What kinds of Show HNs are you asking about? What do you mean by how is a site doing?
My Show HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14778497) made it to the homepage, but I don't think its what you're asking about. My site is just a personal site with random content so its no different than before my post.
I messed up my wrists from typing/mousing too much a number of years ago, so I spent a couple years working at a grocery store while building a new kind of text editor meant for efficiently writing code with motion sensors (e.g. Leap Motion, Kinect). It made it to the front page here, which was an interesting experience, but my end game with the project was basically, "get far enough, post to HN and the world will see how cool this is, and somehow you'll be able to continue working on it"—and that did not materialize.
Sorry about your wrists, I also suffer from RSI issues; recently I have started using voicecode which has allowed me to use voice for about 80% of my coding/computer use instead of typing/mousing. You might want to check it out?
It does have a large learning curve, is not cheap (Dragon + voicecode) and currently runs on Mac only (windows/linux in the pipeline), I am using that in conjunction with SmartNav for mousing.
Thanks house9-2. I briefly tried Dragon like six years ago and didn't have a very good experience with it—though I imagine it's improved since then. Probably the bigger issue for me though is that I just don't personally like speaking as an interface to coding. SmartNav looks cool. IIRC I looked into it way back when but it was prohibitively expensive for me, though I might be thinking of something else.
I'm mostly just using mouse/keyboard now, but I have learned some things about how to do it. Partly it's about not freaking out about things—seems like the added tension makes it a lot worse. That has been much more difficult than I can describe briefly here, but it was important at least in my case. Additionally, having some mindfulness about how I was feeling physically at the computer and letting that direct break-taking has been very useful. Same with various stretching/yoga things I do regularly. I spent a lot of time learning/practicing meditation in order to getter better, unadulterated feedback about physical problems (and to help stay relaxed while computing). It's interesting how oblivious we can be to discomforts from posture etc., and how automatic correcting them can be once you just tune in.
Anyway, I'm still not fully recovered either, but computing is a much more pleasant thing these days than it has been for many years.
I switched to the DVORAK layout some years ago. And I engage my foot pedal programmed to "copy" and "paste" when those operations get heavy during a large refactor or something. I also switch between an "Adesso iMouse E1" and a "Countour Roller Mouse Free2" to mix it up.
Unfortunately there's no shortcut to it. They basically follow the principles outlined by Dr. Sarno that has treated RSI patients as if RSI is a real physical malady with psychogenic origins.
My Show HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14782936) made it to the front page 7 days ago and stayed there for a couple of hours. We got 70 downloads and some very good feedback.
We are consistently getting a good rating in Play Store [1] and thanks to HN we now have around 50 daily active users playing 75-100 games. Meanwhile, we are developing the features that were suggested in the comments and we felt are required.
The traffic bump and feedback was motivating and helpful to know I was on the right track with my content. I also learned there are some comments you just need to ignore and focus on your own vision :)
edit: my traffic was lower than I originally remembered, it was ~5k per month, not 25k in mid-2014
That's amazing. I would love to connect with you on Twitter if you would have the time. But since we are not following each other, I cannot send any messages. I am growing my blog similar to yours, but it is an personal blog though.
A project I'm working on, Gridmaster, hit the frontpage of HN back in November. The traffic and mailing list signups were nice, but the product feedback we got was way more valuable.
It helped us realize that a web-based version of our "CodeAcademy for Excel" product wasn't going to cut it. We built an integrated version that actually lives inside of Excel and won a contest with Microsoft.
Submitted my Show HN 1075 days ago (https://photoeditor.polarr.co/), for a WebGL photo editing tool, now has turned into a startup with more than 10M users.
Just wanted to let you know that your website is shown to me in very badly translated Dutch, personally I'd rather have correct English than bad Dutch, but I don't see a way to change it.
Same thing in French. inexplicably, "key" (I suppose) is translated not as "touche" (or wrongly but understandably as "clef") but as "robinet" ("sink tap").
Oh I just got it. The original in some other language probably is equivalent to the verb "press", translated to "tap", then to "robinet" which is comically absurd.
Yeah, I didn't think they were literally using Roman numerals to describe their user base; I thought they were using the "10M == 10,000, 10MM == 10,000,000" notation that is (for some reason) popular with financial-type people[1].
But anyway, I was wrong; I poked around on the site and they indicate they really do have millions of users. So: wow, nice work!
