The creator of Bingo Card creator I believe said on here before (or maybe on his blog) that he had a similar growth. Now it's his day job. So I'd just keep thinking about it the way you are. Good luck! :)
Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users
71–80 of 166 posts
Re: Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users
#72Oh, I can outdo you! Many years ago I did an upstart that was a combination of delicious and facebook, using bayesian filtering to locate links and people you might be interested in from what you posted yourself. Incredibly clever product. Before Google had even thought of pagerank. We got funding, we had great engineers, and I was the CEO. But you know what? We never launched. We ran out of money before we got that…
Can we hear more?
If you're ever in Copenhagen and buy me a beer I'll talk all night :-)
Re: Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Obviously I didn't test that. Why would someone cancel? It supposed to take you back to the home page.
Like I mentioned earlier, it probably does not need to be high on your agenda. However, to answer your question why would someone cancel... because the button is there and we users are stupid. Open up a private browsing instance and go through the workflow. You'll probably end up here[1]. Did you change something in the last hour? I thought I was getting a message from dailycred not from you when I checked before I w…
It isn't stupid to click the cancel button.
That cancel button is actually what cause a few brief periods of unavailability a couple hours ago. When a user clicked the cancel button it was taking them to the account page even though they didn't have an account, and that was crashing the server.
I have fixed the crash, but I still need to add the proper redirects after cancel is click. Thanks for reporting this. It made tracking down the problem easier.
Re: Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users
#74Hi, I just signed up, sounds like a neat service, but when I look at the lowest price plan, starting at 29.99 is pretty steep.
Though not comparable, there's a reason why dropbox starts at 9.99$ a month, and salesforce starts at 5$ a month (per user).
Maybe you should look into having a lower price point but with less features or less requests per month.
Re: Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users
#75> Beta accounts are absolutly free and have the same privileges as the Baltus Plan.
either typo or ingeniously relevant reference to beverage
Re: Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users
#76It's odd that your site isn't coming up in a google search for brombone. That's probably hurting you a ton. You might look into that. I've had even tiny pages come up pretty quick in google searches.
Good luck to you, man. I am really glad to see a real world example of what startup life is actually like instead of those one in a million instant takeoff sites that make real people feel so discouraged.
Re: Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's back up now. Useful service, I would use it assuming availability is good (I have jerryrigged something similar myself in the past and it was a real pain in the ass to get working smoothly). Suggested pricing seems way off though (I know it's free right now) - how did you figure out what was reasonable?
Pricing is tough. Part of setting a price is getting feedback from potential customers. Can I ask why it seems way off to you?
I'm not really a potential customer, but I'll jump in: $199 and $499 per month shocked me, and the range $29 to $499 completely confused me about your target customer. You should have an option marked "FREE" and in the same text as the paid options, and not just "free beta" but "free trial".
It seems like your target customer is someone who's not going to set up PhantomJS on their own, right? For 500 dollars I'll figure out how to set it up.
Another comment: the intro two paragraphs are probably more technical than they should be. The "what for" should be above the "headless browser" section; you might even put all of that stuff on a second "technical details" page to not scare people away. You're not selling "headless browsing" (anyone knows that they want that can probably set it up), you're selling "testing" and "screenshots" (and maybe other services too).
Re: Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users
#78I checked it out to see if it's something that interests me.
It took me a while to "get it" (i.e. understand what it does). The aha moment came with the sentence, "It doesn't display the page on a monitor."
If you can, try to get to the explanation sooner, using simple words. I think I'd seen the phrase "headless browser" before but I'd forgotten what it meant.
Re: Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
What an awesome question Adam. Just had a look at our cohort analysis. Happy to let you know that 16% of the December 2010 cohort (those 100 people) are still using Buffer today (27 months later). It's actually fairly representative of what our retention stabilizes to after 4-5 months for almost every cohort, though 100 is not an ideal sample size! We've certainly worked to improve retention over time, but in additio…
Joel, what are you using for your cohort analysis? An internally-built tool? A third-party service?
Would be an interesting third party tool. Does anyone do this already? Something as simple as receiving a list of usernames over time.
Re: Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Joel, what are you using for your cohort analysis? An internally-built tool? A third-party service?
Hey Charlie! We've been back and forth on this in the lifetime of the startup, but we're now doing all metrics ourselves, so it is internally built. I built an early version of the cohort analysis (which didn't scale, but that didn't matter) just a few months in and it was massively valuable. It's not too hard to knock something together.
Thanks for the answer Joel!
By the way - I'm curious why you guys had to built this internally - I always get the feeling people prefer using a 3rd party service like kissmetrics than building something.