I forgot to add a clickable link http://www.organizemysearch.com
feel free to use user/pass:hn/hn to test it out if you want!
Ask HN: How to get users/traffic who are actually interested in this webapp?
11–17 of 17 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to get users/traffic who are actually interested in this webapp?
#12Your problem is that people don't know that they would find your product useful until they have it. Who is actually going to be looking for your tool?
Drew Houston has talked about this in respect to Dropbox (http://www.justin.tv/startuplessonslearned/b/262672510) - who knew they needed Dropbox until they found out about it? USB sticks and email work just fine, right?
I have exactly the same issue with Synctus - VPNs and Terminal Services work just fine, right?
What you need to do is find a channel. People who are already in the business for whom your product is a value-add.
For example: for Synctus, I am reselling through IT professionals - the people who might recommend and install VPNs and Terminal Services for their customers.
In your case, you might see if you can approach specialist car search and real estate search sites - if you can work out something that you can give them which will add value to their service too.
Re: Ask HN: How to get users/traffic who are actually interested in this webapp?
#13I'm not sure who your target audience is. I've searched for apartments, a car, and a house. Every time I used a spreadsheet to keep track of those things and it worked great. From my quick look at your site, that's all you really seem to be offering. I'm not sure what extra value you're adding.
That you used a spreadsheet puts you in an incredibly small minority. His target audience is going to be those that can see (or will instantly recognise when shown) the benefits of such, but without the motivation to take on the hassle(1) of organising it themselves - people who keep it in their heads, or scribble on whatever scraps of paper etc. they have to hand. Take the endless 'to-do list' type sites as a compar…
I may be in the minority (not incredibly small though), but if someone isn't comfortable using a spreadsheet, they're probably not going to be comfortable using a web app either. Spreadsheets are pretty ubiquitous.
Re: Ask HN: How to get users/traffic who are actually interested in this webapp?
#14I'm not sure who your target audience is. I've searched for apartments, a car, and a house. Every time I used a spreadsheet to keep track of those things and it worked great. From my quick look at your site, that's all you really seem to be offering. I'm not sure what extra value you're adding.
I hear you, and thanks for the feedback. The idea of this webapp however is to do things more than that. You could say some people prefer using even bookmarks or in my case sometimes I used to use notepad for keeping track of car ads for example. But the websites has some advantages. 1) It parses out data for you automatically [unlike excel or notepad], like car mileage, color, price, etc (or in the case of other typ…
Cool, sounds like you have a lot of features there. I didn't know about the parsing part. What I would love is if you would poll those sites daily and then alert me whenever a car of a certain model is listed for a specific mileage and price. That would be amazing. It sounds like you have the parsing part already done.
Re: Ask HN: How to get users/traffic who are actually interested in this webapp?
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hear you, and thanks for the feedback. The idea of this webapp however is to do things more than that. You could say some people prefer using even bookmarks or in my case sometimes I used to use notepad for keeping track of car ads for example. But the websites has some advantages. 1) It parses out data for you automatically [unlike excel or notepad], like car mileage, color, price, etc (or in the case of other typ…
Cool, sounds like you have a lot of features there. I didn't know about the parsing part. What I would love is if you would poll those sites daily and then alert me whenever a car of a certain model is listed for a specific mileage and price. That would be amazing. It sounds like you have the parsing part already done.
Yeah. The parsing works for websites that are 'monitored' by organizemysearch.com (and more will be added as the website grows). So if you paste in a car ad url from cars.com it will parse the basic info for you (eg. mileage, price, make, model, etc).
The advantage here is the user can add their own fields which they think are relevant to a car search. So someone could add something like "my comfort level in the backseat" and anytime they add another car ad they could specify something like 'good','average','bad' which will be associated with that car ad so in the end they can sort things very easily and weigh their options better.
As for your alert idea, I can see that being an add-on product perhaps. However I know that most of the major new/used car websites provide alerting capabilities based on certain criteria, so that functionality may already exist.
Re: Ask HN: How to get users/traffic who are actually interested in this webapp?
#16I think you're a feature. A perhaps sorely missed feature, but still a feature. I agree trying to drive traffic is hopeless. You need to find partners that want to embed your functionality. You shouldn't be a destination, you should be a service for destinations.
Re: Ask HN: How to get users/traffic who are actually interested in this webapp?
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
That you used a spreadsheet puts you in an incredibly small minority. His target audience is going to be those that can see (or will instantly recognise when shown) the benefits of such, but without the motivation to take on the hassle(1) of organising it themselves - people who keep it in their heads, or scribble on whatever scraps of paper etc. they have to hand. Take the endless 'to-do list' type sites as a compar…
I may be in the minority (not incredibly small though), but if someone isn't comfortable using a spreadsheet, they're probably not going to be comfortable using a web app either. Spreadsheets are pretty ubiquitous.
I didn't mean comfort (although I suspect that it may come into it more than you give credit for).
I meant hassle; effort - should I just scribble notes, or will I spend a couple of minutes thinking about what info I want to record before I see it on screen? I could knock up a quick spreadsheet of the relevant comparison points pretty quickly, but I wouldn't bother if there was a pen and paper in sight. If I already had a spreadsheet that I'd used previously, though, I'd use it again. I'd use the website in question if it was equivalent to that, and free. (Sorry OP, I can't think of anything you could add that would make it worth coughing up for, for me at least.)
It's fickle, sure, and it's a very minor difference in effort. That's what people do when they're not really giving much thought to what they're doing, IMHO and IMHE.