty quickly, but I wouldn't bother if there was a pen and paper in sight. If I already had a spreadsheet that I'd used previously, though, I'd use it again. I'd use the website in question if it was equivalent to that, and free. (Sorry OP, I can't think of anything you could add that would make it worth coughing up for, for me at least.)

It's fickle, sure, and it's a very minor difference in effort. That's what people do when they're not really giving much thought to what they're doing, IMHO and IMHE.

oms2010
I hear you, and thanks for the feedback.

The idea of this webapp however is to do things more than that. You could say some people prefer using even bookmarks or in my case sometimes I used to use notepad for keeping track of car ads for example.

But the websites has some advantages.

1) It parses out data for you automatically [unlike excel or notepad], like car mileage, color, price, etc (or in the case of other types of searches - parses out relevant information like monthly rent, number of bedrooms,etc) (which allows the user to really sort and compare all the options)

2) With future enhancements it will automatically detect ads which have expired from everything you saved (not easily done with bookmarks)

3) Also it can be accessed anywhere, being a web application

4) But most importantly it saves one time to look through everything, eg. all options.

For people who really take their time to make decisions when buying certain items like a used car, an apartment rental, or something else, it would be useful to be able to really compare everything you found for things like best price or lowest mileage across all ads you found from different websites.

Try doing that in notepad or with bookmarks and it quickly sucks up your time (which was one of my main personal motivations for creating it).

imp
Cool, sounds like you have a lot of features there. I didn't know about the parsing part. What I would love is if you would poll those sites daily and then alert me whenever a car of a certain model is listed for a specific mileage and price. That would be amazing. It sounds like you have the parsing part already done.
oms2010
Yeah. The parsing works for websites that are 'monitored' by organizemysearch.com (and more will be added as the website grows). So if you paste in a car ad url from cars.com it will parse the basic info for you (eg. mileage, price, make, model, etc).

The advantage here is the user can add their own fields which they think are relevant to a car search. So someone could add something like "my comfort level in the backseat" and anytime they add another car ad they could specify something like 'good','average','bad' which will be associated with that car ad so in the end they can sort things very easily and weigh their options better.

As for your alert idea, I can see that being an add-on product perhaps. However I know that most of the major new/used car websites provide alerting capabilities based on certain criteria, so that functionality may already exist.

apowell
Perhaps you could work with some of the classified sites themselves (start with smaller ones) to add an "Organize My Search" widget. Pitch it as a way for them to increase engagement and drive more return visits.

Also, many car enthusiast forums have "Cars for Sale" sections, and they're utter disasters. It would be valuable to be able to save those listings easily (bookmarklet?). A little word-of-mouth campaign on a forum can go a long way, and you can kick it off with a forum sponsorship with commercial posting rights.

(Side Note: The question in your header is implied -- don't state it, just answer it.)

oms2010
Yeah, I was thinking about the car forums approach actually, but the widget idea is a good too. Thanks for the feedback.
adam-_-
By the way, the homepage is bit of a mess on Safari + Mac (I know you're not asking for that kind of feedback but yeh...).

Side-scrolling main frame thing is just awkward. Some of the images overlap as well.

I don't think this is something that people will know they need, or at least, not know what to call. So approaching potential customers through forums, reviews on relevant blogs, widgets/partnerships sounds like a reasonable route to take.

oms2010
Thanks for pointing that out. I have rushed a bit through the css part in order to get it out there, otherwise bugs and ideas keep piling up and you never release (even small apps like this).

I have planned to switch to Blueprint css framework to simplify the design part (design is not my strong point).

rlpb
Your problem is that people don't know that they would find your product useful until they have it. Who is actually going to be looking for your tool?

Drew Houston has talked about this in respect to Dropbox (http://www.justin.tv/startuplessonslearned/b/262672510) - who knew they needed Dropbox until they found out about it? USB sticks and email work just fine, right?

I have exactly the same issue with Synctus - VPNs and Terminal Services work just fine, right?

What you need to do is find a channel. People who are already in the business for whom your product is a value-add.

For example: for Synctus, I am reselling through IT professionals - the people who might recommend and install VPNs and Terminal Services for their customers.

In your case, you might see if you can approach specialist car search and real estate search sites - if you can work out something that you can give them which will add value to their service too.

famfam
I think you're a feature. A perhaps sorely missed feature, but still a feature. I agree trying to drive traffic is hopeless. You need to find partners that want to embed your functionality. You shouldn't be a destination, you should be a service for destinations.