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Ask HN: How did you find your early adopters?

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Re: Ask HN: How did you find your early adopters?

#61

Post by ficho »

chewxy wrote: post #26
obilgic wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish people(hackers) would spend same amount of time building and marketing/selling their idea. Unfortunately, i think its human nature, it is always easy to start with the fun part, and give up when the steps need to be taken become uninteresting/difficult. Hackers love creating stuff, but when it comes to the selling that idea to their potential users, they dont have enough energy. Hackers vs entrepreneurs?

I absolutely agree. I have fallen into that trap a number of times. The latest was indeed with Fork the Cookbook. Some bloggers filed a DMCA request (fun fact, recipes cannot be copyrighted, so they essentially were perjuring themselves). It sapped so much energy from our marketing and coding efforts, that 3-4 weeks later we're still recovering - took ages to convince ourselves that it was still worth doing. There's…

For what it's worth, I just discovered your site and i find the overall design and experience awesome. It's light, clean, pro, has some fun elements and a bit of a nicely integrated branding which is cool (the forking idea). Well done!

Re: Ask HN: How did you find your early adopters?

#62

Post by maxua »

The best course is to find users before building a prototype. Guess it's too late to apply.

Think about why you're doing what you're doing. What kind of problem it solves? Who has this problem? Once you understand the problem it takes some trial-and-error to find actual people that have it. The good thing if you're right about the problem people will be willing to talk to you, since you might have a solution they are looking for.

it takes time to really learn your users. I've built a community site for developers (DOU.ua) and it took me five years to figure out the most pressing problem my customers have. May be I wasn't listening hard enough but it still takes time.

Re: Ask HN: How did you find your early adopters?

#63

Post by olbmen »

chewxy wrote: post #26
obilgic wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish people(hackers) would spend same amount of time building and marketing/selling their idea. Unfortunately, i think its human nature, it is always easy to start with the fun part, and give up when the steps need to be taken become uninteresting/difficult. Hackers love creating stuff, but when it comes to the selling that idea to their potential users, they dont have enough energy. Hackers vs entrepreneurs?

I absolutely agree. I have fallen into that trap a number of times. The latest was indeed with Fork the Cookbook. Some bloggers filed a DMCA request (fun fact, recipes cannot be copyrighted, so they essentially were perjuring themselves). It sapped so much energy from our marketing and coding efforts, that 3-4 weeks later we're still recovering - took ages to convince ourselves that it was still worth doing. There's…

Of course recipes can't be copyrighted, but you running into this issue proves just how much you screwed up at trying to understand your audience. Don't blame them for filling DMCA requests, blame yourself for not building something that they'll want to use and contribute to. Think about it for a minute. Does Github grab your source code without asking you and then offers people the option to fork it? No! Devs upload their source code to Github because they get a value out of it. The same goes for food blogs or anything else. If your target audience can't get any value out of your product, then you're dead before launching. As devs, we need to keep this in mind: people won't care if they can't get value. Just because it took you days/weeks/months/years/decades to build does not mean it will produce value for anyone. Only studying your target customers and building on top of this knowledge will.

Re: Ask HN: How did you find your early adopters?

#64

Post by smartial_arts »

akg_67 wrote: post #17

Three months before the MVP, I started a blog and established myself as 'somebody' for data analytics in the target domain. Started participating in online forums and commenting on other blog posts relevant to the target domain, specifically focusing on data analytics. By the time, I launched MVP, influentials in the domain were aware of me. In a few months since launch, I gained several hundred registered users thro…

Do you mind sharing a link o your MVP and maybe some ideas on ways you can monetise the service? Thanks!

Re: Ask HN: How did you find your early adopters?

#65

Post by bilus »

boyter wrote: post #21

Show HN for original project, then iterate on the idea with new one ( http://searchco.de/ ) and just keep going. I got a lot of initial traction by being one of the first people to work on DuckDuckGo's ZeroClick info (donated a lot of the programming documentation) which provided some initial back-links and referral traffic. Kept this going by adding more things through DuckDuckHack. Everything from there has been po…

I just found this thread so it's 'a bit' late but... A very useful service, I use it myself. I also couldn't fail to notice lots of supportive comments on Criticue (while moderating). Keep up the great work.

What have you written it in if it's not a secret? PHP?

Re: Ask HN: How did you find your early adopters?

#66

Post by boyter »

kevinrpope wrote: post #52
boyter wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possible. Its also part of the trough of sorrow. Its hard to remain motivated when nobody is paying attention to you. A lot of websites I liked using that launched at the same time I did on HN are now dead despite my asking to pay to use them. slowcop.com is one that springs to mind. I used that damn near every day and still miss it. I wonder just how much success (small and large) can be attributed to just continuin…

Out of curiosity, what service/activity did slowcop offer?

Sorry about the late reply. It was somewhat similar to YSlow for Firefox. I always thought it had some potential because the implementation was so slick.

Re: Ask HN: How did you find your early adopters?

#67

Post by boyter »

bilus wrote: post #65
boyter wrote: post #21

Show HN for original project, then iterate on the idea with new one ( http://searchco.de/ ) and just keep going. I got a lot of initial traction by being one of the first people to work on DuckDuckGo's ZeroClick info (donated a lot of the programming documentation) which provided some initial back-links and referral traffic. Kept this going by adding more things through DuckDuckHack. Everything from there has been po…

I just found this thread so it's 'a bit' late but... A very useful service, I use it myself. I also couldn't fail to notice lots of supportive comments on Criticue (while moderating). Keep up the great work. What have you written it in if it's not a secret? PHP?

That's ok :)

Yes a lot of support on Criticue which I used for a while to work on the design.

Its not. PHP for the front facing code, Python for most processing tasks, MySQL and Sphinx for the search.

Feel free to email me bboyte01@gmail.com for more details.

Re: Ask HN: How did you find your early adopters?

#68

Post by kevinrpope »

boyter wrote: post #66
kevinrpope wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, what service/activity did slowcop offer?

Sorry about the late reply. It was somewhat similar to YSlow for Firefox. I always thought it had some potential because the implementation was so slick.

No worries. I think Google also has a competitor to slowcop (https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/) so it could be they figured it wouldn't make any sense to try to charge.

Re: Ask HN: How did you find your early adopters?

#69

Post by boyter »

kevinrpope wrote: post #68
boyter wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry about the late reply. It was somewhat similar to YSlow for Firefox. I always thought it had some potential because the implementation was so slick.

No worries. I think Google also has a competitor to slowcop ( https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/ ) so it could be they figured it wouldn't make any sense to try to charge.

They were offering all sorts of other services though. The ability to rerun after a deployment and get the comparison, daily/weekly/hourly reports and other services.

I really liked the idea, but as you say I can see how they wouldn't try to compete with Google. That said though considering the Reader fiasco they might have been perfectly positioned had Google decided to shut it down.

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