Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesc | Hacker News Reader

If someone wants to take over OpenHunt, email us at support@openhunt.co

The code and production database is available (with all the users and projects), so you'd be able pick it up right where it left off.

I was going to write up a post-mortem but haven't gotten to it yet. Anthony Franco's comment on HN was pretty spot on: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10940729

Would like to reiterate (as I said on the original launch threads on HN), OpenHunt had no animosity towards ProductHunt. The community (including me) had some critiques against how PH was being run, but instead of constantly complaining about things, we launched an experiment to see if things would be better with an open source community.

It didn't work out this go around, but I'm hopeful another team can do better.

View on HN

Let me provide you with a little bit of feedback for your future projects.

You had a great launch that showed a lot of interest from the community. I still think there's room in the ecosystem for an open competitor to PH's closed model. But what did you do to capture that initial surge of visitors and bring them back? What were your plans to keep user engagement strong?

Here's an example:

When you posted this on HN 78 days ago, I asked if you had a daily summary email [0] like Product Hunt did. This is primarily how I interact with Product Hunt. An informal survey of my coworkers shows the same thing. We all read the daily email. It keeps us coming back to PH. This, IMHO, essential feature that Product Hunt had Open Hunt lacked on launch day.

For some reason I think you may have added it later, and I seem to recall I may have signed up for it. But looking through my emails I never received a single email from Open Hunt and, after awhile, I forgot it existed at all. Until today, when you announced you were shutting it down.

Engage your users. Capture visitors. Give them a reason to keep coming back and engaging with your product, or they'll forget it exists.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10762614

It was good advice, and I agree with you. We added email about a week later and got a couple hundred signups to it. But by then there wasnt enough traffic or submissions to really make those digests valuable.

We should have had it at launch. It still might not have been enough, but it would have been a much better shot.

Everything falls after launch. Everything.

It's relatively easy to get the "hey look over there!" viral bump, but beyond that it turns into a game of retention with ugly words like "drip campaign."

People are always interested in "new," but they need a reason to keep returning. That's what makes a business run.

(kinda like how, for movies, the opening weekend gets all the news, but not so much the 22nd weekend.)

>Anthony Franco's comment was pretty spot on

Respectfully, I believe the content issue tells only a small part of the story (or is even more a symptom). The far greater challenge was that there was no notion that the audience included influencers, as does ProductHunt's audience.

That single fact creates the value of ProductHunt. It contributes to the belief that what's being posted there actually matters, which then keeps the content providers (submitters) and consumers coming back.

Actually, I tried to email that address but got this:

Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the server for the recipient domain openhunt.co by mx1.improvmx.com. [192.241.186.150].

The error that the other server returned was: 550 relay not permitted

Couldn't email you. Contact me, details in profile.

sorry, i messed up the dns records. jacques@forwardtrail.com will work for now

I tried sending you an email, but it bounced.

Same here

i've sent you an email, mate!

You can always join me over at Techendo (https://www.techendo.com/) making that a great community. :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com