I had 3 of my "Show HN" hit the front page. I have stats about 2 of them. They had a huge spike at the start, but the current traffic is more correlated with SEO and backlinks rather than the initial influx of visitors.
My actual most visited website is one that has hit the front page, but not because of my "Show HN".
I felt it was easier to read and understand, since the "is-" or "has-" clearly shows it's a modifier class, and not a base class.
Also, it prevents the namespace from being "polluted" by class names that could be used for other things. For example, there's a "box" element, and a "is-boxed" modifier for the "navbar".
Lastly, the same modifier class can be used on different elements, since they are specific to the context in which they're used.
Two things my team announced on Show HN appeared on the home page for a day or so.
MindMup (https://www.mindmup.com), an online mind mapping tool appeared in 2013, and got a nice traffic bump that day, it took about two years to reach that level of regular traffic. the site now gets between 400 and 500k visits monthly during busy school periods (seems to be mostly used by educational users), and grows around 5% per month.
ClaudiaJS (https://claudiajs.com) is an open source tool that helps deploy Node.js projects to AWS Lambda and API Gateway easily. Originally built for MindMup, we decided to spin it off as a separate open source tool. It appeared on HN about a year ago, and according to NPM stats now has roughly 85K downloads.
Result: About 50,000 visits to the web site, which then averaged about 1000 visits a day. Not much repeat traffic from those visits, but the daily traffic is now about 1200 visits a day.
The traffic spike, remained a spike and didn't continue long. But it gained a few regular users. I run my own blog with HexoPress (http://hexopress.com).
Led to a large traffic spike, and attention from a company that would acquire it roughly 18 months later. The team has grown from 3 to 100+, with over 1m registered users. Although the domain has changed and it looks like nobody bothered to keep the original registered (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
Submitted MidiWriterJS about a year and a half ago (https://github.com/grimmdude/MidiWriterJS). I think the majority of the stars and usage it gets came because of that.
I use WakaTime A LOT. I wish there would be more functionality and an ergonomy though - are you focusing mainly on new platforms now? Things like email reports could use some refreshing! Keep up good work!
Thanks for the feedback... the report emails are almost 4 years old now so could definitely use a refresher. I personally prefer emails without images, but would you want charts as images in the report emails?
Anything really that is an improvement from "You have not reached your goal. You need to code more" or something along those lines. Any graph or even a summary would be an awesome improvement!
Posted in November 2016. Got a ton of traffic for about three days (~20k users/day). Now DAU is around 10-15. More a side-project type site, never was intended as a business.
I posted http://moviemagnet.co (movie torrent search engine) awhile back, it was removed from Google search results and still receive a steady 2k+ visitors a day.
tl/dr: HN provided a nice boost, but websites don't grow if you don't feed them.
Backstory: ~5 years ago I started driving a taxi, for fun & adventure & freedom. And to support myself, while trying to figure out how to finish recovering from a head injury [1]. After 8 days I made an account on kuro5hin.org (k5) & started blogging about my experiences.
At first I was just trolling k5 user "Zombie Jesus Christ", who had grand ambitions to help people, but was handicapped by a history of mercury poisoning -> mental illness. My point in being 'TaxiCabJesus' on k5 was to show that it's the little things that count. After a 3.5 years I'd learned a lot about what people actually experience (which I hadn't appreciated due to my upper-middle-class upbringing), and was forced into retiring from the taxi driving gig...
One day kuro5hin.org went away. K5's absentee founder Rusty hadn't prepared for a datacenter move, and the site was lost. I posted in HN submission RIP kuro5hin that my story "Electronic Taxi Dispatch, v1.0" was last to post [2], and one of you responded that you appreciated my k5 submissions & encouraged me to re-post them at a site of my own.
I still intend to write a Taxi Wars trilogy: A New Hope, The Vultures Strike Back, and Return of the Drivers. I also have some other stories to tell. Retrospectively I realized that I was learning about the various 'predicaments' that people find themselves experiencing. Draft titles include:
The Predicament of 'old people' /
Ordinary Rendition: The Public Servants' Quagmire /
the predicaments of doctors and patients
I joined Toastmasters several months ago. Recently I gave a speech that's based the 'predicaments of doctors and patients'. It went over pretty well, which was motivation to work on my little site...
