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Ask HN: two developers with no marketing skills built an app, then what?

11 points by phdtree ↗ HN
We're a team of two guys, for the first time in our life we built a web app over nights and weekends. This is like our side pet project and we actually think it is pretty awesome. Essentially it is a wiki where users can create & edit not only their own academic genealogy, but also anyone they know.

Like everybody else did, we posted a short "Show HN" here on Hacker News, we submitted a link to Reddit, we got a few thousand visits & close to ~100 signups, we were pretty excited initially. Then, a couple days later, once the traffic dried, we're now left in a zombie state of less than 10 visits a day and no new signup any more.

Our target users are science major undergrad/graduate students, postdocs, professors, and researchers in general. But the question is, how do we reach them, how can we let them know that there is this cool app they should definitely check out, what shall we do besides the "Show HN" and submitting to Reddit?

We're just two "average Joe" junior developers, and we have absolutely no marketing experience at all. So, we're here to ask HN: what should we do then? Would appreciate any constructive ideas/advice/suggestions/criticisms. Would love to hear what you have done to market/promote your side projects or startups, what works, what does not work, etc.

12 comments

[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 55.1 ms ] thread
gee_totes
What are you doing for viral growth? Like, why should I tell my friends to sign up?

Have you thought about setting up some type of system to automatically create profiles for people? You could scan in the front page of a printed thesis (where it lists the advisers), extract the names, and then add pages if they don't exist for those professors and PHD people. Then, when a PHD student googled themselves, the phdtree link would show up.

phdtree
Yes, we are actually thinking about that idea. The problem is, how to encourage more user participation?
gee_totes
Not sure. Maybe a fully-fleshed out profile could be visually appealing? Or the website could announce that the profile is only 80% complete (like how OKCupid and LinkedIn do it).

Or a big "claim my profile" link?

gee_totes
I have another idea. What about finding a small group of colleges that compete with each other, filling out the profiles for those phd people, and then writing a blog post about it and sending it to the colleges?

Maybe the colleges will use it in marketing material or a blog post. Free publicity for everyone involved!

Then, whomever is reading the college's blog because they care about that kind of stuff will be compelled to claim their profile.

ig1
What's the value proposition - i.e. why would someone want to use it, what benefit would they get from it ?
phdtree
Let's say, you're a first year PhD student trying to decide which research lab to join, you narrow it down to three labs, you can check the three professors to see 1) who their ancestors were 2) where their former lab members ended up to be, industry or academia, etc.
ig1
It seems like your approach would suffer a lot of selection bias and would need to collect a lot of data before it would be useful, hence it'll be hard to bootstrap contributors.

I'm not an academic, but wouldn't a better strategy be to do co-authorship analysis on papers to generate similar information. That is you could say researchers who co-wrote their initial papers with more senior researcher X (normally indicating a supervisor or mentor relationship) at lab Y tend to end up at Z and have an average research impact score of R.

That way you could get all the data from analyzing public citation databases and avoid the chicken-and-egg problem with trying to crowdsource the data, and go directly to solving the main problem of comparing potential PhD supervisors based on their trackrecord.

phdtree
Yes, that's definitely one interesting direction we should go pursue. Thanks a lot!
stfu
Love that idea. That could also lead to an interesting analysis which institution the co-authors give as their home institution. Might be even demonstrate causality, e.g. researcher X from institution X works with researcher Y from institution Y and later researcher X joins institution Y as well. I'm suspecting there are some academic tribes out there.
tlb
There is only a slim chance that this type of idea will work. That's better than nothing, and many successful startups were given low chances initially. But the vast majority of stone-soup ideas where the users add all the content fail. You should set criteria for success (such as 20% of academics online in 3 months) and be ready to move on to another idea if you don't meet them.