Thank you HN: BreakkUp.com Story

Just under 4 months ago I posted a link to BreakkUp.com and requested feedback from the Hacker News community. We got so much helpful advice that I thought I’d come back and give you guys a big thank you and post a little update about our progress. You can read the old post at the link below. As you may notice, most of the comments left by HN members were put into action.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=285895

Long story short, the site actually got put on the backburner for a few months while we focused on our mobile app company – http://saltlicklabs.com. I don’t remember which night it was but it was a couple hours past midnight when we had the crazy idea of integrating BreakkUp into our first premium application. Through the premium app - Little Black Book - members are given anonymous access to BreakkUp. We were a little concerned about the quality of submissions but it hasn’t been a significant problem thus far.

BreakkUp gave us the ability to hedge against Black Book competitors (2 of 'em) if we ever needed to price the app for free, but right now the price barrier is great because it keeps out the nonsense. In addition, we repurposed the templates used on the mobile version (m.breakkup.com) to make a free iPhone app strictly for BreakkUp.com. Huge cost savings in terms of marketing, awareness, etc. since it's free to publish free apps to iTunes.

The good news is BreakkUp is now growing by ~50-100 new members a day and the free iPhone app is downloaded over 100 times a day. However, the way people use the site is a lot different than we had initially planned so we’ve got a lot of changes and new features planned for 2009.

During the holiday break, we’re experimenting with Google AdManager so we can start advertising our own applications to our community. It’s a walled-garden approach that gives us a higher return while the site is still relatively small. Our audience is primarily iPhone users (emotional / retail therapy), so it makes more sense at this junction to advertise our own products rather than use Google AdSense. That's the theory we're testing at least... if BreakkUp grows significantly in 2009, then our mobile company has a lot more weight against the VC and big-budget guys.

So if you have any new feedback (re: BreakkUp or Saltlick Labs), please send it our way.

Thanks HN! Hope everyone has a safe holiday vacation. Hot cocoa and coding, what could be better?