Ask HN: Review my website
popbub.com
popbub.com
After looking a bit more at the site I have a slight clue but still very little idea about the site and its features. As a user, I'm unwilling to login with Facebook just to test it out and explore.
Is this similar to an existing concept that I don't know about?
When you sign up via facebook you get 200 points. I'll add a feature where you can create an anonymous account for less points so you can try it out.
It's completely free, so you don't have to pay for anything.
You can put up a bounty by creating a challenge. Hit 'Submit' on the top to submit a new challenge. Yeah it's an arbitrary amount that you decide.
You need to say, on the front page, in a couple of clear sentences, what the point of the site is.
First of all, as a couple of other users have said, I have no idea what your site is. Popbub.com doesn't exactly make the product obvious (although it does have nice potential), and there is pretty much nothing telling me what to do.
Let's get some text in there! It astounds me that you expect users to "sign in with Facebook. Do it now!" when you literally haven't explained the point of anything.
I'm not trying to be harsh, as this is supposed to just be constructive criticism. The design of the site is simple and although there are a few typographic errors it's definitely not bad to read.
Get some descriptions in there, and maybe a screenshot or demo or SOMETHING so I know why I'm staring at the page.
Good luck!
I built Sleepyti.me as a free app, and did not expect to make money from it. As such, I am not interested in acquiring subscribers (I don't offer a service), or paying for traffic via AdWords. Startups with a product (for example WakeMate, which has received considerable HN coverage this week) have saturated this advertising space, and it's not really an area in which I'd want to throw money.
In my case, the profit comes from sheer traffic. The more traffic I get, the more people will click relevant ads in the single banner AdSense unit I display after the information has been given to the user.
Since my profit comes from traffic, it does not make sense to pay for traffic via AdWords in the traditional sense: the money would just go in a circle.
It's repeated a lot, but the best way to drive traffic to your website is to solve a problem. Sleepyti.me is one way to solve the problem of waking up tired (a common problem, I might add), but there are obviously infinitely many problems to choose from.
Once the tool/site is written, it must be tested to provide an elegant experience. Critique from other developers (some here at HN, but also over at [Proggit](http://reddit.com/r/programming)) helped me a lot.
Once the site launches, it's imperative to provide users an outlet to express their interest and show it to other people. Lucky for us, this no longer entails "enter a friend's email address here to tell them about us!" A simple Facebook like button allows the site to spread organically. Each time a user "likes" the page on Facebook, his or her friends will see the notification and have the opportunity to like it his/herself. Theoretically, this could spread through all of Facebook's ridiculous userbase, which would provide more than enough traffic.
HN, Reddit, and more recently StumbleUpon have provided great outlets for traffic, and social media like Twitter and Facebook have allowed it to grow quite nicely.
I'm (ambitiously) trying to launch similar sites at a rate of one project per month, given leniency for interesting bugs or project changes.
Sorry if this post was a little exhaustive, but I wanted to make sure I included the necessary background information to answer your question :)
My most profitable day so far brought in about $30; I've had a few such days. Average is somewhere around $14/day.
My goal is to earn $10/day or $300/month per site, which I think is both achievable and a nice goal. December, being my first month with a payout from Google, is on track with this goal (granted, with some residual from November): I have $344.77 in unpaid earnings that will be sent to me at the end of the month.
As I briefly noted in my earlier post, I'm trying to do one of these projects per month--if my goals can hold, 300 * 12 sites is equal to a residual income of 3600 per month or $43,200/year. Lofty goals, but that's not a bad salary for residual income!
I'm still very new at this, with a lot to learn, but I'd love to write up my experience in a HN post. I know a lot of people are interested in making money this way, and although I'm certainly not an expert, I'd love to lend any insight.
You've got a plan -- my only concern would be the upkeep of 12 sites. But who knows, one of those sites could turn out to be a home run. Thanks for writing.
And like everyone else mentioned, I have no idea what your site is for. Add a big headline "PopBub will make you rich or get you laid or both" and then explain how.
If you get a bunch of members it would be really fascinating to watch how the bounty points flow.
FB.logout();
I'm testing it out on my dev, and the login button is not turning into a logout button even when I am logged in via facebook.
Also, FB.logout(); is logging the user out of facebook, which probably isn't desirable.
Is this only happening on my end?
If you want to only log someone out of your site, you've probably got a session variable of some sort you want to destroy, right?