Getting Users For Your New Startup | Hacker News Reader

Getting Users For Your New Startup

blog.pud.com

286 pointspud59 comments

I wasn't sure whether to put the Hacker News reference in there, for fear that people might come out of the wordwork trying to game HN after reading this.

That's why I also put in the line about not spamming. I can get rid of the HN link if people think I should.

More useful than most things posted here by virtue of being specific with details and blunt about what worked for you. Thanks.

Agree w/ trevelyan. Useful article.

do not worry Pud, you are not spamming

From a former F'ck'dCompany forum member

So, you're the infamous "." Yuo were prolific, I'll give you that.

Like a motorcycle stuck in the mud. Ra! [/inside-joke]

You should ad that including pretty girls showing their vaginas on your webpage does attract an audience.

Not sure what the ROI on those Fucked Company t-shirts were, but I'm sure they generated page views.

Pretty girls can be a good design element to draw the users' eye toward something on your site. But this post is more about bringing in new traffic; web design is another topic.

To answer your ROI question, the girls modeled for free and I sold about 20,000 shirts. Also, they didn't show vaginas (at least not on the publicly facing parts of my site). Here's an example: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pud/58650101/in/set-1268624

Oh, bullshit. I saw plenty of poon on your site, guy, and I was no member. I understand it may be embarrassing ten years later that you used nudity as a cheap come-on, but don't deny it or refer to it as web design. Please.

Thanks for answering.

Obligatory "Pics or it didn't happen"

Pud already admitted to it in his reply. I have no idea why he's ashamed of it now and is trying to pass it off as "web design". Or maybe he's betting that nobody who reads HN remembers the bubble days when Pub made his living off of reporting other people's economic demise, exploiting women to sell schwag and other crappy web me-too's.

You know, I've never heard anyone say that their ads were part of the design, coochy or no coochy. I guess strippers are just part of the strip club decor; everyone's really just there for the awesome DJ and the bargain drinks.

Anyways, I'll continue to take Pud at his word when he's offering up advice.

I go for the cushy chairs.

I couldn't resist:

"They built a house of straw. The thundering machines sputtered and stopped. Their leaders talked and talked and talked. But nothing could stem the avalanche. Their world crumbled. The cities exploded. A whirlwind of looting, a firestorm of fear. Men began to feed on men.

On the roads it was a white line nightmare. Only those mobile enough to scavenge, brutal enough to pillage would survive. The gangs took over the highways, ready to wage war for a tank of juice. And in this maelstrom of decay, ordinary men were battered and smashed.

Except for one man armed with an AK-47, and a Honda full of silver"

I forgot the other great FC quote about the never ending housing bubble.

This one:

"It's a new paradigm, and everybody who doesn't buy, now, will be priced out forever. Anybody who does buy will be rewarded with a lifetime of riches, as their property will continue its 30% yearly price increase.

Renters, and anybody born in a future generation, will not be able to afford a $15,000,000 starter home in 15 years. They will live in tent cities, and Hondas.

This asset bubble is different than all of the others - it will never slow down, or pop. The gains are permanent.

what is this I don't even

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pud/58650395/in/set-1268624/

(sorry, couldn't resist)

everyone already knows about HN. it's not a secret.

I saw the link on twitter first, and specifically came here to see if it had been posted. Classic.

My takeaway? These are things that only a founder could pull off. I've heard "the best person to pitch your idea is you" canard dozens of times, but this is a tangible demonstration of such.

A hired PR gun or early bizdev hire probably wouldn't think to go the controversial route. And if he did, it would come off as inauthentic and spammy.

Good story idea: “I’m not sure if my thing is legal.”

This is definitely going to the top of my how-to-bait-reporters list.

haha +1

As long as it does not report to some API you are using and terms it comes with ;-)

"If the writer doesn’t respond, try a different one. But only one at a time — they won’t like you if you give the same story to their competitor. "

What is a good amount of time to wait between contacting writers? Or how much time has to pass without a response for you to to decide to move on to the next one?

I usually figure they're not interested if I haven't heard back in 2 or 3 days. Sometimes I wait a bit longer if the writer is very well known, and therefore more deluged.

Definitely leaving that last piece up to our collective imaginations...

(TC writer here) I'd say send an email, and if you don't get a response in 1-2 days send one more saying that if you don't hear back in the next 24 hours you'll probably try your luck elsewhere. Don't be threatening about it (the reporter doesn't owe you anything), just be transparent.

