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

kickoffboost.com

91–100 of 112 posts

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

#91
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.

Going to hijack and tell you that you've got all the right buzzwords to get me interested but I still have no idea what you're offering from the landing page. So much so as to dissuade me from signing up (to what?)

Thank you! I'm glad someone finally agrees with me. I keep getting overruled on this point, but I wanted to put an interactive product demo on the landing page.

Algorithmic.ly is a simple service for certain kinds of algorithms without needing to manage the infrastructure. So if you're building, say, an e-commerce site, and you want to add a feature that adds a "people who bought this item also bought these" presentation box onto each page, you can use Algorithmic.ly to build a data model, choose the "item similarity" algorithm to continuously run on your model, and then use Algorithmic.ly's REST API to push data into the model and query results from the algorithm.

I hope that help explain it, and I hope someday I'll get to build a cool interactive demo into the landing page :). For now, the conversion statistics are not helping my case for putting more on the landing page.

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

#95
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going to hijack and tell you that you've got all the right buzzwords to get me interested but I still have no idea what you're offering from the landing page. So much so as to dissuade me from signing up (to what?)

Thank you! I'm glad someone finally agrees with me. I keep getting overruled on this point, but I wanted to put an interactive product demo on the landing page. Algorithmic.ly is a simple service for certain kinds of algorithms without needing to manage the infrastructure. So if you're building, say, an e-commerce site, and you want to add a feature that adds a "people who bought this item also bought these" presenta…

Guess I'm in the minority that likes to know what they sign up for.

Thanks for a solid explanation.

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

#96
Submitted my latest project, https://sparklr.me/ Out of curiosity, is there a criteria for what gets showcased, and if so, what is it?

Also, noticed that all the new things are appended to the bottom of the page. Makes it look like the site hasn't changed, imo, but maybe that's intentional

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

#97
Hi Everyone,

The response to kickoff boost has been overwhelming and I'm in a bit of a struggle to keep up, but it's a great thing :)

I'm focusing the showcase algo right now so I can't comment or reply to everyone individually until later tonight, but I'll post some updates here.

I launched kickoffboost.com rather prematurely not having any idea that I would get this much traffic. I started coding for kickoff boost the day I read Paul Graham's post "Do things that do not scale" and basically just built a front page with DB hook to showcase products.

Right now, I am manually approving submissions. I'm working to implement a process where after approval, each product will have a "life" (say 300) and "age/clicks" (starting at 0).

When links are clicked, that product's age will be incremented, and the product will get front page space as long as age doesn't exceed life. The life/age bar will be publicly shown for each product. Once age exceeds life limit, the goes to "archived / older posts" and new products get front page view ( thinking about limiting front page to show 20 products at a time ). What do you guys think of this idea? I just want to optimize great new product's chance of discovery and I thought this would be a fair way to distribute the traffic love.

Like I said, I took Paul Graham's advice to heart and created something that really doesn't scale as of this moment. This has been extremely validating however, and now I am in overdrive to get things done. Please feel free to help me out by giving me ideas about how I can improve this.

I am really hopeful that I can turn this into something very helpful people like me who build things and often don't get the recognition they hope or deserve.

Thank's to everyone who pointed out bugs and optimization tips. I am getting to them one at a time. Thanks to everyone who submitted their products. Because of the premature launch, I cannot guarantee that I'll approve and showcase all the products just yet, but I feature all the submissions (as long as they are not troll submissions) in a just and fair way. Thank's to everyone who took the time to write to me and say that they see this as something useful. Thanks to everyone for checking it out. And thanks to PG for that essay "Do things that do not scale". I don;t know how, but the idea came to me within an hour of reading that essay.

Cheers! easymode

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

#100
post #88
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a co-founder of Bitcast ( http://www.bitcast.io - the current top listed "Kickoff"), I can say the traffic from Kickoffboost has been great! For some rough data: We actually launched on HN a week ago and had about 120 concurrent visitors for a span of ~6 hours. I assume this link, at it's #1 ranking since ~10pm PST, is getting somewhere around 100-150 concurrents as well (because of the off timing). As a result, i…

How is this even remotely relevant to what I asked? And haven't you (or someone else from your company) had posted the exact same comment earlier under a different parent, a comment that is now gone? So presumably you just "moved" it here to get it higher up on the page. That's tacky. Don't do that.

Sorry, that was a reply to a different comment! I was going to speculate on the selection process, but the OP has done a good job of answering that above.
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