We got some awesome customers (including some big names) from our HN launch, and it kickstarted out growth. If I remember correctly, we finished out the week at about $4k MRR... nothing compared to now, but at the time it felt awesome to be making money.
We've come a long way since then, but our Show HN was a great way to kick things off!
I've really been interested in ReadMe because it fills such a simply yet extremely important need for developers. Would you be willing to ever do one of those Indie Hacker posts [0]?
Also, question: is ReadMe no longer free to Open Source projects? I see reference in your docs that say that ReadMe is free for Open Source projects [1] but on your current pricing page [2] I don't see any reference to the free-open source version.
Hey! I've been using ReadMe FOSS and had no idea that you were a show HN project. Congrats on your success! Super, super happy with it and love using it! Thank you!
They're one of our licensees (of BeeLine Reader), and sometimes people send us customer support requests because they think they're owned by us. I had no idea there was a different ReadMe, but I suppose it's not surprising.
Presumably since you're in different markets, you can each own your respective trademarks?
Hi Gregory, I love your startup and documentation, I am doing https://serverjs.io/documentation/ right now and launched https://documentation.agency/ in the past (but didn't actually have time at that moment to follow up on the requests). I am thinking on applying there.
Subscribers increasing slowly but steadily. ShowHN didn't lead to any direct sales as far as our reporting shows but doing a "ShowHN" is something of an internal milestone for us and the comments have been interesting a good motivational boost. Hopefully have more to Show HN in the future!
I had a few i think. One for example ascii.li which front paged twice. It's just a stupid content site so traffic died again but for a week or more I got thousands of users and plenty backlinks.
Most of the Show HNs on HN's front page get there organically. Sometimes we see ones that fell through the cracks and put them in the second-chance queue (described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 and links back from there) or email repost invites.
As lwansbrough said, a small number of reposts is explicitly ok (this is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). Reposts aren't a good thing per se (and can drive the, shall we say, detail-oriented segment of the community crazy sometimes), but it's worse for good submissions to fall through the cracks, so we make the tradeoff that way.
Edit: Taking a quick look at your post, I think you may be falling into some of the traps that prevent a project from attracting attention here: for example, the "I can't tell what this does" problem, and the fact that the intellectually interesting details aren't up front, so curiosity isn't engaged in the first couple seconds. Take a look at
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14841231, which are some tips that we send to YC startups and HN users who email us.
From my experience, things I used to submit 5-7 years ago got to the front page organically. Literally nothing I submit now gets to the front page, and you can see the wide variety of things in my profile, including SHOW HN, ASK HN, etc.
Now one can say that they were just all things that shouldn't have hit the front page, but these days I really believe that you need to ask a few HNers to upvote something for it to hit the front page. I think it's a dirty little secret of reddit and HN. Perhaps it can be fixed with algorithms somehow, but I am not sure how.
PS: there was one exception when I made a clickbait title with the word "hacked" in it, like a year ago. That hit the front page organically.
I tend to look at HN comments before following a link. As was pointed out by someone else, the web is suffering from an obesity crisis, and I check the comments to see if anyone said anything interesting before risking a visit to the link.
As for your submission, I have no idea what problem it's supposed to solve, and I'm not inclined to "sign up" to try to figure it out. I think screenshots or other graphics to 'show' what your site does would be helpful.
So I clicked on the link in your post in safari on Sierra, and it's literally a blank page. I was curious so I opened the developer console and it says:
"app.initialize is not a function (in app.initialize({"api":"https:\/\/api.visualtip.com","key":"db4430ab8da22455511f9b26963a7151835ef5471b82"});"
I haven't the slightest idea what that means, but would have expected to at least see some sort of header or un-styled text rather than absolutely nothing!
It definitely seems like there's quite a bit of luck in getting to the front page - submitting at the right time when people who would be interested happen to be looking at 'new' and feeling like upvoting. It's definitely worth resubmitting a few times (at tactically advantageous times of day).
That said, you might want to add a few sentences describing VisualTips, and maybe the backstory, on your submission. A lot of people click into the comments to get a bit more context and decide whether or not they actually want to click into the submitted item itself.
Also, it would be helpful to have some kind of visual description on your homepage. I have a pretty good image in my mind from the text, but for such a _visual_ product it would be really helpful to see screenshots or, even better, a gif of it in action. Those visuals would likely help people get more excited about it.