Setting a 'time limit' like this helps makes sure you don't end up on the reporter's mental backburner indefinitely. Of course, if the reporter is super swamped this may lead them to simply pass on the story. But usually if it's good, they'll try to find another writer who can take it.

Incidentally, I just did the same thing to you :)

Had emailed you yesterday, no luck. Sent a gentle reminder to you again a couple of hours back. Still no reply, but keeping my fingers crossed :)

PS: seriously, though, sometimes I wonder whether journalists get my emails or it simply ends up getting into the spam box. Sadly, there is no way to know for sure.

I would rather expect to hear a no than waiting indefinitely.

Why can't journalists simply say no for a story? I understand they are flooded with emails, but a one word no would suffice.

I agree with the sentiment, but I don't think I'd react kindly to a one word "no". Imagine putting in time and effort into an email and just getting "no" in response.

One of the best ways to cut down on inbound email, is to send less outbound email.

How do I bait you?

pud taught me a whole lot when I worked for him. good to see him blogging.

> Good story idea: “My competitor raised $20 million, yet my thing is better.”

That is a good way to get into a writers spam bin. Every writer gets 5-6 stories about related companies when they post something, and it is annoying

What are some good ideas?

send tips about other companies, the industry you are in, news or article ideas, a unique angle on your news or company. a lot of bloggers like it when the news you send them almost writes itself. in short, be useful, get to know bloggers and dont expect the world

A warning is probably the most potent type of meme. A brief, well-worded warning can travel far, grabbing a lot of attention along the way.

An overly alarmist marketing campaign is considered FUD. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt)

The issue with articles like this, for me, is that it doesn't quite specify who this will work for.

As in, it works for sites that just need a ton of users - but not so much for niche-specific webapps that charge.

If you are trying to build a community and need a lot of numbers in a very short period of time, then sure....but if you want to find your users for your specific niche...this advice doesn't quite work.

I think there's good advice here for almost anyone, you just have to adapt it to your situation. Not all of these work for everyone, but many will work for most. Let's take your site CompVersions.com (which looks very nice, BTW) for example:

Controversy - Okay, tough one there. Get back to me on that.

Viral tricks - Allow new users to extend their free trials by another 14 days if they send an email about the service to 5 people. Or, give new paying users some amount of credit for doing something similar. Give away a free {thing designers want} - To enter the contest you must tweet about the service. Tons of options here.

Affiliate Program - People pay for the service, so this is doable. The affiliates you want are people/companies who operate popular design sites/blogs/forums/newsletters/services. If they have ads then they could be an affiliate (actually, even if they don't). Cut special deals for really good partners. Consider offering small payouts for trial sign ups and bigger payouts for paid customers.

SEO - Goes without saying. You need to be thinking about this.

Press - You probably aren't going for CNN here, but there are lots of design oriented publications both online and off. Think of some story ideas and start pitching. Are more people going freelance because of the economy? You could play off that angle. Clients who can't make up their minds about anything is a classic designer story. If you can put together a success story of someone who used your product to get an indecisive client to make a choice- that's a story people want to hear.

Celebrity Endorsement - Offer your product to a highly visible designer for free. If they like it, ask for an endorsement. Maybe a tweet or two? Maybe a mention on their blog?

Biz Dev - There are lots of design agencies out there. Maybe this is something that some of them would be interested in using. Maybe you could do a co-branded promotion with a company that offers another kind of design tool, like wire framing or something. Perhaps you could work with Appsumo to put together a "Designers" package, of which CompVersions would be a part.

Offline Events - Probably not super useful for this. But live design demos in front of an audience could be fun.

So yeah, I think there's some good material to go on here.

Err....wow! Dude...thanks for this advice. Many of the things you highlighted here make total sense, and I have thought about many of them - I guess I always dismissed it as 'not for me'.

The normal stuff, Biz Dev, SEO, Affiliate Program, for sure.

Here is a simple suggestion, perhaps you should write a version of this post that is geared to webapps like mine that have a monthly fee.

I bet that would be something the community is interested in. As would I...of course :)

what about offline events? Are they effective? I recall Yelp did a lot of that in the early days.

Offline events work best when your product has strong ties to the real world.

