Ask HN: How do you measure the success of your web app?

I would look at how many repeat visitors, how many people share it with another person, and ultimately how many people pay for it. Cause people vote with $ and make a commitment.

I consider people spontaneously tweeting or blogging about it to be huge. I know it may seem trite, and as everyone loves to point out, it's not revenue, BUT it does mean they are putting their own reputation on the line that their friends will like it.

I also have metrics within my app itself. Like out of the people who want to signed up, how many completed useful chunk in the application. Out of those, how many took the next step. So far I haven't spent too much time looking at bounce rate and repeat visitor rate, but those are valuable metrics too.

I also use UserVoice and it's been really great. A lot of people have taken the time to post something (and that in itself tells me a lot about how people feel about it) and their comments feed me energy to keep going and making improvements.

I also put my email address right on the account page (at least during the beta period) and invite people to email me feedback. A lot of them do that too and I always respond and get some sort of useful feedback (beyond just a bug report).

Paying customers is the best measure of success for me. Feedback is good, but I find that it's very hard to get feedback. I'm in a boring B2B market, so there is less people talking about it.

Returning paying customers, that is the gold standard.

I lauched my app over a month ago (http://www.moreofit.com). I slapped on Google Analytics to monitor traffic amount and sources, and submitted my site to Google Webmaster Tools, which has indexed several thousand pages so far. (I also suggest you use mouseflow.com to view you user's mouse movements and actions). It's fun to see traffic steadily increasing. For the past 3 weeks, each day will usually be a personal record for most amount of visitors in a day. Lately, I've been doubling my daily traffic every week. Of course, it's not possible that will keep up, but I consider it a personal success, considering how close I was to ditching the project all together.

However, still not a single feedback. And my CTR is horrid. And hardly anyone uses the really cool features that I thought were most interesting (eg: filtering by tag, modifying tag importance, etc). Most people just search for something "sites like zamzar", find my site in Google results, find a result (or a few) that they like, and go on with their life.

To answer your question, it's really a personal or relative question. I'm happy knowing that more and more people use my tool to somehow make their life better. Even though not a single one of them thanks me, and they hardly ever click on my ads, I'm OK with that. Probably, it's because traffic is increasing. I imagine at some point it will level off, and I won't feel so great about the project. On one hand, it's a "failure" because I've really gotten no buzz, have not seeked attention of the blogosphere, am not making the $15/mo I need to break even on it, etc, etc. On the other hand, it's something that is mine, forever, that I am proud of, and that has potential. And hell, it really works well. So, in terms of a "success," relative to the fact that this used to not exist and now it does, I've obtained it. In terms of "can I retire off of it," not so much.

PS: Here are some other URLs that might help you find out how to better track and engage your visitors (as well as showing off what my site does): http://www.moreofit.com/similar-to/mouseflow.com/Top_10_Site...