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How I Got My First 1000 Users in 1 Day

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Re: How I Got My First 1000 Users in 1 Day

#41

Post by PilateDeGuerre »

benologist wrote: post #33
drum wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why?

Most of us aren't here to be the audience for whatever startups and sites that treat HN like a marketing tool. This morning when I checked HN there was 4 advertisements on the front page excluding the official yc hiring notices - exitround, envato, statuspage.io, aws. 42floors' the other week described HN's front page as part of their SEO campaign - we're literally being exploited just to boost their visibility on go…

>Most of us aren't here to be the audience for whatever startups and sites that treat HN like a marketing tool.

In a very literal sense that's exactly why we are all here. HN is ad supported just like most every no-cost website.

Never forget that HN is YC's marketing apparatus. HN is incredibly valuable to YC the VC firm (an incubator is a sort of specialized VC firm), to the YC startups, and to Paul Graham personally. HN is one of their most valuable strategic assets. And that value is derived from us, their adoring audience-participants.

Re: How I Got My First 1000 Users in 1 Day

#42

Post by billmalarky »

jsnk wrote: post #12

I have a side project (dmtri.com). It lacks active users right now. I don't mind not having too many registered users as the website doesn't require you to sign up. I just wish that people would visit more and write more. Obviously the problem is that there isn't much going on actively on the site. However, I detest the thought of spamming every facebook groups and such. I tried organically growing by writing really…

The real problem is I'm not quite sure what you're offering that hasn't been done a million times before.

I'm not trying to be a jerk, I'm being curt. What differentiates dmtri? It looks like just another site to post stuff anonymously. Why would I use it over 4chan or reddit etc etc.

These are things to think about if you want it to take off.

Re: How I Got My First 1000 Users in 1 Day

#44

Post by benp84 »

Congrats on the success! I'm curious: the condition of <1 mile proximity isn't transitive, so wouldn't users be seeing only one half of a lot of conversations? Like if A was close to B, B was close to C, but A wasn't close to C, then A would only see what B says to C but not what C says back. Or have you divided up space into fixed cells roughly one mile wide to prevent this?

Re: How I Got My First 1000 Users in 1 Day

#45

Post by drum »

benp84 wrote: post #44

Congrats on the success! I'm curious: the condition of <1 mile proximity isn't transitive, so wouldn't users be seeing only one half of a lot of conversations? Like if A was close to B, B was close to C, but A wasn't close to C, then A would only see what B says to C but not what C says back. Or have you divided up space into fixed cells roughly one mile wide to prevent this?

This was probably my most embarrassing oversight. Your first point is the way it's working. I'm trying to figure out if there's a way to make that work without segmenting the map into fixed cells... any thoughts?

Re: How I Got My First 1000 Users in 1 Day

#46

Post by drum »

jpittman wrote: post #34
james33 wrote: post #7

I think you need a 5th takeaway: write a follow-up blog post about how your HN post got you 1000 users, subsequently getting you another 1000 users that missed the post the day before.

how about a 6th takeaway in a follow up, in which he discusses retention of these initial 1000 users? I think it's great he was able to obtain those numbers early but I think those users are a bit ephemeral.

yea that would be a good post... ill see what i can do!

Re: How I Got My First 1000 Users in 1 Day

#47

Post by Cogito »

drum wrote: post #18
Cogito wrote: post #17

Please add push notifications? If you log in, and no one is around, the app gets closed pretty quickly. I have checked back multiple times, and always seem to miss everyone chatting. I would love to know if someone close by is online or chatting, so that I don't have to sit there hoping someone sees my tepid 'Hello?'. I don't know if push notifications are the correct answer, but letting me know that there was activi…

Yes, you're absolutely right. I was kickin myself all day yesterday because push notifications weren't working. I couldnt figure out why but my guess was it had to do with the provisioning profile. i resubmitted late last night, and requested expedited review. hopefully itll be out in the next few days. either way, thanks for the constructive feedback!

A couple of other things I've noticed:

* No way to copy text from other people

* No way to create hyperlinks (which would be awesome)

* Emoticons seem to disappear

* New people are very confused by the badges

* I had a weird bug where it kept asking me to wait 5s before posting, I hadn't touched it in ~10 minutes. It had been cycling between "Need 1 more person to unlock this area" and being unlocked for some of that time too.

Seeing the usage pick-up has been fun! Looking forward to seeing how things progress.

Re: How I Got My First 1000 Users in 1 Day

#48

Post by platz »

benologist wrote: post #33
drum wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why?

Most of us aren't here to be the audience for whatever startups and sites that treat HN like a marketing tool. This morning when I checked HN there was 4 advertisements on the front page excluding the official yc hiring notices - exitround, envato, statuspage.io, aws. 42floors' the other week described HN's front page as part of their SEO campaign - we're literally being exploited just to boost their visibility on go…

The other side of this coin which makes me uneasy is: if HN is the only place that get traction for certain projects, what does that say about the value proposition of the project? In other words, is what we have here a self-validating pyramid? Do non-HN people actually have a need for new software that isn't already supplied by the big 4?

Re: How I Got My First 1000 Users in 1 Day

#49

Post by algoshift »

I've learned Facebook and LinkedIn can produce really disappointing results.

Over the last couple of weeks we've been pushing hard to develop awareness for a worthy cause (special needs education tools). Details here:

http://www.tommyteaches.com/special-education.php

(Yes, taking the opportunity to also get a little attention on HN. Sorry, this is important.)

Analytics tells us that LinkedIn, in particular didn't have good engagement. A few strategic posts on CraigsList probably did ten times better LinkedIn.

The best results we got have been due to friends, family, neighbors and local teachers making a push to reach to their immediate connections (their friends, family and co-workers) to have them engage. Also some blogs produced results here and there.

In general terms building an audience for just about anything on the internet is really hard these days. Luck can be a factor, but more and more it seems to require a lot of hard work and "street smarts". For example, I contacted every host at a local TV station with slightly different versions of the same story in order to see if anyone would be interested. Call it A/B testing. One was, and that helped a bit (just a bit).

Good luck with your app. It looks interesting.

Re: How I Got My First 1000 Users in 1 Day

#50

Post by benp84 »

drum wrote: post #45
benp84 wrote: post #44

Congrats on the success! I'm curious: the condition of <1 mile proximity isn't transitive, so wouldn't users be seeing only one half of a lot of conversations? Like if A was close to B, B was close to C, but A wasn't close to C, then A would only see what B says to C but not what C says back. Or have you divided up space into fixed cells roughly one mile wide to prevent this?

This was probably my most embarrassing oversight. Your first point is the way it's working. I'm trying to figure out if there's a way to make that work without segmenting the map into fixed cells... any thoughts?

I can't think of any other way off hand. I'm assuming you don't like cells because of edge cases where two people could be near each other but in different cells? If the cells were carefully selected it might not be too big of a problem. For example, you could put each college campus in its own cell. But that could take a while and you'd have to drop the one-mile guarantee. I'll let you know if I think of anything else. I don't think it has to be a dealbreaker for an otherwise great idea!
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