Ask HN: What do you do with a finished product? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What do you do with a finished product?

I'm ready to start getting some users on my site (http://debate-zone.com), but I'm unsure of how to do it. Buy ads? SEO stuff? Spam? Thanks if have advice!

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How you get users depends on what your goal is. It looks like your site offers a free service and has advertising (AdWords and selling ads directly [hint: telling users to name a price is not a good idea.]) as it's only income source. This pretty much rules out paying for users unless it can be done very cheaply as you aren't going to make much per new user.

SEO is good. A properly configured site can work wonders, but beyond that, a good product will "SEO itself". Spending time on linkbuilding campaigns or blackhat SEO will not be efficient in the long run.

Buying ads could be expensive and wouldn't be worth it to me. That would depend on where you can advertise and the cost, but I wouldn't do it.

Spam is an obvious no.

So what can you do? Well, this post right here will more then likely get some visitors to check out your site (if that was your intent, +1 sneaky). I'd focus on creating the best product you can, including a better design, alternative monetization methods, and asking HN or current users for suggestions on improvement and implementing them. [sidenote: I don't have many projects I consider finished, only paused if I'm not working on them. Stay open to future development. If you aren't adapting and improving, you're falling behind.]

You could contribute to debate forums or other relevant websites, posting genuinely helpful comments relevant to your site and harmlessly introducing it. I personally like to only use advertising methods that I would not be annoyed with, but if your only goal is to make money, just spam your site all over the place. You might make a little cash, but you'll get a bad reputation doing it.

Thanks for the great feedback. I'm looking mostly to have an active community, but one that generates some small revenue on the side. I'm just looking to pay back hosting etc. costs. I agree with the idea that a project should never be finished, and that's what I used to think, but then I read a few hacker news articles about fail early etc., and I realized I was spending way too much time on little features. I went through a bunch of layout changes, and while this one is boring, I think it works.

I just added anonymous arguing, so that will help the site get some activity, I think. I don't want to do blackhat stuff/actively SEO it, but only if nothing else works.

I bought a Reddit self-serve ad, and I guess I'll see how that works, and I'll start making small comments on political forums or something.

Bug Report: At 7pm Austin time (April 10th, 2010), I cannot load your site in IE 7.0.5730.11 on Win XP Pro SP2.

Before the site fully loads it freezes the browser then leaves an empty (blank) broswer outline.

I tried twice and it happened both times. I had to use the task manager to kill the browser both times.

IE 7 is still in service for many users, thats why I used it to look at your site.

Whoops, thanks for telling me. It seems I forgot to test the site in any IE - in IE8 it's completely messed up, and I can only assume it's worse in IE7. I'll try to fix it soon.

Create a feature matrix of your site versus other debate sites. Show why yours is better. Do a screencast and show how easy it is to use.

Have you seen http://www.whitehouse2.org/ or http://www.allrise.com/ -- at least there is a focus. Yours has none.

Good ideas, thanks. I haven't seen whitehouse2, which is really good, or allrise. Mine doesn't have a focus, it's basically a site where you can debate about anything, and tag it so it stays a bit organized. Or do you mean something else by focus? I'll add a quick feature matrix now.

I meant a theme. With a matrix, you can use what you find on other sites to guide the development of your own.

A visual theme, or a content theme?

gold mines:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1247292

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=267639

These are amazing, thanks.

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