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Comment by danielskogly | Hacker News Reader

This evening we got our 171st user for our wishlist-service. When we launched it 1 year ago we tried to get it out on different channels like Reddit and HN without much success, while we _did_ see success in just talking about it to friends and family, and had just over 100 users in January this year.

Since then, we've done close to zero marketing, and it's been amazing to see new signups, wishlists and items being created - seemingly out of the blue. I made a simple Slack-bot to post those events to a channel with their ID, and these are the stats from it was added late March until now: 53 new users, 74 new wishlists, and 482 new items.

As we do no sort of analytics, we have no clue who these people are, but boy does it make me happy to see those "A new user was just created!"-messages nonetheless!

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You can't get from 0 to 100k without passing through 171 first. :) Congrats and good luck!

Very true! :) Thank you, and likewise - pretty sure there's more than 100k information-hungry parents out there, so wouldn't be surprised to see the "100k to 500k"-post in the not too distant future!

Maybe you can if you get multiple users sign up at once :-)

I have a suggestion for wishy (if you're not doing this already of course).

Extract out the most popular items that people are sharing (no identifying information connected, only extract out super items that you can identify well, like "Wonder Woman on blu ray"), or similarly build your own curated lists based on what's popular right now (eg a new PS4 game). Build some categories that they belong to ("video games" or "clothing"). Then enable people to quickly browse for things within those segments to add to their wish lists. It should boost wishlist item adding substantially over time and give people new ideas. You could also build a gently curated top 10 or 20 item list in a given week or month (manually reviewed for potentially inappropriate items). You can track various metrics for what's moving socially right now for a link/item to get an improved idea on what matters to provide some further ranking (eg facebook sharing acceleration or deceleration).

We aren't doing this, and we definitively should! I've added this to the todo-list, and will work towards having manually curated lists up first, and try to make it a bit more automatic when we have a bigger user mass. Can't give you a specific date for implementing this, as Wishy.gift is both a sideproject and - at least for now - very seasonal (36 of the 53 new users since March signed up in November/December), but I'm hoping to have this up for August/September :)

To be honest, I wish I had this two weeks ago when I was making my own wishlist!

Thank you for taking the time to suggest a feature!

One even smaller suggestion: in "Your friends and family can check of which items they are getting,", the word "of" should be "off" :)

Appreciate it! Fixed in next build!

In case anyone is wondering (like I was), I think this is the site:

https://wishy.gift

That's the one! Any feedback and suggestions are appreciated!

Usually landing pages for early stage products tend to be iffy but you've killed it honestly! I got what your product was in 10 secs.

What would be awesome is a link to a demo wishlist!

Agree with this, your landing page is _so good_ I'm going to use the format to replace my own garbage landing page. Thank you for the inspiration, this is awesome. You're starting a movement!

By the way, congrats on 171 users :)

Wow, thank you! Good luck with your own project too!

Thank you for those awesome words!

A demo wishlist is a great idea, perhaps with the ability to switch between how the creator sees the list and how others do?

Really appreciate the suggestion, will be adding this!

On the landing page below "share it", "check of" should be "check off".

It's been like that for a whole year without anyone noticing - or at least without anyone telling us. Thank you for doing so!

Fixed in next build :)

I'm liking how it looks, but, at least on mobile, I'm not able to find a list of features. I don't know if my behaviour is typical but on most sites that means I move on to find a similar site that does include a feature list.

For example, it was recently sinterklaas (Dutch holiday with a tradition of randomizing who gets who gifts) so someone in the family set up a list on https://www.lootjestrekken.nl/. That way everyone got an email, as soon as you clicked 'OK' on that email you're able to make a wishlist, ask questions to the group, ask anonymous questions to the person you're meant to buy for, etc.

I guess what I'm asking is, without having to watch some videos (it's quicker to hit next result on Google) how can I know how your product works? I see right away it's vaguely what I'm looking for, but as you can tell I've got specific demands, and I don't think I'm the only one. So how can I know it's exactly what I'm looking for?

Just a friendly heads up (love the idea!)... clicking "Why Facebook?" works on Chrome, but not Safari (I'm on Safari 11, macOS 10.13.1).

Thank you for letting me know! I'll have a look at this as soon as I get my hands on a mac!

Looks interesting but I don't have a Facebook account :/

The dependency on Facebook is kind of unfortunate, as it excludes those who either don't have a Facebook account, or for various reasons do not want to use it to sign up for services. I am myself in the latter category, but went with it as I wanted a single login, and saw it as the best alternative at the time - got some more about that in the 'why Facebook?' section on the site.

Would really like to provide a solution that could work without login, but I'm kinda clueless on how to solve this in a good way, that allows for the creator not knowing what has been checked off or not, as well as allowing others to both check and later - perhaps even on another device - uncheck items :/

On the landing page the images within the gray circles are not loading... assuming that there were images (I only see grey big circles).

Using chromium (desktop)

How strange! These are autoplaying, muted videos, which has worked on every platform and browser I've tried so far. What OS and which version of chromium are you on?

I like the idea and could see myself using it, but I don't use Facebook.

Have you thought about a few marketing side projects for your site? For example, maybe (a) showcase public lists with a count of how many people clicks on each item, (b) creating a list for entrepreneurs, parents, teachers, etc, and (c) sharing them on the respective site.

People will hopefully not just find the items interesting, but will also be curious to see what items others are looking at.

And best of all, hopefully a lot of people will find your site this way.

that's awesome on getting to 171. I just recently hit 6. But, the first 2 were mine.

My god put google analytics on that site.. how do you even run a site without any analytics?

People were doing analytics on their own server-side data before Google even existed.

I'm using a throwaway because I don't want this associated with my my main account, but a super valuable market for you here is sex workers. I used to be a camgirl, and a main source of income for a good chunk of camgirls is getting people to buy gifts off of wishlists. Usually people use Amazon's wishlist feature, but that obviously limits you to things that are on Amazon, which doesn't have a great selection of sex-related stuff. Having a pretty, store-agnostic platform would be really welcomed.

Good places to find camgirls is /r/camming / linked subreddits in the sidebar, along with the sites themselves (I only used Chaturbate, so I can't speak to the other platforms).

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