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Ask HN: How did you acquire your first 100 users?

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Re: Ask HN: How did you acquire your first 100 users?

#51

Post by type0 »

metalmanac wrote: post #15
_fizz_buzz_ wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, I bite. I went to your site and then clicked to learn javascript. There is a short description about javascript and then a couple of links to javascript tutorials. What now?

This is exactly the problem users are having. Since the purpose of the site and how it works is buried in the About page, people are clueless about what to do next. I am redoing the front page to only focus on explaining what the site is about. The idea is this : * provide a community reviewed wiki explaining what X is about and how to go about learning it. The aim is to answer the questions how to learn X programmin…

It sound like you are trying to compete with codementor.io the problem is that Metal Manac doesn't say anything meaningful and it looks kinda boring with just the bootstrap and no theme. You need to work on the integration between the features and UX, make it memorable! There was a HN tread recently that even bad web design can bring you more visitors/users as long as it's memorable and stands out from the croud.

Re: Ask HN: How did you acquire your first 100 users?

#52

Post by stuaxo »

metalmanac wrote: post #24
_fizz_buzz_ wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a decent idea. I think a problem will be that you are trying to compete too much with stackoverflow. * "provide a community reviewed wiki explaining what X is about": http://stackoverflow.com/tags/javascript/info * "provide a Stackoverflow like QA section": http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/javascript * "provide an chatroom to replicate the IRC experience": http://chat.stackoverflow.com/rooms/17/javascri…

My hypothesis is that 99% of the people who use Stackoverflow only visit the QA part of it and things like the community wiki and chatroom receive minimal traffic. From talking to a few dozens of users, most people don't even know that the chat room and wiki exist! The current number of users in the Stackoverflow chat rooms > with 100 users currently talking in 57 rooms. The usage of the chat is shockingly low. I thi…

This is the first I've heard of a wiki or chatroom on S/O and I probably won't visit them now I know they exist either.

Re: Ask HN: How did you acquire your first 100 users?

#53

Post by type0 »

minhajuddin wrote: post #26

I have launched a few products. It is really difficult to get the discussion going on many places like reddit or other discourse forums as there are rules against promoting your products. However, I have had huge success with advertising my product ( a paid contact form endpoint service https://liveformhq.com/ ) on another free product ( https://getsimpleform.com/ ) that I built. If you can build a smaller version of…

> If you can build a smaller version of your product which provides value to customers it can be a great source of leads :)

This is great advice. I hope more startups would follow it. Make valuable open source tools, create free tier services etc - that brings much more exposure to relevant users/customers because they discover you and not the other way around.

Re: Ask HN: How did you acquire your first 100 users?

#54

Post by osel »

karthiksk2012 wrote: post #45
leblancfg wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want real feedback, take away every mention of YOU and the company from the home page. Rewrite it from the perspective of your potential first 100 users. Show them exactly what pipecourse is doing that they can't find on some other site.

Got it. I actually created a pipecourse on my startup thinking it will be a way to show users one of the usecases of the platform.But i get your point.Thank you.

Nothing particularly wrong with showing off on the landing page, quite cool that your app suits it. The issue is the topic - it should be about the app and it's relation to the user, not about you or the company. You could quite easily (if I follow the product idea) create a course about the product itself. Sort of like a walk through or tutorial explaining it.

Re: Ask HN: How did you acquire your first 100 users?

#55

Post by dotancohen »

breeze_em_out wrote: post #14
_fizz_buzz_ wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, I bite. I went to your site and then clicked to learn javascript. There is a short description about javascript and then a couple of links to javascript tutorials. What now?

Well, your browser info and metadata have now been sold to third parties for a few pennies, so I'd say mission successful for site owner. Are people actually still this naive? Reading HN users makes me feel like I'm trapped in the 80s where the internet was a magical mystery that nobody really understood. It's about 40 years too late to just assume the average trash website is actually a meaningful statement about so…

> 99.9999999% are just junk.

And that, my friends, is how the mystical nine nines was finally achieved!

Re: Ask HN: How did you acquire your first 100 users?

#56

Post by karthiksk2012 »

osel wrote: post #54
karthiksk2012 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Got it. I actually created a pipecourse on my startup thinking it will be a way to show users one of the usecases of the platform.But i get your point.Thank you.

Nothing particularly wrong with showing off on the landing page, quite cool that your app suits it. The issue is the topic - it should be about the app and it's relation to the user, not about you or the company. You could quite easily (if I follow the product idea) create a course about the product itself. Sort of like a walk through or tutorial explaining it.

True.The idea behind creating on the story of pipecourse is because usually people blog about what worked for them and only when things get succesful. By blogging also about what i tried,what didn't work , i thought people can relate better and I think if lot of startups did this, I think we can learn a lot from each other.

Re: Ask HN: How did you acquire your first 100 users?

#60

Post by metalmanac »

type0 wrote: post #51
metalmanac wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly the problem users are having. Since the purpose of the site and how it works is buried in the About page, people are clueless about what to do next. I am redoing the front page to only focus on explaining what the site is about. The idea is this : * provide a community reviewed wiki explaining what X is about and how to go about learning it. The aim is to answer the questions how to learn X programmin…

It sound like you are trying to compete with codementor.io the problem is that Metal Manac doesn't say anything meaningful and it looks kinda boring with just the bootstrap and no theme. You need to work on the integration between the features and UX, make it memorable! There was a HN tread recently that even bad web design can bring you more visitors/users as long as it's memorable and stands out from the croud.

I agree with you. The site is still very, very early and I am currently focusing on the UI and UX to make the site memorable. Thanks for the honest feedback!
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