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Ask HN: How would you promote this weekend project?

1 points by IgorPartola ↗ HN
I have just launched a dead-simple site/server monitoring service, and now am trying to grow the user base. I realize this is a very competitive environment, but I run with very little overhead since it's a weekend project only. I already have two dozen free users, though most are inactive. What would you do to get new users to sign up? Does it make sense to run AdWords campaigns for this type of service, or is the ad space so saturated that I won't get any quality clicks anyways? What other venues are available?

URL: https://www.pingbrigade.com/signup

Thanks!

6 comments

[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 20.8 ms ] thread
pharno
well, posting it on hackernews is a good Idea, you've got a new user :). Besides that, I have no plan of promoting

edit: 2 Ideas: you should be able to name targets, and give them a max value. So if ping time exceeds 0.5 seconds, you get notified.

IgorPartola
Thanks :). Right now the ping timeout is a pretty high 2 seconds and is not user-configurable, but I'll add to my TODO list to make sure that it is.
by
Try to find places where there are people who would benefit from your product.

Post free links to your site on non-spammy relevant places. If you get creative this should produce a nice set of inward links and a bit of traffic.

Look at your competition. They probably have relevant expertise. See where they advertise and are listed.

IgorPartola
Thanks. So going the non-ad route would work better then. I have a few communities to target in mind. Specifically, I think Low End Box and WHT would might work well. I am just worried that giving away free premium accounts would devalue the product.
by
Maybe I did not phrase that well. What I was thinking was not to give your premium accounts away free, I agree that would devalue your product, but that you could get free advertising by posting details of your product in places where the community will be interested. Places where there is a high concentration of people who would benefit from your product. I do not have particular sites to suggest, you will need to do some extensive Googling. My experience was getting some nice links to something I did by applying some effort to find people who were particularly interested in the subject. Do not think I am an expert, I was just throwing in some small ideas.