Getting A New Product Off The Ground: Part One | Hacker News Reader

Getting A New Product Off The Ground: Part One

kalzumeus.com

62 pointsaaw20 comments

Hmm. I'm sort of considering blogging on a fairly frequent basis this month, so while I appreciate to no end that folks find my blog interesting, can I ask that anyone considering submitting this series in the future exercise discretion? I would dislike being on the front page twice a week.

That said, if folks have any questions, shoot.

Anyone who desires karma could just post a link and then you'll be on the front page again.

I have abandoned feed readers (like many others it seems) so HN is how I rely on finding what to read - if it's not here then I won't see it.

I mostly do likewise (the only feeds I check regularly are searchyc results). Can I suggest Twitter (@patio11) if you have a particular interest for what I write? I announce virtually all significant blog posts and tweet fairly seldomly otherwise, and Twitter gives people a cheap option to pay attention whereas the HN frontpage has no cheap option to say "Oh God not Patrick again".

Fair enough - although I still think that your articles belong here. Look at the home page now and tell me it couldn't use some more article with practical advice for people currently running startups.

> I would dislike being on the front page twice a week.

Obviously, feel free to not answer this, but why? I only ask because from my perspective, knowing that others find what I do valuable is a powerful motivator. Every time I hit the front page, I get a little smile on my face, and another productivity boost...

And also, all it takes is one person to miss this post, and it's not gonna happen. Your posts are like free karma: pretty much everyone's gonna end up voting up something with (kalzumeus.com) on the end.

Hm. Maybe that's something for pg to think about?

why?

Because HN is a community I am happy to be one little (if slightly verbose) member of, rather than a marketing channel for me. I'm a guest here, so I try to keep my footprint small and confined to where I'm pretty sure that I add value.

Gotcha. Makes perfect sense. It's why I don't submit my own posts: if it's valuable to someone else, they can submit it, but I don't want to presume that it's automatically useful.

Why not let the community decide whether your posts add value? Isn't that why we have an upvoting system?

    In particular, I’m starting to devote my free cycles at lunch into thinking
    about scalable content generation strategies for organic SEO, which is the
    form of marketing that I’ve had the best results with in the past.

For situations where organic SEO is not really an option (or for which I lack imagination), what other strategies would you recommend to get an app from 10 uniques/day to a hundred or so? I’d especially be interested in your opinion on how to attract visitors to a site like delicious/reddit/digg.

Thanks!

Seed it with your friends, act as sockpuppets for a while, and engage with whatever community latches on. It's funny, you guys envy my ability to spin up thousands of pages and sell stuff, and I envy the whole viral loop dynamic.

Also, everybody who is not in walled garden, and most of those who are, can and should have an organic SEO strategy. It's insanely powerful, and has very attractive characteristics for startups in that it rewards technical savvy, close interaction with your community, and agility in execution, and does not necessarily require a whole lot of money to do.

Ok, time to subscribe to your twitter account then.

This post I found really quite interesting. I'm taking part in the HN November Launch month to launch a side project and start actual development on Sunday. I found your post to be great timing for me, in fact I've been doing the infrastructure build in the past couple of hours and was writing up the functional and technical specs on the train, so excellent timing!

"Happiness does not write code" is an awesome quote.

Patrick, what service are you planning to use for billing (presumably recurring)?

Spreedly + Paypal.

I noticed you use Paypal for bingocardcreator.com too - aren't you concerned they will kill your account? They seem to do so a lot.

I think this is a cognitive bias caused by, e.g., me not rushing to the front page fifty times in the last four years saying "Guys WTF Paypal just paid me a thousand dollars on time with no hassles."

I hope you won't mind me lifting that line and repeating it as my own in the future with no attribution ;) It spells out exactly what I want to say every time I hear the "WTF PayPal suxx" debate.

Go for it. I've got lots more.

Nothing beats a solid TODO list. I keep mine in a file called TODO.txt with sketches on my grid notepad. (Makes designing html pages much easier.)

When you have a solid framework (I use Perl + CGI::App) the CRUD code/modules become the easiest to code.

It's the damn interface that takes a good while (especially without a good designer.)

What I like to do is use Blueprint CSS and make my pages jQuery themeable. This gives me good fonts and padding along with a standard look when working with the jQuery UI plugins.

I can't even fathom the idea of starting a business, there is so much to do when creating a decent app that adding the business part just adds to the headache.

Another hurdle I've come across is documentation. Even writing a good description for your app can be hard.

I envy products that take only a couple of months and are able to turn a profit. I've been working on my project for over a year now and just barely getting close to a release month.

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