I would recommend a total redesign of your front page. It sounds like it could be a great tool, but I have literally no impression of it from clicking on any of the non-gated links on your site.
The basic info on https://visualtip.com/tour is closer to what you need on the homepage. But visual-focused instead of text. And absolutely reduce the noise on the page by getting rid of meaningless text such as
"Security: We take security very seriously and have taken measures to protect our customer's data"
and the Deiter Rams quote which looks like a user endorsement needs to go too.
I agree. I clicked to the front page and I see something about annotating images, but then also something about users... and I just don't really get what it does without reading the whole page. The company name is also not very illuminating.
The tour page however tells me almost instantly that it's meant to get feedback on designs (even if that is only made clear in step three out of three). Now going back to the front page, those three steps are there as well, except they're shown as three separate features of the product instead of logical steps (I didn't make that connection) and the "You, the designer" part puts the "so what's that about clients/customers" in place.
Then again, I often feel like I'm thick-witted so take it for what you will. Or perhaps where you link from (e.g. link text / ad text / the search query they entered) gives enough context for them to get it.
199 comments
[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 251 ms ] threadMy Show HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14778497) made it to the homepage, but I don't think its what you're asking about. My site is just a personal site with random content so its no different than before my post.
Project: http://symbolflux.com/projects/tiledtext [video]
Original Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5306155
Sorry about your wrists, I also suffer from RSI issues; recently I have started using voicecode which has allowed me to use voice for about 80% of my coding/computer use instead of typing/mousing. You might want to check it out?
It does have a large learning curve, is not cheap (Dragon + voicecode) and currently runs on Mac only (windows/linux in the pipeline), I am using that in conjunction with SmartNav for mousing.
- http://voicecode.io/
I'm mostly just using mouse/keyboard now, but I have learned some things about how to do it. Partly it's about not freaking out about things—seems like the added tension makes it a lot worse. That has been much more difficult than I can describe briefly here, but it was important at least in my case. Additionally, having some mindfulness about how I was feeling physically at the computer and letting that direct break-taking has been very useful. Same with various stretching/yoga things I do regularly. I spent a lot of time learning/practicing meditation in order to getter better, unadulterated feedback about physical problems (and to help stay relaxed while computing). It's interesting how oblivious we can be to discomforts from posture etc., and how automatic correcting them can be once you just tune in.
Anyway, I'm still not fully recovered either, but computing is a much more pleasant thing these days than it has been for many years.
http://www.rsi.deas.harvard.edu
http://www.rsi.deas.harvard.edu/mb_what_is.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=ErgonomicNotes&type=comment
Unfortunately tools like the Jouse3 mouth-operated mouse cost too much to be experiments.
We are consistently getting a good rating in Play Store [1] and thanks to HN we now have around 50 daily active users playing 75-100 games. Meanwhile, we are developing the features that were suggested in the comments and we felt are required.
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.buildmyvoc... - Two-Player Vocabulary Game
The traffic bump and feedback was motivating and helpful to know I was on the right track with my content. I also learned there are some comments you just need to ignore and focus on your own vision :)
edit: my traffic was lower than I originally remembered, it was ~5k per month, not 25k in mid-2014
It helped us realize that a web-based version of our "CodeAcademy for Excel" product wasn't going to cut it. We built an integrated version that actually lives inside of Excel and won a contest with Microsoft.
I talk a little more about what happened here:
https://medium.com/gridmaster/what-weve-been-up-to-since-hit...
I got a camera recently and have been debating whether or not to get Adobe's photographer package. Currently I just use Lightroom mobile.
Now I'm thinking I'll probably go with this. It looks really good!
Perhaps because I used it on my mobile phone.
Is this still the case?
"M" is one of those fundamentally ambiguous type of abbreviations that really shouldn't ever be used. (Kind of like nn/nn/nn date formats.)
It is commonly used to mean both "thousand" (M was the Roman numeral for 1000) and "million" (10K, 10M, 10B).
Why not? 10M seems the obvious.
I think andrewstuart was asking what qualified as a "user": how many were active, how much they engaged, etc.
But anyway, I was wrong; I poked around on the site and they indicate they really do have millions of users. So: wow, nice work!
[1]: https://www.accountingcoach.com/blog/what-does-m-and-mm-stan...
My actual most visited website is one that has hit the front page, but not because of my "Show HN".
