The power of reddit
Yesterday I linked my new game (http://parrothunt.nergal.se) in reddit.com/r/webgames to hopefully get feedback. And just then I realized how powerful reddit is to spread your work and get feedback. It's so simple to target towards correct group of people, in this case games created for the web. Nowhere else that I'm aware of can you reach out to thousands of people around the world with the same interest that easily.
So only in 24 hours my little game has been played about 1100 times and had above 1500 unique visitors. I've gotten multiple feature requests and a lot of positive comments.
Reaching out to people interested in the same subject and get that huge response gets you motivated to continue develop what you love to do. I strongly recommend people who spend a lot of time working on small projects in their spare time to spread their work at reddit. It's not just another funny pictures site!
Thumbs up for reddit!
8 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 22.7 ms ] threadSubmitting to reddit/HN when you launch a product is a decision you need to be careful with. You need to time it right to get enough upvotes, you need to target your audience, you need to be ready to handle the traffic, and your product needs to be in a state that's ready for criticism.
This is an encouraging story, but to others out there: be careful! In the words of Eminem, "you only get one shot."
(Of course there are a million other ways to promote other than "Show HN" or reddit posts.)
That isn't actually true for HN. As long as you're not doing it too much, you can resubmit it until it generates some discussion. But it's important that the goal isn't "to get my stuff onto the front page" but rather "my stuff is inherently interesting, so reaching the front page would be a net positive contribution to the community."
I don't know what Reddit's rules are regarding resubmits, though.
This time, it was the latter, and it got a lot of more reaction than any of my other projects have ever had.
Yes, I agree with you. I was prepared for the traffic and also for criticism (and for the trolls out there!). But I learned that with this amount of users there will be light shed upon all small cut-corners you make that you think no one will notice. Which in my case was good for future projects.
In my case I was more eager to show the game than to actually get _a lot_ of users since there are no money involved since it's just my spare time project. However, if it had been money involved and if I had made investments (other than my own time) I probably would have investigated the best time of day/week/month to publish my project.
But I gained a lot of knowledge from this fuss :)
I use reddit a lot to promote my blog posts but I've realized what @chatmasta mentioned to be true.
If you want to publicize your startup or project on launch day, its better to get it published on some famous blog for that stream.
Need not necessarily be techcrunch or mashable. Can also be CSS tricks or Paul Irish's blog. Equally valuable. And the HN / Reddit takes care of itself.
Sauce: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/05/open-source-marketing-with...