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I'm creating a website to promote early stage sites and ideas

kickoffboost.com

21–30 of 112 posts

Re: I'm creating a website to promote early stage sites and ideas

#23
post #20

Okay, I'll go for it. I'm very curious to see how the traffic will compare to Hacker News. Yesterday I put a link to my company ( http://algorithmic.ly ) in a comment and the response was overwhelming. I've heard that traffic from different sources can behave drastically differently in terms of conversions, and HN is notoriously bad with conversions, so I wonder how it will compare.

HN is only good when it hits the front-page..

Re: I'm creating a website to promote early stage sites and ideas

#26
FYI, I submitted an app (http://memn.io/) to this an hour or so ago and while I don't see it in any publicly available section, I am getting more than a few hits with kickoffboost.com as the referral. Playing around with your URLs showed that you can just increment the number to view any submitted product. You might want to switch to UUIDs or at least add more security.

Re: I'm creating a website to promote early stage sites and ideas

#27
post #18

Even though I'm already subscribed to betali.st and erlibird, I just can't seem to get enough of sites like this. Bookmarked.

Are there other similar sites that you could name (either for closed or open betas)?

http://www.reddit.com/r/sideproject

Note: I moderate r/SideProject. This subreddit has similar content to "Show HN," but each link spends more time on the front page. It is also a good place to test submission titles before posting to HN.

Re: I'm creating a website to promote early stage sites and ideas

#28

Cool idea. I might suggest creating a static version of your site and hosting it on s3. This will make it much more stable if you have a high read rate. Then you can point the new submissions to a app server or something. You don't have to get fancy with this or anything, a simple 'wget -r http://www.kickoffboost.com/' and upload that to a s3 bucket, etc.

Even easier would be to setup cloudflare in front of the site.

All you have to do is set the cache control headers for your landing page to something like "max-age=300, public". That way cloudflare's servers will eat the vast majority of your requests, but no one will see content older than a few minutes.

We got HN'd the other day and this kept our median response time around 25ms, even for our slow rails app.

Of course you have to make sure your landing page is publicly cacheable for this to work (i.e. no user specific data), but that's a small price to pay for a drastic reduction in the amount of traffic you need to serve.

Re: I'm creating a website to promote early stage sites and ideas

#29

For anyone who likes this sort of thing, you should also check out http://betali.st/ I'm not involved in either btw.

Betalist is awesome. Refered visitors are eager and curious early adopters. If you get featured, it's the easiest few hundred emails you can get.

Re: I'm creating a website to promote early stage sites and ideas

#30
post #20

Okay, I'll go for it. I'm very curious to see how the traffic will compare to Hacker News. Yesterday I put a link to my company ( http://algorithmic.ly ) in a comment and the response was overwhelming. I've heard that traffic from different sources can behave drastically differently in terms of conversions, and HN is notoriously bad with conversions, so I wonder how it will compare.

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