Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users
Thirteen users have signedup for my hosted PhantomJS web service (BromBone.com). That's a lie. Four of those 13 accounts are test accounts I created. Why I am so excited about these nine accounts? I have nine people who have decided to take my service for a test drive! The great thing about that is that nine is only one less than ten. Ten doubled is 20. Find another 20 and I'm up 40. That's almost half way to 100, then 200, 300, and 400. Soon I'll have a 1000.
That may be a little optimistic. I've read so much about gathering interest before launch and talking to customers. But it din't go as smoothly as I would hope. Posts to mailing lists take me longer to craft than I would like. The discussion is positive and generates some traffic. But honestly it is a trickle compared to what I need. I posted twice to HN, but no one clicked the upvote button.
Why then am I so positive? I got two sigups overnight. And I hadn't done any new marketing the day before. My traffic is tiny. But every time I do a little piece of marketing, I see a spike. The spike goes away, but it leaves behind a residual traffic increase. Additionally, the nine users I have are actually playing around with the service. They're using something I crated! I think if I keep my efforts going, traffic and users will increase.
If anyone else out there is excited about getting just a handful of signups, you're not alone. I'm sure we won't all make it big, but I think there's reason to be excited. Just because my "launch" didn't bring in a flood of users doesn't mean that I can't grow the trickle into a stream, and then a river. Or maybe this is denial. Time will tell.
165 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 165 ms ] threadPosting at the right time is not a guarantee you'll be seen, and you're post doesn't stay on the new page very long during peek times.
Don't worry though. I'll be back next week sometime between 9-10am Eastern with a new blog post.
Advice: Your site could benefit from some visuals, like a screen shot/ demo.
I haven't launched yet, and while I feel that there's a large audience for the service I plan to provide, I feel like the majority of my potential users are content with what they have right now.
Either way, great job. I'm not sure if I could be so optimistic. Besides talking to potential users, have you tried advertising/promotions/etc?
Edit:
As justhw said, a demo or two and screen shot wouldn't be a terrible idea.
And while this may not make a great difference, add a favicon and change the title.
The title is currently set to "A headless browser as a service built on PhantomJS - BromBone"
So, in my sea of tabs, all I see is "A head" which isn't as helpful when trying to find the tab as "BromBone."
I love that quote. Is this the original source? http://jasonlbaptiste.com/featured-articles/if-you-build-it-...
It supposed to take you back to the home page.
Open up a private browsing instance and go through the workflow. You'll probably end up here[1]. Did you change something in the last hour? I thought I was getting a message from dailycred not from you when I checked before I went for my walk.
Seems like you're logging these errors somewhere. Sorry if I am muddying the error tables for you.
[1] http://www.brombone.com/account?error=access_denied&erro...
That cancel button is actually what cause a few brief periods of unavailability a couple hours ago. When a user clicked the cancel button it was taking them to the account page even though they didn't have an account, and that was crashing the server.
I have fixed the crash, but I still need to add the proper redirects after cancel is click. Thanks for reporting this. It made tracking down the problem easier.
Maybe HN is a bug reporting tool as well. :)
Useful service, I would use it assuming availability is good (I have jerryrigged something similar myself in the past and it was a real pain in the ass to get working smoothly). Suggested pricing seems way off though (I know it's free right now) - how did you figure out what was reasonable?
It seems like your target customer is someone who's not going to set up PhantomJS on their own, right? For 500 dollars I'll figure out how to set it up.
Another comment: the intro two paragraphs are probably more technical than they should be. The "what for" should be above the "headless browser" section; you might even put all of that stuff on a second "technical details" page to not scare people away. You're not selling "headless browsing" (anyone knows that they want that can probably set it up), you're selling "testing" and "screenshots" (and maybe other services too).
A few tutorials on how to do various tasks with your service would help a lot too (beyond the one-liners).
I'm a developer, which I think everyone in your target market is, so let's assume I could probably roll my own version if I could dedicate a couple of days to it (that would be consistent with my previous experience). I'd expect you to set your pricing low enough that I should never even consider trying to roll my own, so low I never even bother to lookup the docs to see how hard it might be. As pseut says, the upper tiers are so expensive that you just motivated anyone considering that volume to go off and do the build/buy analysis.
I hope this is constructive feedback. There are lots of other good suggestions here on how to make your landing page convert better. If you take all the feedback on board, I do think you have a service that can provide value.
A few thoughts:
-You should make the explanation of what your site offers a little bit more clear. It took me a few minutes to figure it out.
-What is the Google Analytics/Adsense lookup Database part? I can lookup sites that use a specific google analytics or adsense id?
What you should focus on right now is whether or not the users you have actually use and like the app. If they do, then you've created something that people like and you should focus on growth. If they are not really using it after registration, then you should focus on improving the product until the usage rate goes up to acceptable levels.
Even though it's a technical project, explained well and with patience even the most non-technical person could wrap their head around it and develop a plan to get it to market.
