Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users

Same thing happened to me, posted twice to HN with no up votes then I got my first sign up and I was super excited. From that point there really should be no turning back.

Obviously I didn't test that. Why would someone cancel?

It supposed to take you back to the home page.

That isn't possible yet, but it is something I want to support.

I find it odd that the hacker community likes to completely disregard non-technical people[1]. It's situations exactly like this where it would bring a huge amount of value to have someone dedicated to marketing/community outreach and evangelism for the product.

Even though it's a technical project, explained well and with patience even the most non-technical person could wrap their head around it and develop a plan to get it to market.

Being both a dev and a marketer, I've found there are two, entirely separate brainstorming mindsets: product design and development, and product marketing and execution. It is incredibly taxing and inefficient to frequently switch between these two mindsets, which is why I believe most developed companies evolve into having two distinct departments: product development and product marketing. I'm working on my own startup now in RoR doing exactly this (i.e. trying to switch between the two roles frequently) with much frustration. Luckily I have a great business partner that is entirely focused on strategy that can knock some sense into me when I become too bogged down in the development/coding thought pattern.

Going to a business school with essentially zero CS majors, I personally know a dozen people that would be interested in jumping in on a project like this, not even for the lucrative rewards of success but the experience of working on such a project and jumping into the tech world.

Just some thoughts...

[1]: Most recent example I've stumbled upon: "No marketers/MBAs/designers/unicorns/whatever." Source: http://hackerho.us/

I know how hard this can be. I've been doing startup stuff for 7 years. And it's still awfully painful. I'd encourage teaching to find an audience.

I've been blogging and blogging and blogging. I ended up giving that up at one point. I thought I had more important things to do. I thought it wasn't growing enough. But that was foolish.

The biggest thing that's changed a lot of things for me in the last year is simply sticking to a schedule of writing once per week. It all eventually adds up. It eventually opens up new doors.

It doesn't happen over night either. But the audience that finds you tends to stick with you. And tends to help market all the new projects.

What about creating BromBone.com was hard that you figured out? Any hosting problems that you solved? Any bugs in PhantomJS? Anything you can open source? Did you learn anything about what kind of mailing list post gets more traffic than others? Learn anything about making collecting signups easier?

I continue to collect tons and tons of ideas as I go through life that I feel were hard and I figured out or were interesting. A bunch of people just pass on when I write about them. Meh. But then every now and then, something spreads like crazy. An open source project here. A motivating post here. And years later you find, a lot of awesome stuff has built up. People following you. People wanting to see your next project and spread it.

Doing what we're doing is a career. It isn't a lottery. It isn't going to happen in one launch. It's something that we should expect to get better and better at. Forever.

> If you launch and no one notices, launch again. We launched 3 times. - Brian Chesky, Founder of AirBnB https://twitter.com/bchesky/status/312438036929576962