Interesting take on a social networking site • Hacker News Board

Re: Interesting take on a social networking site

#21

Post by unalone » Tue, Feb 17, 2009, 12:13 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #19

unalone wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that was part of the joke. Somebody on #startups submitted it to Digg as a "nonsocial nonnetwork." That pretty much sums it up. It's why we didn't exactly expect the traffic we're getting. (We're up to nearly 3,800 users, up another 800 in about 4 hours, so growth hasn't stopped yet - and that was in the dead of night.)

Neat :) Reminds me of the launching days of camarades.com, we didn't know what the hell was happening, it spread like wildfire. If I can give you any advice at all it would be try to create a reason for those people to come back at some time in the future when you've better figured out what to do with this, you're really sitting on something and chances of hitting it out of the park like that twice are slim. So, to a…

Hoo boy, this is fun. We're almost at 4000 users, and still haven't sold a single shirt, so perhaps our model's about as weak as Facebook's is. (We're both pretty averse to laying on ads.) Luckily, each user takes up no bandwidth at all, so we're doing fine right now.

The problem as I see it is that our 4000 users means nothing. It's a meme, essentially. Registration happens so quickly that our high numbers don't mean much; the fact that we're getting linked all over means a lot, but I see it as more of a "you have to see this" fad among friends than I see it as dedicated users. (We've got a 50% bounce rate and the average stay lasts under two minutes.)

Anything that we add would have to work without ruining the nature of the site. As in: right now the workflow is "take in answers, give link to profile," which is very sticky but creates a path off the site pretty quickly - and removing that removes the stickiness.

I figure the best route to go right now is just to interact with the people we've got talking to us. We have two email addresses, one for photos and one for haiku, and we got way more submissions than I expected for a first-day submissions thing. Those are the people who're actually talking back and forth with us, so I figure they're a good place to start when it comes to expanding. (I'm figuring out now just how to create the gallery for their stuff.)

Re: Interesting take on a social networking site

#22

Post by jacquesm » Tue, Feb 17, 2009, 12:18 PM UTC

unalone wrote: post #21

jacquesm wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neat :) Reminds me of the launching days of camarades.com, we didn't know what the hell was happening, it spread like wildfire. If I can give you any advice at all it would be try to create a reason for those people to come back at some time in the future when you've better figured out what to do with this, you're really sitting on something and chances of hitting it out of the park like that twice are slim. So, to a…

Hoo boy, this is fun. We're almost at 4000 users, and still haven't sold a single shirt, so perhaps our model's about as weak as Facebook's is. (We're both pretty averse to laying on ads.) Luckily, each user takes up no bandwidth at all, so we're doing fine right now. The problem as I see it is that our 4000 users means nothing. It's a meme, essentially. Registration happens so quickly that our high numbers don't mea…

Here is an interesting thought: How many of the people that somehow made it on the web set out to do that vs how many of them simply did what they were enjoying best ?

My money would be on those doing what they were enjoying best being in the majority.

Re: Interesting take on a social networking site

#23

Post by rs » Tue, Feb 17, 2009, 12:29 PM UTC

unalone wrote: post #8

herval wrote: post #7

...but where's the business model???? (just kidding)

http://cafepress.com/thenadstore We're old-school: merchandise only, baby! (We're getting a few artistic friends to make posters, so hopefully we'll have something really worth selling. I also really like the look of the "nad" logo.)

What might be an idea is to print out the profile user created on a t-shit, or other clothing

Re: Interesting take on a social networking site

#24

Post by unalone » Tue, Feb 17, 2009, 4:15 PM UTC

rs wrote: post #23

unalone wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://cafepress.com/thenadstore We're old-school: merchandise only, baby! (We're getting a few artistic friends to make posters, so hopefully we'll have something really worth selling. I also really like the look of the "nad" logo.)

What might be an idea is to print out the profile user created on a t-shit, or other clothing

That was suggested. The problem is: we don't know how to easily make custom shirts like that. We didn't expect this to blossom at all: this was just a quick test site we made before we started work on our big project. So this has taken us completely by surprise. We didn't expect 5,000 users in under 2 days: it would have been silly to.

Re: Interesting take on a social networking site

#25

Post by lloyda » Tue, Feb 17, 2009, 5:05 PM UTC

unalone wrote: post #16

aston wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nad: not the best initialism...

Which makes it even more fun for us. ;-)

Agreed! :-)

Re: Interesting take on a social networking site

#26

Post by hwijaya » Thu, Feb 19, 2009, 4:18 AM UTC

Great concept. It gives me a very enjoyable way of signing up. You guys actually make us re-consider some aspect of our own registration form. We might borrow some of your idea. Thanks a lot.

Re: Interesting take on a social networking site

#27

Post by moxy » Thu, Feb 19, 2009, 4:34 PM UTC

unalone wrote: post #21

jacquesm wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neat :) Reminds me of the launching days of camarades.com, we didn't know what the hell was happening, it spread like wildfire. If I can give you any advice at all it would be try to create a reason for those people to come back at some time in the future when you've better figured out what to do with this, you're really sitting on something and chances of hitting it out of the park like that twice are slim. So, to a…

Hoo boy, this is fun. We're almost at 4000 users, and still haven't sold a single shirt, so perhaps our model's about as weak as Facebook's is. (We're both pretty averse to laying on ads.) Luckily, each user takes up no bandwidth at all, so we're doing fine right now. The problem as I see it is that our 4000 users means nothing. It's a meme, essentially. Registration happens so quickly that our high numbers don't mea…

When I first filled out my profile at the site I didn't even notice that you were selling shirts. I wouldn't be surprised if other visitors didn't notice either.

Re: Interesting take on a social networking site

#28

Post by spyrosk » Sun, Feb 22, 2009, 1:05 PM UTC

As an experiment in a different approach in getting user info it's really good. I too had fun signing up. But if there is something more to it, I can't say I've spotted it. Why does the user benefit from this service? It was kind of vague for my taste at least. On the other hand maybe I missed something.. :)

Just a technical note, I couldn't get it to work with Opera 9.51, after entering my name I was redirected to the first question and then instantly on the end page. You might want to fix that.

Kudos for the idea though..