14K visits, 17K pageviews, 3 sign-ups: My Hacker News Frontpage Post-mortem

I haven't written a post-mortem, but last week I had a post on how http://planscope.io (formerly Projector) made me $119.50 in a month. It got crazy traffic - about 40k uniques.

I was really surprised how many people went on to explore exactly what Planscope is. About 20% of people didn't bounce, and ended up checking out the product tour. I netted about 300 new accounts (which was about a 50% jump in user accounts!)

I think the winning formula for a good product blog is: Educate your audience (this is the reason they visited in the first place), have a very clear call-to-action at the bottom of the post ("Are you a freelancer looking to..."), and have an easy outlet to view the rest of your marketing site.

A datapoint that may give an explaination for your low conversion rate:

- The page does not say what the product does, I don't try demos just for the sake of trying demos;

- Nevertheless, I thought I should check out the demo before giving some feedback... and got an error.

Hope this helps.

Your current niche "PM tools for software industry" has crazy competition including all big guys - Microsoft, IBM, HP, Oracle, SAP - basically any big company that comes to mind has something to offer, smaller guys (37 signals, Atlassian, Assembla, etc). You also get a hundred various project management apps on Google marketplace (140 products) + around 50 on SourceForge.net + plenty of desktop/shareware tools.

You should really think about better niche or sub-niche or start as a plugin/component to existing systems (if you are really into PM).

It is still very good to see some sort of innovation in this seemingly old and very conservative field.

Good luck with your project, I am sure you will figure it out.

Several comments here suggest your landing page sucks, but the real way to boost conversions from blog readers would be to move your call to action up the page. You have the try a demo button at the bottom of your sidebar. Test making that the first thing in the sidebar. You may want to test having it both first and last.

You GA blog post (as well as this one) is a classic example of content marketing, where you lead with something highly useful to the reader so that they become aware your product even exists.

BTW, I love the personal kanban structure of your todo listing.

Thanks for sharing. We are really interesting in this sort of stuff.

We are finding that: i) site driven to specific posts very rarely results in visitors checking out other parts of our blog. ii) twitter drives close to zero traffic.

This may mean that content has to really excite, menu/side links have to drag visitor attention, and the right people need to be tweeting/sharing the message.

We remember reading that some visitors may spend less than 5 seconds on a site before moving on. StumbleUpon visitors especially just given the nature of the platform.

I distinctly remember seeing this on HN and, as I generally sign up for things that even remotely interest me on HN (assuming people may not have perfected their pitches yet) I was curious as to whether or not I might have been one of the three.

Then I looked at thetaboard.com, and I knew immediately that I wasn't.

If thetaboard is a project management product, I have no idea how it does that. Compared to Basecamp, which is what I use now, and basecamp's current homepage lets me know that it has todos, documents, projects, blah blah blah. For what its worth, I don't think that basecamp's current landing page is as effective as past pages have been, but it also has a lot more brand recognition and trust than a new startup.

Compared to the thetaboard landing page, and there are literally zero details as to how it makes team collaboration better. Also, its <title> attribute says "Simple Team Collaboration [...] and Product Managment[sic]", but all I can see is "Simple Team Collaboration", which to me at least, is a different product than Product Management.

There's a screenshot that looks like Outlook, and is too small to see. It appears to work on an iPad, but we don't use iPads, so that's moot. Does it work on Android? Is that really a Samsung tablet?

Again though, the main thing is that there aren't any details. There's nothing on the home page that sells me, or even tries to even the least little bit.

In short, it disheartens me when you say that your biggest mistake is not leveraging Twitter. That's not it at all. Your biggest mistake is in having worthless copy on the home page. Your signup ratio is 3/14,000, .0002. If that were even just half of a percent, you'd have a ton more signups.

Having people tweet links to a page that isn't converting means that if every person in the world saw and clicked your link, you still wouldn't have the registration or conversion of the average message board.

I know it's hard to keep up with peculiarities of every language. But thetaboard sounds like "tit board" in portuguese. Probably not a big problem, but probably doesn't help much either.

Nice post. Now I've got a good reason to sign up for Thetaboard.

ThetaBoard is awesome, your landing page just sucks. It's a GREAT todo list. You just to change the UI a bit so it's not in the way in certain places. And then from there on start adding social features like dragging and dropping tasks (don't call them stories, that's just weird) into team mates' panels. That would be AWESOME.

I've been working on a todo list / team manager like that too Tasck.com, But thousands of dollars, 3 developers, and 4 years later my stupid fucking todo list is still incomplete. I learned a lot because I made a lot of mistakes. It was my very first web project / startup-to-be. I'm not pouring any more time and money into it until I can find a local developer within driving distance who's willing to help me out with it.

I think you could use a few of the features from my todo list. I invested so much time and money into it I don't want to just ignore it. I'd rather see it merged or tied into someone elses solution or something. I'm insanely busy this and next and next month but click on my username and send me an email.