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

91–100 of 118 posts

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

#91

Post by X-Istence »

klbarry wrote: post #84

Interesting! I made my own guide a while back for my friends, with great success. 1a) Make a "brand" with your middle name Google your first and last name. If you’re like most people on earth, you’re one of many with your particular combination. So how can you rank higher? Never fight a battle you don’t have to. Pick a middle name, real or imaginary. Google your new full name. Example: My name is Kevin Barry. The Goo…

This has worked well for me personally. My dad and I have the same name, and I share a fairly common name for Dutch people. My name is Bert Regeer, but I always go by Bert JW Regeer. In conversation I am still Bert, but everywhere else I am Bert JW. This solves a lot of problems.

People no longer get me confused with my dad or some guy working for Shell, when I sign up for mail or anything along those lines it has my middle initials in the first name field (unless they have a special field for middle initials) and I don't have issues with my dad and I sharing a name (If we travel together, sometimes the airline will cancel the ticket because they believe it is a double booking ... makes it really fun when we both go to check-in).

Best of all, I now rank really high for Bert JW Regeer. As in, almost everything on the first through third page are exclusively me (may change depending on location) on Google. That makes it fairly easy to find me.

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

#92

Post by patrickambron »

X-Istence wrote: post #91
klbarry wrote: post #84

Interesting! I made my own guide a while back for my friends, with great success. 1a) Make a "brand" with your middle name Google your first and last name. If you’re like most people on earth, you’re one of many with your particular combination. So how can you rank higher? Never fight a battle you don’t have to. Pick a middle name, real or imaginary. Google your new full name. Example: My name is Kevin Barry. The Goo…

This has worked well for me personally. My dad and I have the same name, and I share a fairly common name for Dutch people. My name is Bert Regeer, but I always go by Bert JW Regeer. In conversation I am still Bert, but everywhere else I am Bert JW. This solves a lot of problems. People no longer get me confused with my dad or some guy working for Shell, when I sign up for mail or anything along those lines it has my…

This is a really good idea (we encourage users to do it). If you have too common a name, use a middle initial. The trick is, you need to use that name in prof. setting (biz card, resume, etc) otherwise people will still Google the other name, and they won't find you

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

#93

Post by patrickambron »

osxwm wrote: post #72
patrickambron wrote: post #54

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 feed…

Hey Patrick, I have a question. Why is the title of your http://patrickambron.brandyourself.com/ brandyourself page "Patrick Ambron, Internet"? Specifically, why ", Internet"?

When we first created the profiles, we wanted to optimize for your industry as well. We didn't want people putting in anything so at first we just used the industries used by the US Labor Dept (LinkedIn does the same). Now we allow you to manually add your profession too, but I just kept mine as "Internet" because it seemed the closest.

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

#94

Post by hasanove »

patrickambron wrote: post #81
osxwm wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The signups from foreign publications were pretty bad. They signed up for free at high rates, but they just don't pay (.5%). Not entirely sure why, but until we figure it out, we put people from those places on a wait list Do you have international friendly payment methods? Regionally tiered pricing? And what do you mean by, "we put people from those places on a wait list"?

What do you mean by regionally tiered pricing? Right now all pricing is in USD which could be another reason for the drop off. Does anybody have experience with this type of thing? PS-certain countries are put on an invite list so they can't sign up right now. It tells them to sign up to get on the waiting list

So, any way for legitimately interested people from banned countries to sign up other than waiting?

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

#97

Post by whit537 »

patrickambron wrote: post #17
whit537 wrote: post #14

Good work, man. Takeaway for me is to make the most of Google Analytics' conversion tracking features.

Yea absolutely. We track everything through our own internal system and through analytics. We want to know where our best users come from. Which sources get people to sign up, which sources bring the most active people, and which sources lead to the most subscriptions. It helps you focus your marketing/PR efforts.

BTW, do you use Google Analytics' realtime features (or other realtime analytics)? It's really fun. :-)

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

#98

Post by patrickambron »

mnutt wrote: post #52
patrickambron wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@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

Yea you can get a similar list from a few places. The problem will be that manytimes the IP will return the company's ISP, which isn't useful for the user

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

#99

Post by patrickambron »

wmacura wrote: post #63
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…

I thought that's a feature of HTTPS, not sending referral headers to non-HTTPS links. (and so not an explicit move by Google but a necessary consequence of providing secure connections for logged-in users)

Yep. Basically if you're using Google behind the HTTPS (like you're logged into Google+) they'll send back a non referral header. There ARE ways around this, but it's tricky

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

#100

Post by X-Istence »

patrickambron wrote: post #92
X-Istence wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has worked well for me personally. My dad and I have the same name, and I share a fairly common name for Dutch people. My name is Bert Regeer, but I always go by Bert JW Regeer. In conversation I am still Bert, but everywhere else I am Bert JW. This solves a lot of problems. People no longer get me confused with my dad or some guy working for Shell, when I sign up for mail or anything along those lines it has my…

This is a really good idea (we encourage users to do it). If you have too common a name, use a middle initial. The trick is, you need to use that name in prof. setting (biz card, resume, etc) otherwise people will still Google the other name, and they won't find you

Indeed, my middle initial is on everything. Business cards, it is in my domain name (bertjwregeer.com), it is used in email, everything.
Post reply on HN