Hacker News Reader

Comment by baumy | Hacker News Reader

At some point a year or two ago I googled around for "best rss reader app" or "best rss news app" looking for android specifically, and I don't remember seeing newsblur talked about anywhere. All of the ones I did try (aggregator, feedly, inoreader, etc) were unsatisfactory in various ways.

I just downloaded and tried newsblur and it's pretty much perfect for my taste and needs. Going to try it for a few days then will likely become a paid user. This comment is coming from a place of relative ignorance, but have you considered investing in a bit of marketing, or a bit more if you have? For how good this app is among rss readers, it doesn't seem as discoverable as it deserves to be.

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Marketing is hard for me because I've hired a few folks to do targeted ads and it ended up being a big cost sink. Beyond that, I try to blog regularly and use big screenshots for new features, which helps a bit with SEO and discoverability. But getting NB onto lists? I'm not sure what that requires.

I'm a subscriber so I have self-interest in you being successful and I've paid money to help support that. If there's one thing I would encourage/plead you to do, it's to hire one person who will do "advocacy marketing". You said "Marketing is hard" and there's no doubt. But you'll know the right person, because they'll be __more__ excited about talking about your product and how it can be used, and who can use it ... than even you are. Most importantly, they'll just do that one thing. RSS/Newsletters is an area of content that geeks love - so finding someone who wants to __regularly__ talk about that in content, video, <forums that count> would be massive. I'll stop there ;-)

Set up a referral scheme. Anyone who refers a new paid user to NewsBlur gets a month free. Anyone who refers 10 people gets a tshirt. Anyone who refers 100 paid users gets actual cash...

Make sure you run the messaging past a bunch of existing users to make sure you pique their interest but don't alienate them in the process.

@conesus You found your advocacy marketeer :)

More seriously, if you follow this advice, your own users might be the best place to find someone like this.

Nothing much to add. Roy-less? Seriously, why not follow this great advice?

FWIW, I've repeatedly come across Newsblur, when searching for RSS readers; it's quite possibly the most common name I see, even from back when Google Reader died, to a few months ago (when I last searched).

It's possible that you were adding the "for android" context in your searches, and it might not do well in that case (because of people seeing it as primarily web-based or cross-platform, and not emphasising the Android part).

Finding good applications, especially for Android, is way harder than it should be. Seems like this is a problem worth solving as well.

Being able to search apps by really basic properties is an embarrassing missing feature of google play store.

Well you'd come upon it sooner if you used alternativeto.net, which is pretty good among software listings.

But also could apparently use some marketing.

Eh, it's likewise seemingly maintained by two guys, so it has some of the homely feel, and is not spammed to death like a widely popular service would be.

I'm using Flym, although TBH I'm not a very demanding user not have I carried out a thorough survey.

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