Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We (unexpectedly) got 60K users in 60 hours - What we learned

patrickambron.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 118 posts

Re: We (unexpectedly) got 60K users in 60 hours - What we learned

#51

Post by davidandgoliath »

shootthemoon wrote: post #42

There is one problem with the "find who is googling you" feature. For about a year now, google has started hiding the search results from the referral when someone uses google while logged in to google services. You may have seen "not provided" in google analytics for searches that found your site... This is users logged in to google. And with more people using google services such as gmail and g+, more and more resu…

The interesting part about it is it allows google access to the data for information in their metrics & analytics while blocking out their competition in the metrics scene.

Rather ingenius move overall.

Re: We (unexpectedly) got 60K users in 60 hours - What we learned

#52

Post by mnutt »

patrickambron wrote: post #10
pdx wrote: post #8

How are they determining what companies are googling you? Do they attempt to create a top ranked page about you, and then monitor IP addresses visiting it, and match that to some db that maps company to IP address?

@pdx yea you nailed it. Most of our users end building a BrandYourself Profile, which is a simple (but pretty) profile that's really well structured around your name, so it generally ranks on your first page. From there we can use the IP addresses of visitors to determine who they are We could always tell you when someone found that profile and where they came from (they came from FB, or they came from Google after G…

I haven't used it, but MaxMind sells an organization database along with their GeoIP database:

http://www.maxmind.com/app/organization

Re: We (unexpectedly) got 60K users in 60 hours - What we learned

#53

Post by patrickambron »

jordanmessina wrote: post #50

Any chance you will release a plugin for a non-brandyourself site? I'd love to put the "find out who's googling you" feature on my blog or even my startups website.

Nothing in the direct roadmap, but that's a great idea. Right now we're focusing on being more directly integrated w sites so we can you improve them right from us. But again, that's a very good idea

Re: We (unexpectedly) got 60K users in 60 hours - What we learned

#54

Post by patrickambron »

Hey everyone, just wanted to say I'm truly flattered my blog got posted to HN and made the front page (I'm the author). I hope people found it helpful

2 comments

1) Some of you wanted to know how HN compares to other sources for us, in terms of signups, conversions, etc. I'll post it in this thread at the end of the day (would you guys want a follow up post on this "Value of HN visits")

2) I've gotten some great feedback on the actual product from the HN crowd, which is awesome. Feel free to leave any feedback on this thread (you can try it at http://brandyourself.com)

Re: We (unexpectedly) got 60K users in 60 hours - What we learned

#55

Post by whit537 »

patrickambron wrote: post #32
whit537 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm interested to see how HN does for you. The front page in my experience drives an order of magnitude less traffic than you saw from Mashable, which is still a nice bump. Let us know how we convert, eh? :-)

Yea, I think I'll post on this thread at the end of the day w some numbers, or maybe even do a quick follow up post tomw. Either way, I'll let everyone know

Cool, thank you.

Re: We (unexpectedly) got 60K users in 60 hours - What we learned

#56

Post by eps »

Patrick, can I ask if you get any actual calls in response to "call and talk to the real person" offer on your website? I'm sure many on HN recognize the importance of having a phone number on the site, but it'd be very helpful to know what it translates to in real world.

Re: We (unexpectedly) got 60K users in 60 hours - What we learned

#57

Post by nickler »

I remember telling people about this when it first launched, citing it as a vanity metrics booster.

As a startup founder, however, it's invaluable. I'm a converted fan, and the process even taught this rookie a bunch about link building and SEO.

Great work, keep it up, and loved the blog post.

Re: We (unexpectedly) got 60K users in 60 hours - What we learned

#58

Post by engtech »

patrickambron wrote: post #38
joshuahedlund wrote: post #35

Very cool, looks like it has a lot of potential. I'm hoping you have some spam prevention strategies in place, though, as it seems pretty ripe for it as it takes off (just like any free service that lets you create profiles and post links to sites, but especially a service that promotes SEO and posts followed links to sites)

Yea that's a good point. The nice part is, we don't create any profiles or links on behalf of the user. They need authenticate things like twitter, fb, etc on their own, so they actually need to have or create these profiles. They need to go through the work of creating all the relevant content, and linking it to eachother, we simply let you know if they are optimized/filled out enough, and track their ranking Intere…

You could have a one-time pay service to get a "verified" badge on the profile, like what Twitter has for celebrities.

Re: We (unexpectedly) got 60K users in 60 hours - What we learned

#59

Post by engtech »

pcambron wrote: post #4
gamingfiend wrote: post #2

http://patrickambron.brandyourself.com/ > Co-Founder & CEO at BrandYourself.com > January 2009 - January 2000 Branding fail

Good catch, updated now! So what did you think of the article, was it useful to you?

just noticed that you've been responding with two different accounts, pcambron and patrickambron

Re: We (unexpectedly) got 60K users in 60 hours - What we learned

#60

Post by engtech »

Have you any thoughts of handling the edge case of users with ridiculously common names?

In the top ten for my firstname lastname I have:

   a famous chef,

   a life coach who is doing branding SEO,

   someone else who is a programmer,

   a professional photographer
In the top three firstname middlename lastname

   various high school kids,

   a registered sex offender
Post reply on HN