Thanks so much :D
I'm trying to gather how many eyeballs each listing can gather, and I'm trying to optimize getting the traffic to the listings.
I'll post the updates in this thread.
Hi. Thanks for checking it out :)
In short, I have no idea how many eyeballs it's gonna get, but I have google analytics open and I've gotten 300+ visit since I linked it here already :D
I would love to feature your product though. I'm really glad you took the time to check it out. It'd be extra helpful to know back from you about how many eyeballs you got from kickoffboost.
You can submit your product on the site, or I can even put a posting up for you if you just give me your link :)
Also, a nicer error page would be ... nicer. The default Rails error page oozes professionalism (I'm guilty of delaying error pages styling for way to long too - who's ever going to see them, right?)
I've been guilty of not setting up notifications and pretty error pages too. Thanks for the link. There are some free Saas tools as well: New Relic, Logentries, Honeybadger that can make it easier.
Note: I moderate r/SideProject. This subreddit has similar content to "Show HN," but each link spends more time on the front page. It is also a good place to test submission titles before posting to HN.
I just fixed it. Thanks so much for pointing it out!
I shared kickoffboost on hackernews just to see if anybody would be interested in this kind of thing. I'm getting so much traffic now and I was not prepared for it at all.
Cool idea. I might suggest creating a static version of your site and hosting it on s3. This will make it much more stable if you have a high read rate. Then you can point the new submissions to a app server or something. You don't have to get fancy with this or anything, a simple 'wget -r http://www.kickoffboost.com/' and upload that to a s3 bucket, etc.
Even easier would be to setup cloudflare in front of the site.
All you have to do is set the cache control headers for your landing page to something like "max-age=300, public". That way cloudflare's servers will eat the vast majority of your requests, but no one will see content older than a few minutes.
We got HN'd the other day and this kept our median response time around 25ms, even for our slow rails app.
Of course you have to make sure your landing page is publicly cacheable for this to work (i.e. no user specific data), but that's a small price to pay for a drastic reduction in the amount of traffic you need to serve.
OT: hahahaha Cloudflare has really improved their image on HN by posting those technical blog posts. Who else remembers that thread where they got super-shat on?
Okay, I'll go for it. I'm very curious to see how the traffic will compare to Hacker News. Yesterday I put a link to my company (http://algorithmic.ly) in a comment and the response was overwhelming. I've heard that traffic from different sources can behave drastically differently in terms of conversions, and HN is notoriously bad with conversions, so I wonder how it will compare.
The traffic to http://algorithmic.ly has been outstanding. I think your site just put us over the top. We have gotten more signups than we know what to do with. I'll have to write up a post about it.
Going to hijack and tell you that you've got all the right buzzwords to get me interested but I still have no idea what you're offering from the landing page.
So much so as to dissuade me from signing up (to what?)
Thank you! I'm glad someone finally agrees with me. I keep getting overruled on this point, but I wanted to put an interactive product demo on the landing page.
Algorithmic.ly is a simple service for certain kinds of algorithms without needing to manage the infrastructure. So if you're building, say, an e-commerce site, and you want to add a feature that adds a "people who bought this item also bought these" presentation box onto each page, you can use Algorithmic.ly to build a data model, choose the "item similarity" algorithm to continuously run on your model, and then use Algorithmic.ly's REST API to push data into the model and query results from the algorithm.
I hope that help explain it, and I hope someday I'll get to build a cool interactive demo into the landing page :). For now, the conversion statistics are not helping my case for putting more on the landing page.
Our product is transitioning from closed to open beta. Among other reasons,
a) We would want to set up tracking for referrals and to better gauge the effects of different distribution channels, among other things.
b) we will have an explicit need for a traffic bump in a small window in the near future, so I would rather save an avenue like this to coincide with our other efforts. This scenario could exist for others too in situations such as looking to ride off a press story, and wanting to utilize the traffic to boost a crowdfunding campaign, etc.
