Clickable link: http://www.brombone.com/
It's down... :-(
Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users
51–60 of 166 posts
Re: Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users
#52Disclaimer: I'm a hardcore phantomjs user. Add a service that scrapes results and I think you'll be overwhelmed with interest. Scraping is a pain. It takes a special niche talent -- but a ton of people want it. Let people submit what information they want off a page -- you write the script that does it for them. Pay as you go, etc. If it saves people time, they will pay for it. I do full-time consulting -- building out software systems for people, but I could just as easily keep myself 100% busy just building phantom/casper scrapers for people that have no clue how to do it -- and I'm not talking about stuff that falls into the "be evil" bucket. You're just building web services where there are none.
Re: Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users
#53One challenge I've noticed is how quickly you can become accustomed to better results. Right now, a 100 sign up day would blow you away. But when that peters out, even to a point elevated from your current state, it isn't as satisfying.
Metrics continue to mess with you, long past the earliest stages.
Re: Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users
#54Re: Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users
#55I passed it along to 0-7000 people, depending on how things play out in the noise of G+ and Twitter. It's not something I have a use for, but it looks interesting.
Thank you.
Re: Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users
#56I'm in a similar situation and it's encouraging to read that this seems to be commonplace. I'm just about on the cusp of having one satisfied customer willing to participate in the develop-deliver-discuss cycle, which makes me very excited, but I'm not sure where to go from there.
From what I can tell, after you get one satisfied customer, you need to figure out how to get a second satisfied customer, and then a third. You hope that eventually one of you attempts to get one customer actually gets you 100.
Re: Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users
#57Working on a web product for +1 year here and we are still a few months away for release. Personally I think I'll cry when I see the first sign up that isn't a test account. If I ever see it.
Re: Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users
#58Although just a side project, one of the most important things I've learned with Hacker Newsletter is to just stick with it. It seems like too often we (the HN crowd) lose our passion for something a bit too quickly and move on to our next big idea.
You can see my subscriber growth rate here: http://imm.io/ZCRJ
For almost a year I could not move the needle it seemed, but then finally it happened and from there it has gotten easier. Now I have 15,000 subscribers and think I can hit 25k to 30k by the end of the year.
Re: Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users
#59Sounds like a cool test app, if you have a lot of time to click through and to double-check the results. You might want to look at https://www.rainforestqa.com , they do something similar but on a much larger scale and automated. Perhaps you'd get inspired for the next step.
Re: Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users
#60In the whole first month of Buffer, we had less than 100 signups. For comparison, we now have 560,000 users (2.5 years later). We now sign up 100 people within a couple hours. It amazes me to think about it. I had a previous startup that also started slow, but never really changed. The key difference between the two, was retention. So I would highly recommend anyone who's getting started to closely watch retention. D…
I recently hacked together a product that aligns with buffer's philosophy, but is inherently different. I have about 70 users, but zero paid users and not much activity. I've been ignoring it from a development standpoint in favor of other projects. Meanwhile I still use the site daily. I hope I can put some more time into it, but for now I'm just letting it scratch a personal itch. If anyone is interested: https://t…
This is neat. It's a key problem we've spent a lot of time thinking about (that posting the same thing in the exact same way to different networks is not the right thing to do). Good job, and good luck!