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Ask HN: How to get people to come back?

6 points by methodin ↗ HN
I've been involved in a couple site ideas that have been "completed", at least enough to be used as they were intended. They've been successful enough to get 500-1000 hits in the span of a day or two without too much effort put into marketing. After the initial burst of activity, however, they all inevitably fizzle out. I feel like I'm missing something extremely important to include as basic functionality since the feedback from these sites is always positive.

What type of things have you guys found that makes people want to come back to your site? Is it gathering emails and sending reminders? Posting blog posts or twitter/facebook accounts that keep people updated? Comments or other community-based offerings? My gut tells me I just have to find a good system to remind people to come back but I'm not certain what that is.

5 comments

[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 27.6 ms ] thread
vyrotek
Its hard to give some solid advice without knowing what these sites are about. It could just be the nature of the service, or maybe you just need something extra to encourage them to explore more and fully understand the value you're providing.

This is basically a shameless plug, but I'd love to talk to you about your sites and see if we can work together. My startup is IActionable.com and we offer Gamification/Game Mechanics as a service which I think could help your situation.

We recently posted on HN that we have decided to offer our services for free for a select few startups.

If you're interested, check out http://iactionable.com/free-for-startups and mention this discussion and we'll get back to you today.

Jsarokin
There needs to be some sort of incentive for them to come back. Something about your site needs to keep them hooked.

Its really different for every case, but take fb for example. You want to see what your friends are posting. You need new information that they wont see unless they go back to your site.

hippo33
In order to answer that question, you'll need to figure out what people hope to accomplish on your site and whether or not that is actually happening. Have you tried collecting any qualitative information about this? E.g. ask your users questions via KISSInsights, interviewing a couple of users, running Userfly or ClickTale? etc. (This post describes all of this in more detail: http://blog.launchbit.com/6-tools-to-learn-about-your-custom...)

Without knowing more of this information, it's going to be impossible to diagnose what would compel people to come back.