Also, unsure if this is actually a meaningful place for our product, as it's a mobile app and so not as direct, but that shouldn't really hurt I don't think
The Museum of Modern Betas (MoMB) has been around for many years now. http://momb.socio-kybernetics.net/ It's worth a visit too if you're into this sort of stuff.
FYI, I submitted an app (http://memn.io/) to this an hour or so ago and while I don't see it in any publicly available section, I am getting more than a few hits with kickoffboost.com as the referral. Playing around with your URLs showed that you can just increment the number to view any submitted product. You might want to switch to UUIDs or at least add more security.
Definitely. Getting feedback on ideas is one of my aim. Kickoffboost will feel much more complete within weeks. This launch was to validate that there is a need for this kind of product, and I think I have the green signal to now make it awesome :)
Here's an even cooler idea: instead of listing emerging ideas, ,and beta projects, what about creating a website service for finishing almost done apps (alpha projects if you like). That would be a more interesting list. People could upload their started, but not finished projects and outline what's left. There must be millions of good ideas that has been started, but never finished due to the fact that the developer didn't find the problem interesting anymore. Specialize in one thing, like iphone-apps.
Why would developers who aren't interested in a problem any more be interested in documenting the code enough for someone else to take over? Color me skeptical :-)
111 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 146 ms ] threadStuff like this is why I prefer /newest to the front page. =)
(Edit: Okay, it's on the front page now. Still, /newest is always worth checking out.)
Thanks again :)
I've recently been featured on beta list and thinking about applying on erlibird although erlibird requires payment.
I would love to feature your product though. I'm really glad you took the time to check it out. It'd be extra helpful to know back from you about how many eyeballs you got from kickoffboost.
You can submit your product on the site, or I can even put a posting up for you if you just give me your link :)
Cheers!
My signups from betalist have dropped off, so I'll let you know how we go with you guys if we get approved.
http://imgur.com/70sPKpM
I'm sure it's all very test-driven though :)
Also, a nicer error page would be ... nicer. The default Rails error page oozes professionalism (I'm guilty of delaying error pages styling for way to long too - who's ever going to see them, right?)
step 2: nah do step 1 first.
Note: I moderate r/SideProject. This subreddit has similar content to "Show HN," but each link spends more time on the front page. It is also a good place to test submission titles before posting to HN.
I shared kickoffboost on hackernews just to see if anybody would be interested in this kind of thing. I'm getting so much traffic now and I was not prepared for it at all.
All you have to do is set the cache control headers for your landing page to something like "max-age=300, public". That way cloudflare's servers will eat the vast majority of your requests, but no one will see content older than a few minutes.
We got HN'd the other day and this kept our median response time around 25ms, even for our slow rails app.
Of course you have to make sure your landing page is publicly cacheable for this to work (i.e. no user specific data), but that's a small price to pay for a drastic reduction in the amount of traffic you need to serve.
Would be real cool if you share what kind of traffic you got from there in a day. Thanks!
So much so as to dissuade me from signing up (to what?)
Algorithmic.ly is a simple service for certain kinds of algorithms without needing to manage the infrastructure. So if you're building, say, an e-commerce site, and you want to add a feature that adds a "people who bought this item also bought these" presentation box onto each page, you can use Algorithmic.ly to build a data model, choose the "item similarity" algorithm to continuously run on your model, and then use Algorithmic.ly's REST API to push data into the model and query results from the algorithm.
I hope that help explain it, and I hope someday I'll get to build a cool interactive demo into the landing page :). For now, the conversion statistics are not helping my case for putting more on the landing page.
Thanks for a solid explanation.
Also, unsure if this is actually a meaningful place for our product, as it's a mobile app and so not as direct, but that shouldn't really hurt I don't think
I'm not involved in either btw.
I'm planning to work all those stats into an algo that would reward better ideas.
Will keep you posted. Thanks!
how do i give this guy my money.
And are people paying you to feature them? Or just companies you like
Great job again man. i love it. Def bookmarked