Apparently HN gives you great advice and then 1536 users in 4 hours. | Hacker News Reader

Apparently HN gives you great advice and then 1536 users in 4 hours.

39 pointsgenystartup20 comments

Last Monday, I was just finishing up work on Wolfpacktales – an app that lets you break your social network into groups and have instant interactions, share files and bookmark things you find. The idea is simple, you have all these people you are friends with or connected to, you don’t discuss the same things with all of them, so by grouping them, you can say what you want to say to each group. I firmly believe that in the next year or two, rather than paying $0.25 (or whatever you pay) for a text message over phones, you’ll be texting over this app across your social network using people’s usernames.

Anyway, I wrote a post on here and it somehow found its way to the front-page. It only stayed there for 2 hours but it spent another 2 hrs on the 2nd and 3rd pages. I tracked the signups that came in on that day, and in 4 hours, there were 1536 new sign-ups from HN (directly and indirectly). Directly in the sense that they clicked on from here and signed up, and indirectly if the person signed up having been invited by someone who signed up from HN in that time. Of that number, 61% are active have have returned to the site more than 3 times and have created groups and 80% have invited people to their groups.

To any new apps/startups launching, HN is a great place to get that initial traction and the best part about it – for me atleast – is the number of criticisms, advise and feedback I got. That was much more important to me than signups.

App url: http://wolfpacktal.es

I tried it out.

Ran into some problems that hopefully you'll shake out. Surprised by the choice of web stack (.net and asp).

I didn't see an option to delete accounts, did I miss it?

Honest question: what's surprising about .net and asp?

I usually see this view explained that due to the .Net stack's higher up front cost than free alternatives, and (debatably) higher long term cost, it's an uncommon choice for startups.

Basically, deploying a .Net site requires at minimum 1 personal license of Windows and 1 server license of Windows. Sometimes a non-free copy of Visual Studio, and usually a license for SQL Server (since many MS people use the whole stack for integration reasons). Without buying hardware, Windows hosting is also always more expensive.

Compared to a LAMP/Rails/Django style app which you could theoretically get off the ground for the hardware cost of a local PC and cheap VPS hosting.

Of course developer familiarity, your local hiring pool, initial launch scale, business partners, vendor integration, etc, etc, etc, all influence the tech choice and its impact on cost.

You're absolutely right about the costs of running real iron - Windows adds $1,000 per machine. But Windows virtual machines cost the same as Linux: about $20/mo for a lowend VPS. Plus the code is compiled and tends to run more efficiently than Ruby for instance. :-)

If you are awesome and outgrow that VPS with some paying customers, then I think you can swing the $1,000 on a windows license.

I really hate being a shill for MS...

>Plus the code is compiled and tends to run more efficiently than Ruby for instance. :-)

Those words don't mean what you think it means. You're right that most CLR code will be faster than equivalently idiomatic Ruby code that accomplishes the same task, but the reasons for it have nothing to do with compilation.

Regarding costs and licensing, have you heard of AppHarbor (http://appharbor.com). It's like Heroku but for .Net, free (at least right now) for small web apps and has SQL Server and MySQL database options.

Also, I've heard mention of BizSpark which kind of defers your costs but I haven't got any hard evidence that it is still a good option for startups.

There's no upfront licensing cost due to Microsoft BizSpark.

I can think of a few practical reasons why (I can think of non-practical ones too, but I assume that's not what you're after :)

1. .Net and Asp have not insignificant upfront costs when compared to a stack based on Ruby, PHP, or practically anything else.

2. You're basically tied to Windows application servers. There really isn't much of an option to move to another OS (whether because you've changed hosts, or you want something more stripped down or leaner, or you've found a valuable library that's only available on a BSD or something).

3. ASP (even with .Net) presents a pretty rigid framework for application development (though I'm sure there's ways around it). If what you're after is MS's take on MVC, that's probably fine, but if you're looking to push boundaries, you might want to think about a more piecemeal approach.

#3: I've messed around with .NET WebMethods a bit. They allow me to go completely around the rigidness of ASP when I need to and they can stay inside the same C# backing code for the page.

would appreciate if you could tell me any other problems your ran into! I'm keen on any feedback. genystartup@gmail. cheers!

Please explain in more detail how this works. I signed up, but did not connect facebook/twitter because I'd rather not spam my friends with something I'm not 100% sure on.

Do my friends have to sign up for Wolfpack to be able to use this service? Does the messaging only happen on your platform, or does it duplicate messages across other platforms as well (fb messages, emails, etc)?

The messaging only happens on wolfpacktales...and we don't spam anyone. Basically you create a group, invite your friends to join, the get a notification and following the link takes them to the group you created, where u can begin interacting and sharing.

So why connect to social networks at all? Not to knock your idea, but it seems like this is just a modernized private chatroom with built in social network spamming.

I once got 231 subscribers to my newsletter from HN. But over 3 days. I agree though, HN is a great place to announce and critique your app

Kudos on taking the initiative and implementing this idea. I've often wondered how Facebook became so successful given that the one thing it's supposed to do well---manage your social network---is probably the least functional aspect of the site. For the most part Facebook is a personal homepage with photos and a forum and that's about it.

Thanks...I figured someone has to do it right? :)

Great app, thanks for sharing and good luck with it. One thing I noticed, is your about page says "It's less intrusive intrusive ...".

Interesting. Is this also a mobile app?

That's the next thing I plan to do. Presently it's only a web app.

clickable link: http://wolfpacktal.es

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