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Ask HN: How to let people know about your website with no budget?

9 points by Smithalicious ↗ HN
I made an anime/manga tracking website (https://toshokan.moe/) that's essentially done now, but I have no idea how to get people to know about it. It's mostly just a hobby project/learning experience so I don't expect it to be profitable and as such I don't have much money to sink into it, but I would like to see people using it (or at least giving feedback as to why they don't like it).

8 comments

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byoung2
If it is a niche website try reaching out to the community it targets. There should be Facebook groups or subreddits for it that you could post a link to. If it is useful maybe word will spread organically.
Smithalicious
I feel like that'd be kind of invasive... Plus, most communities explicitly forbid this in their rules or guidelines.
dhruvkar
I think this sentiment is an indication that what you made is not as useful as you'd like.

Communities enjoy things that are useful to them.

By virtue of you being interested in your own side project's subject matter, makes you a part of that community.

Build something that YOU find useful, then when you share you won't feel like its being invasive, it'll feel like giving a gift.

Smithalicious
I think it's invasive by means of explicitly violating the rules of almost every community. For example, /r/anime has a rule that says that all posts have to be anime-specific, which my website is not. I messaged the mods to confirm this and they also said it is not allowed. Similarly, 4chan has a "no advertising" rule and more importantly it is strongly ingrained into the culture that you don't post things that can link you to some kind of "identity". Even posting your own youtube videos there is met with disdain.

I do think what I've made is useful and it was expliclty made to scratch my own itch (and I've been using it for months by myself) but I am just not comfortable going into communities, most of which I would not have otherwise visited, to do something that probably violates the rules or at least looks a lot like spam.

muzani
I've had hundreds of referrals from reddit and got 60% of my downloads from Facebook groups, even after paid advertising.

The key is to make something people want. Don't "sell". Wait for people facing a problem to ask for a solution, and then mention your website as a solution if it's the case.

Nearly every product out there is competing with some hacky solution. Often that hacky solution is a subreddit.

hackermailman
I know nothing about anime, but this site doesn't seem to cover individual episodes, which seems like it'd be important if you're doing internet anime series db thing. Of course the low-key shill method would be to find threads that mention whatever is on your site, and then link your site. 'What other shows has X directed? Here's a list https://toshokan.moe/person/ykbx/animeography' That way it's not blatant advertising and pretty much what happens with imdb every single day.

Another option is get a booth at an anime con, if it's not thousands of dollars. Or buy advertising on 2channel, hang out in large anime specific discord chat servers and create a bot people can query for animeography.

Nortey
As an avid anime watcher and a frequent user of https://myanimelist.net/, I don't mind providing a bit of constructive feedback:

- I get that its just a hobby website, but at the moment there isn't enough there that would pull me away from using an established service such as myanimelist. Or at the very least, it isn't completely obvious to me what it provides that MAL already doesn't. If you do decide to advertise on other sites, I'd suggest making it clear to users what your site offers that isn't provided by already established services.

- This might just be a personal thing, but before an image loads, it first shows up as a blurred image. I really do not like this, as I find it a bit painful for my eyes.

The layout looked pretty decent to me and everything loaded fine on my end. Good job the UI and development. If you were just wanting this to be a hobby, then I'd say well done, and keep playing around with it. If you do want this to ever take off in any way, my suggestion is to focus on providing something new, because at the moment it feels like a bit of an incomplete MAL clone (don't mean to come off as harsh here, just trying to be honest). Good luck!