I built it but they wouldn't come!
I wrote a "social" site but I'm having a hard time attracting users. What your experiences with promoting your site? Have you successfully started a forum before, and if so, how?
~ 3 months in: We used some "unconventional methods" (that I won't mention in detail) to attract a few initial users.
~ 7 months in: We had a breakthrough with google (we still aren't sure exactly what it was) and we started to get a ton of search traffic
~ 10 months in: from here, traffic was all from word of mouth and referrals. This was by far the major segment. The first two combined up to maybe 40,000 users...everything from there to 300,000 was primarily driven by word of mouth
After that we had some deals, etc, but most of it was just surviving until things picked up on their own.
I can tell you that we tried anything and everything to get even a little bit of attention in those days. I can't point back to one thing and say "that's what really got it started"...I think it was just a combination of keeping ourselves out there until we were in the right place at the right time.
And now I have to do it all again.
That sounds like you used some "morally questionable" methods.. ?
Maybe you'd care to elaborate?
I guess it would be easy to say, "Eh, what's the big deal?" if you never have to deal with the cumulative effects of everyone promoting their products in spammy ways.
At the very least, it's disrespectful to the folks that don't get paid enough to keep all the networks running everywhere.
I agree with zkinion, many startups use "legal spam". Our site was around before MySpace became the social networking behemoth that it is today. They used to make fake accounts on our site all the time. And we would do it back to them.
You don't read about it much in the stories in Founders at Work, but from what I've seen a lot of very successful sites did whatever they had to do to win. If your product is truly disruptive you shouldn't have to do much at all to advertise it. But there are a lot of social sites out there, and a lot of them play dirty.
The honest way: Find a way to deliver value to the user that doesn't require them recruiting everyone they know before they are able to benefit from the site. WHY ARE YOU UNIQUE? Start small and think about each individuals experience vs. big numbers.
The usual way: Seed the site with fake profiles and activity then spam the hell out it. Can be effective as long as you are offering something unique. (not Tagworld)
The probable way: Fail like 99% of the social sites out there. Path of least resistance baby.
I see what you did there. Nerds don't have 50 friends.
I just think sarcasm (like your comment here) and certain strains of humor (the replicating meme, for example) are counterproductive, though I don't by any means wish to discourage original/well-thought-out humor.
Good thing we've nipped that sort of thing in the bud, so the beautiful signal can shine through unhindered by noise.
Smiling and laughter wastes precious calories and time. Time that could be spent perfecting your quirky web2 startup into a soulless corporate killing machine.
If we allow jokes on news.yc, people might start having fun, and fun is the antithesis of productivity!
Back to work, people! (whipcrack)
First, someone started participating who had a massive following on YouTube, and basically jetissoned over his entire auidence to our site. That doubled our traffic overnight.
A few weeks later, someone with influence in a massive forum community posted something about us, and that was an even larger traffic boost. Essentially, people from that forum site started spending their time on our site.
Putting email scrapers and all that stuff to get people to spread word about you is nothing compared to what a few social super-nodes can do for you. Once you attract those people to start evangelizing your product, you have increasing chances to attract even more super nodes.
The problem is attracting those super nodes in the first place. Build something that people can form an opinion about. Super nodes want to put their hat on something, their seal of approval. Generic does not get approval, I assure you. Stand for something, and imbue your product with that ethos. As sparse as reddit looks, you can bet that there's something identifiable about that site.
Pick a place for your fight where you have an advantage: social news has clear leaders and network effect working against you.
Pick a tool for your fight: web site that is looks and feels like any other site is not enough (even if it has 10x better tech behind it)
Pick your friends, who are for the long run: talk to your best users, make friends. Talk to your competitors too, news.YC is a great place to make it happen (I'll be happy to chat to you).
Learn from the mistakes of others: there have been plenty of personalized news sites that failed before, what have you learned from their mistakes?
- make it compelling - manually invite a core group - take note of feedback, keep improving, keep advertising
In my first project (from way back in 2001), it involved 6 months of hard work in advertising, telling everyone about it, getting people to sign up. It was 50% selling, 50% content. And then bam, I didn't have to do anything anymore. After that initial push momentum took hold and that was it. Any additional advertisement increased numbers, and stopping the advertisements dropped traffic, but the core numbers never diminished.
Make it easier to get information about the stories. It's very hard to browse.
The "related similar save hide report" menu is terrible. It looks like a tag cloud or keyword highlighting. Don't forget usability heuristics!
When trying to get critical number other than conversions, don't make people sign up to use features (like the stars).
Keywords aren't as interesting as a snippet.
When people click on a link for registered users, make the default a signup form rather than a login form.
Don't fall for the hype of the current Web 2.0 square boxes and olive green look. It will look like 70s fashions in a few years. (okay, that is extremely subjective). Make the page, or at least the header more compelling.
Our site has not reached critical mass yet, but we're pretty close. Same space, different approach. Would be very interested to hear what you have to say about us.
I really like the layout and how clean it all is. I also like the fact that you take some design cues from Google with your logo/search box (nothing wrong with using design patterns!). I also liked the consistency when you clicked on a link - ie, the header and title didn't move.
Is that "What is Jaanix?" always the default link at the top? If so, great! In these nascent stages you should definitely be accommodating people with questions and establishing what it is you do. When Digg first came out people had a lot of questions about how that worked as well.
The tuners are great. I really dig how they're analogue - a lot of people make the mistake of stepping sliders for "tuning" functionality.
Such a small thing, but any chance of making the comment box slide out rather than pop out? Everything else looks so slick it was the one thing that stood out to me. Actually I also noticed videos seemed a bit clunky (click on one and then scroll to see what I'm talking about).
