acquire users, support my users well, scale in a timely manner, react quickly to feedback, or monetize the application
How do I prepare myself mentally for launch? Do you think I'm ready?
web application: http://linkpeek.com
If you answered no to those questions, expect zero people to know or care about your app. Launching and running a successful web app is 10% development and 90% marketing.
I'm telling not trying to discourage you, the opposite actually. Just because no one signs up when you launch doesn't mean your app sucks. It means no one knows about it. Start marketing, start blogging, start SEO, start guest-posting, start doing everything you can to get the word out.
As an aside, you should probably have a way to monetize the app in mind and put it in place before launching. Very few apps can get away with ads or freemium effectively, especially if it is a small micropreneurial endeavor.
Edit: Looks like you have an email list. That will help you convert well on the first few days and give you a morale boost. Don't worry about the rest, tackle it as it comes. You'll never be ready enough, so just go for it when you have a working product :)
Do you have organic search traffic coming to your site? (no) Do people know about your app? (no) Have you validated the market for your application? (not really)
As for monetizing I plan to eventually allow subscribers to choose bounding box sizes or access to the raw (and large) screen shot. My competition in the market charges lots for this service but I have no idea what a fair price would be. I was thinking monthly subscription based on usage: 1gb $9.99, 5gb $19.99 and unlimited plan for heavy hitters. Is that a fair price, I have no idea.
Thank you agian
You can even do this before your product is ready. Make two pages with different prices, A/B test them and track conversions on the "Buy" button. Since your product isn't ready yet, just show a "Thanks for your interest, but we aren't done yet!" page. Collect email addresses too.
This gives you an idea how many people will buy at what price-point, and help provide more email signups. The caveat is that it requires some level of traffic coming to your site first
Try testing incrementally. Run some tests where your conversion is going from Home Page -> Pricing page. This is pretty easy to do since clicking through to a pricing page is a lot less friction than buying a product, so you'll have more data to work with.
Once you get a good conversion there, move on to the next step in your funnel (probably Pricing -> Buy)
I'm sure there are a number of potential customers just like me who have their own unique requirements. But you'll never know if what you're building is in line with what your customers need until you launch. Good luck.
I hope to make http://LinkPeek.com useful and fair for the majority. You are correct, to do this I'm going to need to communicate a lot more with potential customers and fellow developers.
Most people advocate a MVP approach (minimum viable product) for many reasons. First, you can do less work before releasing. Second, it allows your ideal users to help you develop the product further. The few users you have (heck even if it is only 5) will be able to tell you what they like, how it is useful etc. You may not know all the uses for your product and a group of people might find that it is useful for X. Then you can market it as the "perfect solution for X"
Your initial users will most likely be HN members. Most of us know how hard it is to do all of those things so we're not going to worry if you don't scale in a timely manner etc. If your site crashes, we'll calmly inform you, if you take a while to respond to feedback, we will understand.
I'll send you an email and I'll see if I can help you..
I do not see a blog link on your webpage. If not, start doing it soon. Start talking about your app, use cases, problems and how you are solving them. Anything that you think is relevant for your broader audience.
And iterate based on feedback from your initial customer base. Don't worry right now about scaling. If you have that many hits on your app that is a good problem to have. The worst is indifference.
Good luck with you app and I am sure you'll do well.
I think this is a good way to do it as well, as you're likely to get some helpful feedback and tyre kicking from HNers.
In response to your app itself: I would suggest offering arbitrary thumbnail sizes( not just 72px ), up to and including full-screen resolution. In addition, I would suggest a snapshot scheduling service, such that regular images are captured for given urls on a regular schedule.
A company like us, for instance would probably pay for a service that allows us to build a design history of our web properties automatically, instead of adding "screenshot the existing live site before deployment" to the design or technical workflow, or relying on the Wayback Machine to do so.