Feel bad 'bout friends that didn't sign up. | Hacker News Reader

Feel bad 'bout friends that didn't sign up.

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Here's my situation,I launched a project like six months ago and I asked some of my friends and relatives to sign up and almost half of them didn't. Everytime we met like in a party, they're just saying "Hey how's your site? I haven't look into it yet but maybe next time." So I just whisper to myself "Do they really want to or they're just bullshitting me? I thought friends and family support each other." Does any of you guys experience this too and what are the things you do to deal with this kind of thoughts against friends and families?

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You're being way, way too self centered and naive.

Let's assume you have no interest in local bands. A young cousin of yours starts a band, and gushes about it whenever he meets you. "You gotta come hear us!"

What are you going to say? "No, I'm not interested in your band"? Of course you say "Sure, I'd love to come sometimes."

But now it's a month later and he's hurt that you never came. Guess what? You're busy building your project and his band didn't meet an urgent need of yours.

I'm impressed that you got HALF of your acquaintances to sign on. Count yourself lucky. Yes, they really felt some measure of caring towards you when they were saying they would visit, and probably meant what they said.

No, your service did not meet an urgent enough need to compel them to visit when you're out of their face and they're dealing with their own problems.

I recommend you read the book "How To Win Friends and Influence People". Nevermind the crappy title, the contents are gold. Central message: stop thinking about your needs, and start thinking about theirs.

So I write an iphone app that lets people record GPS tracks, it's been out for a year, and I've told everyone. A friend also writes iphone apps. When his launched, I bought it, wrote reviews, and gave him all of our app engine code to put up a quick website about the app. A few weeks ago, he emailed to ask if I knew of a good app to record GPS tracks. Argh.

Normal. Most people aren't interested in most of the stuff out there. Your site will be interesting to 1% of the people, you need to go wider than friends & family and try to find the audience that wants to be in your site.

I've historically found it more difficult to get people I know to take an interest in my sites than people I don't know.

Even sending out links, I see that they aren't being clicked on.

Then you meet somebody in a coffee shop, and they're interested, and all of a sudden, you see this random person you don't know checking out your stuff.

I've always wondered why it's like this. I think sometimes you don't 'stick' with the people you know because you aren't different. Your friends know you, they know you come up with ideas and build stuff, and only when you strike a nerve with something they want, will you get them to use it.

On the other hand, most people aren't expecting to meet or hear about new and interesting things from a random person they meet, so I think that sticks with them a bit more. It's more novel with a new acquiescence than a familiar one.

Plus, they're wondering what you're all about, if you're all talk, etc. So they take some action.

Just my thoughts.

I think one of the first few things you learn about entrepreneurship is that friends and family aren't as supportive as you imagine they might be. They might not use your stuff, and they might even question why you're doing it. Just learn to ignore those and move on. Everyone encounters it. Don't feel too bad.

Don't sweat it. If your project is successful, the participation of your friends and family will be a drop in the bucket -- and a support headache.

My friends and family are happy that I'm happy making a living doing what I enjoy on the internet. That's enough.

Don't sweat it - that's just what friends do. In fact, friends are quite a bit worse than actual customers for getting feedback. It's much easier to get friends to "sign up", but once they do that, they almost universally log out and forget.

If your experience is anything like mine you'll get more feedback from your first one or two paying customers than all of your friends combined.

I don't even bother telling friends to sign up unless they would be interested in the product because of their work, hobbies, etc. Even then, they're not the most helpful crowd.

People in general are very lazy. If they don't have any interest in what you are doing their opinion or feed-back is going to be very poor. So the lack of feedback is not that important.

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