According to pud, it depends. He gave Evite as an example, but mentioned that Yelp did something similar.

An earlier version of the blog post (that danzheng likely saw) didn't include the section about offline events, though it did include something about Evite in the "Get creative" section.

IIRC it was also one of the success factors of MySpace.

From what I understand, MySpace got its initial group of users from (1) having a contest for parent company Euniverse.com employees to invite as many people as they could, and (2) spamming Friendster users, telling them about a faster alternative, when Friendster had performance issues.

MySpace also had a pretty good viral loop that went like this: 1) See small thumbnail image of Tila Tequila's boobs 2) Click image to see larger version, then forced to create account 3) Create account, use contact importer, email everyone you know

I think they didn't start throwing events until they were big.

We built most of our community back in 2003/2004 by combination of contests and offline events. But on the other hand I'm not sure whether to call that successful or effective as it seems to me that most useful leads come from outside of this "community".

What's up with the highlighting?

People love to get clever with links. But it just confuses people. Links should be underlined and a different color. If you really want people to know it's a link, make sure that color is blue.

Startup Idea(?) - Marketing/PR company to get you beta/real users for your tech/other startup, so that you can foucs on what you are good at, focusing on the product. Charges per user acquired.

One of the best articles i ever read on startup Marketing.

Why is his web site (Blippy) on a steep decline: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/blippy.com/ ?

I'm not full time at Blippy but can say (a) compete.com isn't accurate, and (b) Blippy has various other goings on that aren't reflected there.

But that's a different blog post for a different day.

compete.com is not accurate, but it's rarely off by order of magnitude. Are you saying that Blippy is NOT on decline?

Compete is regularly off by orders of magnitude and direction

Could you give an example of Compete.com being off by order of magnitude?

Could anyone here claim that Blippy.com is one of such examples? I'm getting downvoted for expressing my doubts in Blippy, but so far nobody made direct claim that Blippy is not on decline.

I would normally use Quantcast, but traffic to Blippy is so small, that it is almost off Quantcast's radar:

http://www.quantcast.com/blippy.com

Tipjoy's embedded js & iframe widgets were measured, not just views to tipjoy.com

This made things off by a 100X overestimate. Whoops!

Compete.com shows troughs, peaks and valleys for sites I've worked for, and the timing appears to have no relation whatsoever to real events and our own data.

What it is good for is comparing similar sites.

Such traffic misreports on Compete are typical for low-trafficked web sites. Can you show an example of a web site that is withing top 20000 web sites on Quantcast.com, but still has an order of magnitude inaccuracies on Compete?

How would I know the real measured numbers for enough sites to give examples?

If you specify just one example that would be good enough. I can give you my example:

http://www.quantcast.com/postjobfree.com/traffic 355,373 visits per month reported by Quantcast is 10% less than what Google Analytics reports (272,688 Visits per Month).

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/postjobfree.com/ 126,069 unique visits in March 2011 reported by Compete.com is ~2 times lower than Google Analytics shows for US traffic in March 2011 (252,621 Visits).

While Compete.com reports numbers that are two times lower, it shows trends correctly (overall PostJobFree.com growth; drop of PostJobFree.com traffic in December).

Every so often I see people on HN use compete as if it were a reliable measurement... In my experience it's not.

Compete shows a few of my websites as declining when they are in fact growing... In one particular case it showed that a website that was tripling in traffic was declining... It's so unprecise that I often wonder if it's not just a random number generator weighted by pageranks and mentions in google trend powering compete, it seems it'd give about the same results...

Here's a link from reddit talking about that: http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/experts-misunderestimate-our-...

Reddit is a good example of pointing out to inaccuracies of Compete.com Still, when reporting on Reddit Compete.com is off by factor of 4 (not 10). And the trend is shown correctly (Reddit growths).

For Blippy.com both Compete.com and comcast.com show very small numbers and Compete.com shows steep downward trend.

Unless somebody could share more reliable source of data I would assume that Blippy is on decline.

A bit on the evil side, but thanks for sharing. What about cross-promotion? I believe already-proven entrepreneurs have multiple channels (online and offline) to promote subsequent ventures. Also, controversy is popular, but is it viable in the long run? There is a line between disruption and controversy, and many startups prefer not to cross it (i m hopeful they choose so for ethical reasons). There's more to make out of a startup than money.

Startup Bus.

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