Being both a dev and a marketer, I've found there are two, entirely separate brainstorming mindsets: product design and development, and product marketing and execution. It is incredibly taxing and inefficient to frequently switch between these two mindsets, which is why I believe most developed companies evolve into having two distinct departments: product development and product marketing. I'm working on my own startup now in RoR doing exactly this (i.e. trying to switch between the two roles frequently) with much frustration. Luckily I have a great business partner that is entirely focused on strategy that can knock some sense into me when I become too bogged down in the development/coding thought pattern.
Going to a business school with essentially zero CS majors, I personally know a dozen people that would be interested in jumping in on a project like this, not even for the lucrative rewards of success but the experience of working on such a project and jumping into the tech world.
Just some thoughts...
[1]: Most recent example I've stumbled upon: "No marketers/MBAs/designers/unicorns/whatever." Source: http://hackerho.us/
If you are the application owner, check your logs for details.
When the post started to get traction I booted more phantomJS instance, but I didn't think the simple landing page would have any trouble.
Anyone still having trouble?
I've been blogging and blogging and blogging. I ended up giving that up at one point. I thought I had more important things to do. I thought it wasn't growing enough. But that was foolish.
The biggest thing that's changed a lot of things for me in the last year is simply sticking to a schedule of writing once per week. It all eventually adds up. It eventually opens up new doors.
It doesn't happen over night either. But the audience that finds you tends to stick with you. And tends to help market all the new projects.
What about creating BromBone.com was hard that you figured out? Any hosting problems that you solved? Any bugs in PhantomJS? Anything you can open source? Did you learn anything about what kind of mailing list post gets more traffic than others? Learn anything about making collecting signups easier?
I continue to collect tons and tons of ideas as I go through life that I feel were hard and I figured out or were interesting. A bunch of people just pass on when I write about them. Meh. But then every now and then, something spreads like crazy. An open source project here. A motivating post here. And years later you find, a lot of awesome stuff has built up. People following you. People wanting to see your next project and spread it.
Doing what we're doing is a career. It isn't a lottery. It isn't going to happen in one launch. It's something that we should expect to get better and better at. Forever.
> If you launch and no one notices, launch again. We launched 3 times. - Brian Chesky, Founder of AirBnB https://twitter.com/bchesky/status/312438036929576962
I figured you'd want SEO on the product's blog page, but on the other hand, if it tanks, or you end up doing something else, you'd want the SEO on your own blog, right?
I had a previous startup that also started slow, but never really changed. The key difference between the two, was retention. So I would highly recommend anyone who's getting started to closely watch retention. Does anyone keep using the product into their second week after sign up? That's the first thing I'd focus on with what I know now.
Just had a look at our cohort analysis. Happy to let you know that 16% of the December 2010 cohort (those 100 people) are still using Buffer today (27 months later). It's actually fairly representative of what our retention stabilizes to after 4-5 months for almost every cohort, though 100 is not an ideal sample size!
We've certainly worked to improve retention over time, but in addition I think with Buffer I finally had hit upon a problem that was a real pain point. So, there was good retention right from the start.
I custom-built my own cohort reports but as number of users grow in my own app, I'm planning to replace it with MixPanel. You don't really want to put stress on your own database servers which are meant for production, not for analysis.
http://cohort.ly/
Not even a blurb on there.
You guys created a really good template for slow-growth. Props.
As I was right this the main question I had was how do I know the difference between "Nobody wants what your selling" and "You need to do a better job marketing"? Retention is a great answer to the question.
I think for us, as soon as we saw that people were sticking around we knew we had to switch to "do a better job marketing". With retention, that was validation that there must be many more people out there who would find Buffer super useful, just like the people who were staying active. In essence, we needed to make more people aware of the value we were providing.
Are we talking LinkedIn style link-bait and endless 'notification' emails?
Or Dropbox/Mailbox style gamification to get more free by being 'part of the club'?
But I really want to try it!
This is a problem with HN. I've submitted 6 stories with this account, all of which seem like they're definitely interesting material highly relevant to HN's audience, and rather similar to stories that have made the front page.
But they've gotten at most 3 upvotes, as of this writing. Heck, I have single comments that get more upvotes than all of my submissions combined.
I don't want to think about having the success or failure of a product riding on HN's ability to find my submission and upvote it.
If you want to personally do something about this, next time you read through the front page and still want to procrastinate, look at the New feed, and upvote some stories that don't already have a big group of people looking at them!
Second of all, you're actually charging money for your product. That's awesome. When just one of those users converts to a paid plan you'll already be making more money than any of those hyped social startups with big launches that never turn a dollar profit.
Kudos.
I run a monitoring service that's built on top of PhantomJS. Happy to chat anytime about the tech or what I've learned about the business.
It would help to have a clear call to action from the homepage. One thing to keep in mind is that most major hosting companies don't charge for inbound traffic any more so pulling data is basically free.