Ask HN: How to gain traction with projects? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to gain traction with projects?

10 pointsecto14 comments

I've been hacking away at little projects for months. I make them up, ask my friends to test them, get feedback, iterate, and get them production-ready. It's what I love to do and I'm not going to stop.

I get pumped up. I post on my blog, Twitter, Facebook, HN, reddit, and I email blogs. I live in Northern Minnesota so there aren't many people around, but I let the few I see know about my latest projects. I even tell people about my projects at the gas station and restaurants. Basically, I try hard.

Nothing goes anywhere. I don't think it's because I make floozy things either; I feel as though my products would interest a lot of people if I could reach them.

It's really disheartening spending days of my life working on something to have a handful of people see it. How do you gain traction with your projects? Is there a magic bullet that works for you?

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While I don't have much experience with launching anything, it sounds like the projects that you're building aren't exactly useful to the people around you. If you don't mind me asking, what are these little projects? You might want to try and focus on a target audience. Maybe even ask them what they need and gather some feedback? Just my thoughts. It may or may not apply.

In reverse-chronological order:

http://memify.me/ http://leftright.me/ http://mugshotwars.com/ http://brainerdcustody.com/

There are more but these are the apps I've made in the past month or two. I've tried to experiment with a variety of viral techniques and range my projects from local to universal context. The only one that got any notable traffic was Mugshot Wars, but it's tapered off to a few visits a day now.

They seem like decent enough projects for fun. But anything long term might be slightly tricky. I particularly liked memify.me and it seems like it could catch on. leftright, as someone had pointed out, seems similar to what's been done. An extension of leftright could be including some sort of question for people to guess - could be age, location, etc.

Seen The Social Network? Mark created something almost identical to http://leftright.me/

can you share what you learned with these experiments?

Similar to what I asked here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2219418

I see what you did there.

No magic bullets, unfortunately, but you'll get more useful feedback if you show us what you've made.

Let me follow this up now I've seen the sites you posted.

While there's nothing hugely wrong with your sites, there's also nothing hugely right with them. I'm not trying to be negative, I'm just trying to be helpful. So mugshot wars is like a fun hotornot clone, and leftright as far as I can tell is a hotornot clone, and brainerd custody is great if you want to see pictures of convicts, and memify is probably fun if you're into internet memes and don't use one of the other internet meme generators and you can be bothered to figure out exactly what it does (which the screenshot doesn't make clear) and how to login (which doesn't work for me, mac+chrome, for some reason).

Again, I don't want you to think I'm trying to crush your spirit or anything. It's clear you know some stuff about making fun sites. But these kinds of things are flaky - either people love them and they explode, or they don't and they fade away. But they're all learning exercises.

It used to be that you could put up a stupid animated gif of a singing animal and it would be the biggest thing on the internet. But there's plenty of other stuff to do online now. It's not so easy to make a viral hit.

So I would say that there's no reason that your sites aren't taking off outside of the reason that there's no reason why they should.

But look at it this way: it's damn hard to monetize junky viral traffic, so be glad you're not just saddling yourself with enormous bandwidth bills! Consider all this a learning experience - you're better at making sites than you were when you started, so when you have an idea that provides value for people, you'll be able to implement it well.

Thanks a lot for your response. I was really looking for honest criticism.

I realize they aren't technically valuable websites. I tried to create them to appeal to users subconsciously. The reason I asked the question is that I feel like I need to know that I can get enough momentum with a project to vindicate taking the startup plunge. I don't want to spend a year on a beautiful product to not have it go anywhere.

And thank god for EC2. Last month's bill for 4 servers: $6

hey, I have actually just started an organization to help entrepreneurs gain traction

http://www.meetup.com/traction-bootcamp

Unfortunately the first group's meetups will be in New York, however, maybe we can include you virtually in our program.

I started this program because I meet a lot of entrepreneurs like you... a lot of people are good at building the initial prototype, but sucks at getting traction.

The two major reasons being

1. Entrepreneurs don't quite know how to gain traction

2. Entrepreneurs don't necessarily have the support system that goad each other on to get traction, especially when the going gets tough.

Love to include you in the program, email me (the organizer) if you want

Try and solve a problem.

What type of problem? How would you define that?

Your clearly a good programmer I just don't see the goal of your apps. In addition they all seem to be slight variations of the same core idea. Trying to arbitrarily come up with an idea that you think is going to instantly gain traction and become viral is just a shot in the dark, unless you have evidence suggesting your idea has that ability.

If your goal is to start a business/make money then find a problem in society (with a substantial market) and provide a solution. It's really that simple, and there are plenty of problems. The type of problem is up to you, I'd go with something you find interesting.

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