So I get the takeaway to be: abandon all hope if you don't hit and capture that big, first-day spike. Just move on to the next thing.
Yep, unless you are planning on catering to the long tail from the beginning.
The Next Feature Fallacy
41–46 of 46 posts
Re: The Next Feature Fallacy
#42I recommend a few tablespoons of salt with regards to this advice if you are a B2B Saas/have a sales team. First experience is definitely important, but features will always be something businesses will consider when deciding which product to go with.
For B2B, the only way I've seen features move any curve positively is A) if you have lost sales consistently due to a specific requirement[0], B) a customer pays you to build a feature[1].
Note also that sometimes features are a great way to introduce sticky-ness/price inelasticity in a B2B product: you just need a few people who really love a specific feature and that 15k/m customer wont think about switching.
Also, the 20% signup is pretty big based on my experience but maybe it's standard for freemium+ B2C startups? For B2B Saas, I've been happy with 5% with 8% being a cause for celebration after a bunch of copy/messaging tweaking. Am I way off here? Would love some pointers if so.
[0] Note that this has to be a overwhelming consensus amoungst your sales guys. It can't just be excuse du jour that's used when someone loses a sale. I would also suggest listening to some lost sales calls: it might help you ascertain whether the lost sales was due to the missing feature or if the feature was just cited as being the cause.
[1] Only build it if you see it being a useful feature for the market and not only that customer (so maybe integrating with twitter rather than the customer's specific DB or something) then it's always a good idea to build the feature. This is especially powerful if you are an underpriced new-comer trying to lure customer away from the big names.
Re: The Next Feature Fallacy
#43While I thoroughly enjoyed this blog post, this seems to not be in the spirit of Hacker News: https://twitter.com/andrewchen/status/605422107028131840 "Can I ask people to upvote my submission? No. Users should vote for a story because it's intellectually interesting, not because someone is promoting it." via https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
When I see this I immediately flag the submission.
This is why I left digg and reddit. The upvote circle of promotion with armies of article upvoters and comment upvoters/downvoters ruined these sites for me.
Re: The Next Feature Fallacy
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
The inverse: upvotes are penalized if the voter comes from a direct link from a non-HN source (e.g. Twitter), so people direct others to vote via /newest.
So, I see a submission I think is interesting and direct link it from my Twitter account; the submission is penalized on every upvote it receives through my link? That just seems like a silly thing to do. Especially since there's an obvious way around it.
Wouldn't you in that case link directly to the article and not the comments section?
Re: The Next Feature Fallacy
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, I see a submission I think is interesting and direct link it from my Twitter account; the submission is penalized on every upvote it receives through my link? That just seems like a silly thing to do. Especially since there's an obvious way around it.
Wouldn't you in that case link directly to the article and not the comments section?
Not if I wanted to get people to engage in the discussion about the submission. Most of the time I'm just as or more interested in the discussion than the article. It's why I participate instead of using HN as a news feed.
Re: The Next Feature Fallacy
#46While I thoroughly enjoyed this blog post, this seems to not be in the spirit of Hacker News: https://twitter.com/andrewchen/status/605422107028131840 "Can I ask people to upvote my submission? No. Users should vote for a story because it's intellectually interesting, not because someone is promoting it." via https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
Is it not reasonable in many cases to infer that the promoter isn't intending people to up vote if they're not interested in the article?
Only if we assume all submitters only submit because of how interesting / important / relevant an the submission is, and are not influenced in their decisions by imaginary internet points, pride in getting to the front page, etc.
For a sufficiently small community this assumption is fairly safe though even then not always true. As communities grow their population trends towards the average (for many characteristics) and the average human is more likely to be driven by the latter motivations than the former, at least as I understand psychology, though I would be very interested to learn otherwise.
tl;dr: I think the assumption that a submitter is motivated more by wanting to make a good contribution over having their HN submission 'win' is shortsighted.