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HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

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Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#31

Post by akharris »

jamesk_au wrote: post #15

I'm a co-founder of a website for Australian high school students. It's a forum-based community where students help each other, share resources, and make friends by bonding over the high school experience—especially for students in their final year as they study for our equivalent of the SAT. For the past couple of years, we’ve averaged more than 350k users, 500k sessions, and 1.5mil page views per month (Google Anal…

What have your experiments looked like? How were you measuring them, and at what rate was your revenue growing? What's your current core metric, and what's been happening to it over the last few years?

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#34

Post by akharris »

pimdewitte wrote: post #13

Thanks so much for this. We built Upfit ( https://upfit.co ), an on-demand fitness streaming app for at home workouts, ran by video creators. We launched on Android & iOS with Upfit and are currently tackling other industries with the same platform. Think about it like a social Netflix for X. We would love to chat! - Pim from Whitespell (Pim at Whitespell dot com)

Sounds cool, Pim - how can we help?

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#35

Post by seeingfurther »

akharris wrote: post #27
seeingfurther wrote: post #8

Hi Michael and Aaron, I'm the co-founder and CEO of PsychSignal ( https://psychsignal.com ) PsychSignal is a provider of real time 'Trader Mood' data, analytics and indices for financial institutions & investment professionals seeking an edge. Essentially we've built the next generation squawkbox. When I was a trader back in the day we used to use one of those old school squawk-boxes connected to the S&P Futures pit…

Hi - What's the metric that you're looking at for growth?

# of clients... and everything that would go into increasing that number, fundraising, head count, marketing.

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#36

Post by akharris »

wjg wrote: post #5

Hi Michael and Aaron, I built Supertask ( http://supertask.co/ ) to make web automation easier and more accessible. Supertask allows users to write shareable, composable automations that make testing webapps and repeating complicated workflows a breeze. Automation scripts are written in a new intuitive language called Flytrap, and are interpreted by a library called Flytrap.js ( https://docs.flytrap.io/ ). Each autom…

Hi Bill - How many people are using supertask right now?

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#37

Post by userium »

akharris wrote: post #24
userium wrote: post #2

Hi Michael and Aaron, I'm the co-founder of StayInTech.com ( https://stayintech.com/ ), a career website for women in tech. We built this website for skilled female engineers looking for a new job, but we seem to appeal to a wider audience than we initially planned. We have lots of male users, and also women who are just starting out in tech. Is that a problem, does it matter in the long run? Should we address our ta…

Sounds like you have a great problem. One of the funny things about building products is that you often don't know who your users are going to be until you actually release. This is why we tell companies to launch as fast as possible, and not spend too much time thinking about what might happen before they have any information about how users interact with what they've built. In your case, your company's goal is to h…

Thanks Aaron, yes our goal is to 1) help people get jobs and 2) help companies to increase diversity of their workforce.

Another issue is how to retain users. Once a user finds a new job, and is not looking for a new one for a while, how do we keep them coming back to the website? I guess with great career content? Do you have any other ideas on how to keep users coming back?

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#38

Post by MichaelFan »

Hi Aeron & Michael, we are building pastrynow.com: an easy kit that helps people to instantly start baking Michelin-worthy french pastries. No special utensil, no additional ingredient and no previous experience in cooking required.

After many iterations we recently built a kit our users really love. We just started to have users talking to their friends about our latest kit! https://squareup.com/market/pastrynow/tarte-aux-framboises.

Questions: 1) Would you like to try? 2) Our user base is quite small: how do we know if it is a communication or value proposition problem?

M.

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#39

Post by akharris »

jerriclynsjohn wrote: post #9

Portuspine is a wearable device solution to provide posture coaching to people who wants to prevent backpain, primarily people with desk job. We provide them haptic feedback whenever they are sitting in a wrong posture, we encourage activities and better sleep so as to holistically improve ones wellness. The user can visualize how posture affect their daily activities and sleep. The wearable device can be worn by the…

Hi - I'd love something to fix my posture, so this seems cool. Feel free to ask a question.

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#40

Post by kuisch »

mwseibel wrote: post #28
kuisch wrote: post #23

Hi Michael, Aaron, My name's Aron and I'm building Wanderlust (www.wanderlust.ly): a travel website that shows where you could go based on how much you can spend and what you're interested in. Wanderlust provides users with a complete trip, including a destination, flight, and accommodation, as well as an overview of the best things to do and see during their stay in that particular destination - after which users ma…

How are you driving traffic to the site and what are your conversion metrics? Have you done face to face user tests with at least 5 random people? Do people have to book right at that time or do you give them the ability to save/share a booking?

In terms of driving traffic, our SEO/SEA strategy so far has been considerably difficult to pull-of given our limited resources in light of the incredible budget of the traditional OTAs. FB/Twitter advertising has been somewhat better.

Additionally, SEO/SEA is something that we feel will be much more relevant for the parties in the market that cater to those users that already know where they would like to travel to and just need to find their flight and/or accommodation. We cater to those earlier in the cycle, wondering 'where can I go?'. This is the feeling we try to associate ourselves with, which is why brand advertising might prove more useful than direct response. Again, this is tricky with a small budget (Yes, we've tested with >5 random people. Users don't have to book immediately, but can create an account and save the itinerary for later.

Conversion metrics we're tracking: 'happy 1st visit' (i.e. views more than 5 trips), visit/search, search/save, search/book. account signup

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