What would be great in terms of functionality is an Audioscrobbler style thing - name a few blogs and have the tuners get set for you.
Also have you done the pre-requisite widget for people to embed into their blogs, etc?
Not sure what other advice I can offer to be honest, you guys seemed to have nailed your concept quite nicely.
Will be fixing the things you've mentioned, hope to see you on our site more often, let's continue the discussion there.
I think the takeaway there is to try niching to a manageable segment of the user population at first.
I hate to rain on your parade (and this is admittedly extremely nit-picky), but those two statements are incompatible, unless you had email addresses from both institutions. Something like ten thousand students from Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, and Yale had joined the site before MIT was added.
And don't worry, that's not much of a parade to rain on. ;)
reddit: PG and Joel Spolsky talked about it. facebook: Zuck acquired the main harvard email list and spammed everyone. myspace: The parent company spammed all its users. digg: ?
I think spamming is almost inevitable. The plentyoffish guy spammed myspace (i think) and made lots of female sockpuppets.
I think Facebook started as a hot-or-not clone. Zuck went around to the college residences to scrape the pictures from the residence's face books.
I'd suggest not following by their example.
If it goes well then find a bigger sponsor and do another game, slightly less local next time around....
“Today, two weeks after its inception, thefacebook.com has blossomed from about 650 members early last week to a network of over 4,300 student, alumni and faculty subscribers as of yesterday.”
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=357543
“‘I have no idea why it’s so popular,’ said thefacebook.com creator Mark E. Zuckerberg ’06. ‘I was pretty surprised.’”
I remember checking it out the day it launched and leaving because it wasn't very interesting. I came back in October (about 3-4 months later) and it had some minimal traction. IMHO, the critical factor was that they added comments and people had started commenting on links.
Facebook was pretty well-established when I joined (fall 04, about 8 months after it started). People were using it as an address book - meet someone at a party, you instantly had all their contact info once you knew their name. And since there were pictures and it was organized by college, you could often pick out who they were from first names alone. There weren't many social features back then; IIRC, it just had Poke and the Wall.
To be honest the site lost me in the first minute because it didn't seem like I'd be interested in it. The theme wasn't apparent in the first 10 seconds. If it was a slickly designed site where people could upvote/downvote cool pictures of exotic sports cars, then maybe I would have stayed. There has to be a niche.
Plus, since there are a lot of other social news sites out there, and I already visit a bunch of them, it's going to be really tough to pull me to a new social news site. Perhaps try building something in a domain that nobody has really ventured into yet? We already have social video sharing, social image sharing, social news, and social profile databases. Maybe there's some new category of social websites that you and I haven't considered yet? Your chances in that new category might be better than with a new instance of the social news class.
"I built it but they didn't come" is probably the leading complaint for the large percentage of startups that fail. You just have to be brutally, brutally honest and straightforward when analyzing your site. Put yourself in the shoes of an average visitor to the site: what does she read that catches her attention? How does she tell you apart from all the other sites on the Web that are similar to yours? Are you solving some burning need for this user that no other site can solve? What are you offering her that's going to make her bookmark your site and keep coming back? It's a really hard thing to do.
I'd suggest not just building one thing and waiting for people to show up. Rather, build a hundred things, each of which you think are pretty good, and then maybe 2 - 3 of them will become amazing hits.
I think this is the approach that original signal took. I have no idea whether it will work, the aggregated content will have to be damned compelling to make it better than a plain on RSS feed. Chances are I'll ever even finish the damned thing anyway. :/ But I figured it'd be worth a shot, if for no other reason than to learn some new stuff and to have a hobby!
Edit: scratch that, I was able to contribute to Piazza di San Pietro, Rome.
If the URL is too embarrassing to admit to... well, there's your problem!
Also, "Interesting things to read" is a little ambiguous, and could use clarification to emphasize that the site _does_ cover both news and reference texts. (Or is it even more than that?) With so much flat-looking text, people are going to read one link and think, "This is just another less-attractive version of Google News," or, "This is just another link aggregator site, but without arrows for some reason."
Somehow, you've got to make your front-page impression for non-logged-in users both provide a little bit of value (but not the many links you're putting up right now), _and_ immediately and visually demonstrate what makes your site uniquely valuable.
The list format feels a little oppressive, for some reason. I can't put my finger on it, but it just isn't ... fun.
Finally, all the links I see initially are about equally interesting to me -- they're all fairly heady math/computer geek stuff. So I don't even get the initial reward of trimming away (or the fun of condemning) the really trivial stuff I wish wasn't in the news. I wonder if someone in the 99% of the U.S. population that doesn't care about Boltzmann machines would even try to push past that.
Design wise the site is a bit dull, but passable. The text is unbelievably hard to read (on Windows/Firefox, default font size). I'm guessing you use Mac or Linux, otherwise you would never have launched with that font.
I originally signed up because the site had the promise of a good recommendation engine. That's something that others have promised (Jaanix, reddit) but no one has really delivered on. If you have got something that you think is unique then tell people about it. I even visited the about page on my first session, trying to find what made your page different. I still don't know.
The biggest problem was with the content. When I first visited most links on the front page seemed to be on machine learning/AI. I guess that probably is because of the interests of the initial users, but I don't need a whole page of links on the same topic. If possible a mix of article types would be good; I found most links were just Wikipedia articles.
Finally, I'm not sure how I feel about the rating system. Other sites have two ratings for a reason. It is much harder to choose between 10 options and breaks up the flow.
Then convert traffic from your blog to your network.