[1] http://jgthms.com/web-design-in-4-minutes/
[2] http://cssreference.io/
[3] http://htmlreference.io/
[4] http://bulma.io/
Also, it prevents the namespace from being "polluted" by class names that could be used for other things. For example, there's a "box" element, and a "is-boxed" modifier for the "navbar".
Lastly, the same modifier class can be used on different elements, since they are specific to the context in which they're used.
Just started migrating a new website, https://devel.tech, from Bootstrap 4 + mdbootstrap pro to bulma (https://devel.tech/site/updates#id15)
Far simpler markup. Better whitespacing / balance. Less javascript.
A good compromise in framework size to features.
MindMup (https://www.mindmup.com), an online mind mapping tool appeared in 2013, and got a nice traffic bump that day, it took about two years to reach that level of regular traffic. the site now gets between 400 and 500k visits monthly during busy school periods (seems to be mostly used by educational users), and grows around 5% per month.
ClaudiaJS (https://claudiajs.com) is an open source tool that helps deploy Node.js projects to AWS Lambda and API Gateway easily. Originally built for MindMup, we decided to spin it off as a separate open source tool. It appeared on HN about a year ago, and according to NPM stats now has roughly 85K downloads.
I've been using MindMup for a few months now and really enjoy it.
Synopsis: Elm arch. in Haskell, but supports isomorphic js
Show HN link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14685677
Status: Still kickin', ~17k views, top 15 repo globally on GH (for a day)
Show HN Link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13983085
Summary: A new diff algorithm
Result: About 50,000 visits to the web site, which then averaged about 1000 visits a day. Not much repeat traffic from those visits, but the daily traffic is now about 1200 visits a day.
Ghostnote https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9145007
I still make good money on Ghostnote and is working on new features plus a new SAAS service.
Weekendhacker https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2563718
This one is alive but not really active. Around 8K users on a mailing list. If anyone want to take over this project pm me.
PinView https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3862889
FinalTouch https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2991206
This was fun to do but just a project we did for fun.
The traffic spike, remained a spike and didn't continue long. But it gained a few regular users. I run my own blog with HexoPress (http://hexopress.com).
Led to a large traffic spike, and attention from a company that would acquire it roughly 18 months later. The team has grown from 3 to 100+, with over 1m registered users. Although the domain has changed and it looks like nobody bothered to keep the original registered (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
Show HN Link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6046227
Status: Still growing, almost 100k users, vibrant leaderboards
Project 2: CLMapper Chrome Extension (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clmapper/omonmigal...)
Show HN Link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4324884
Status: Unmaintained. Reached peak of over 4k users, now under 2k and decreasing
Posted in November 2016. Got a ton of traffic for about three days (~20k users/day). Now DAU is around 10-15. More a side-project type site, never was intended as a business.
tl/dr: HN provided a nice boost, but websites don't grow if you don't feed them.
Backstory: ~5 years ago I started driving a taxi, for fun & adventure & freedom. And to support myself, while trying to figure out how to finish recovering from a head injury [1]. After 8 days I made an account on kuro5hin.org (k5) & started blogging about my experiences.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13123659
At first I was just trolling k5 user "Zombie Jesus Christ", who had grand ambitions to help people, but was handicapped by a history of mercury poisoning -> mental illness. My point in being 'TaxiCabJesus' on k5 was to show that it's the little things that count. After a 3.5 years I'd learned a lot about what people actually experience (which I hadn't appreciated due to my upper-middle-class upbringing), and was forced into retiring from the taxi driving gig...
One day kuro5hin.org went away. K5's absentee founder Rusty hadn't prepared for a datacenter move, and the site was lost. I posted in HN submission RIP kuro5hin that my story "Electronic Taxi Dispatch, v1.0" was last to post [2], and one of you responded that you appreciated my k5 submissions & encouraged me to re-post them at a site of my own.
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11609802
I still intend to write a Taxi Wars trilogy: A New Hope, The Vultures Strike Back, and Return of the Drivers. I also have some other stories to tell. Retrospectively I realized that I was learning about the various 'predicaments' that people find themselves experiencing. Draft titles include:
The Predicament of 'old people' / Ordinary Rendition: The Public Servants' Quagmire / the predicaments of doctors and patients
I joined Toastmasters several months ago. Recently I gave a speech that's based the 'predicaments of doctors and patients'. It went over pretty well, which was motivation to work on my little site...
We got some awesome customers (including some big names) from our HN launch, and it kickstarted out growth. If I remember correctly, we finished out the week at about $4k MRR... nothing compared to now, but at the time it felt awesome to be making money.
We've come a long way since then, but our Show HN was a great way to kick things off!
I've really been interested in ReadMe because it fills such a simply yet extremely important need for developers. Would you be willing to ever do one of those Indie Hacker posts [0]?
Also, question: is ReadMe no longer free to Open Source projects? I see reference in your docs that say that ReadMe is free for Open Source projects [1] but on your current pricing page [2] I don't see any reference to the free-open source version.
[0] https://www.indiehackers.com/
[1] https://readme.readme.io/v2.0/docs/open-source
[2] http://readme.io/pricing/
http://www.readmei.com
They're one of our licensees (of BeeLine Reader), and sometimes people send us customer support requests because they think they're owned by us. I had no idea there was a different ReadMe, but I suppose it's not surprising.
Presumably since you're in different markets, you can each own your respective trademarks?
https://www.construct.net
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13984951
Subscribers increasing slowly but steadily. ShowHN didn't lead to any direct sales as far as our reporting shows but doing a "ShowHN" is something of an internal milestone for us and the comments have been interesting a good motivational boost. Hopefully have more to Show HN in the future!
Not even one upvote though. Do any of these posts get on the homepage organically?
LE: 2nd (and last) try: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14841172
As lwansbrough said, a small number of reposts is explicitly ok (this is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). Reposts aren't a good thing per se (and can drive the, shall we say, detail-oriented segment of the community crazy sometimes), but it's worse for good submissions to fall through the cracks, so we make the tradeoff that way.
Edit: Taking a quick look at your post, I think you may be falling into some of the traps that prevent a project from attracting attention here: for example, the "I can't tell what this does" problem, and the fact that the intellectually interesting details aren't up front, so curiosity isn't engaged in the first couple seconds. Take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14841231, which are some tips that we send to YC startups and HN users who email us.
Here is an example SHOW HN that had all the elemnents you speak of but went nowhere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13474714
Now one can say that they were just all things that shouldn't have hit the front page, but these days I really believe that you need to ask a few HNers to upvote something for it to hit the front page. I think it's a dirty little secret of reddit and HN. Perhaps it can be fixed with algorithms somehow, but I am not sure how.
PS: there was one exception when I made a clickbait title with the word "hacked" in it, like a year ago. That hit the front page organically.
As for your submission, I have no idea what problem it's supposed to solve, and I'm not inclined to "sign up" to try to figure it out. I think screenshots or other graphics to 'show' what your site does would be helpful.
Here is what a sample feedback page looks like: https://visualtip.com/3c5090a169f6b9e955d3b57b9401497b
I don't know but I suspect many users are on mobile devices like me.
"app.initialize is not a function (in app.initialize({"api":"https:\/\/api.visualtip.com","key":"db4430ab8da22455511f9b26963a7151835ef5471b82"});"
I haven't the slightest idea what that means, but would have expected to at least see some sort of header or un-styled text rather than absolutely nothing!
Thank you for the feedback regarding the blank page. It's on our list :)
That said, you might want to add a few sentences describing VisualTips, and maybe the backstory, on your submission. A lot of people click into the comments to get a bit more context and decide whether or not they actually want to click into the submitted item itself.
Also, it would be helpful to have some kind of visual description on your homepage. I have a pretty good image in my mind from the text, but for such a _visual_ product it would be really helpful to see screenshots or, even better, a gif of it in action. Those visuals would likely help people get more excited about it.
The basic info on https://visualtip.com/tour is closer to what you need on the homepage. But visual-focused instead of text. And absolutely reduce the noise on the page by getting rid of meaningless text such as
"Security: We take security very seriously and have taken measures to protect our customer's data"
and the Deiter Rams quote which looks like a user endorsement needs to go too.
The tour page however tells me almost instantly that it's meant to get feedback on designs (even if that is only made clear in step three out of three). Now going back to the front page, those three steps are there as well, except they're shown as three separate features of the product instead of logical steps (I didn't make that connection) and the "You, the designer" part puts the "so what's that about clients/customers" in place.
Then again, I often feel like I'm thick-witted so take it for what you will. Or perhaps where you link from (e.g. link text / ad text / the search query they entered) gives enough context for them to get it.