Show HN Aftermath: Releasing Followords.com this morning | Hacker News Reader

Show HN Aftermath: Releasing Followords.com this morning

12 pointsbcambel14 comments

This morning I've submitted our project to HN. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4099054

Got pretty helpful feedback. But that wasn't the only thing.

478 people requested invite out of 755. 63% conversion rate. Almost 9K unique visitor visited our website. At some point in the morning I was seeing 400+ active users on the website. Unbelievable. 35 people registered without telling them how to register. ( You cannot register directly, there is only a login form - but they figured out a way :) http://imgur.com/Kbf9J

6K people visited directly from Hacker News, 1K from Twitter ( I guess Popular Hacker News post )

I was afraid that Nginx might not hold up, but that was not the problem. I wasn't ready for it! Stuck on my chair from 08:00 am till 02:00 pm. I am still feeling anxious.

People tweeted about us without using our application. https://twitter.com/#!/search/realtime/followords (even in Spanish)

Today another lesson learnt: So if you are working on a project. Release it. Ship it. Let people tell you how much your project, website or tagline sucks. Embrace it. Think about it, thank them and move on.

I need some sleep, tomorrow is another great day. Thank you all for your contributions.

"I was afraid that Nginx might not hold up"

Seeing articles get nuked by a sudden spike in traffic tends to give one unrealistic assumptions about what servers can handle. Most can take quite a bit if you're serving mostly static content.

Just wanted to let you know, there's a typo on your landing page. "Archieve" should be "Archive". Otherwise, looking good!

"478 people requested invite out of 755." Does this mean 755 requested an invite and 478 got one?

755 opened the registration form, 478 completed it.

All you really need is an email.

Asking for first name and last name too, even if it's optional, will probably discourage some people when they see the form.

If they're discouraged because I'm asking their names, than it's fine. There is nothing I can do about that.

Not to sound contrarian, but the 'something' you can do about that is to not ask for their first and last names.

I'm not suggesting that's the right or wrong approach, but you should ask yourself the following questions every time you ask the user to do anything, especially so when asking for their personal information:

- Do I really need this? Does the app break if I don't get it? Does the quality of the app diminish? Is there some measurable way in which this impacts me negatively?

- Can I rely on this? Can it be verified? If a user enters his name as "Pinocchio Dandelion", can I say that it isn't? At this point, if it IS incorrect, refer back to question #1.

By my estimation, generally, if you're asking for names, and it matters, you should probably also be asking for credit card information, or some other way to vet that data. If you aren't expecting to bill them, you probably don't need to ask for it.

Of course, you might have something in the app that does need it that we can't see from the outside, but most commonly in these scenarios is that people think they need the information and really don't, which means that you might have captured an even larger percentage of users in the signup funnel.

In regards to signups, you really really really want to make it as frictionless as possible. Once you have their email address, you almost certainly have a more 'committed' user than someone who hasn't filled out the form at all. If first and last names are nice for you to have (but not strictly necessary), then you can ask for them later, after you have their email address.

Once you have the email address though, that gives you the ability to try and lure them in further. Patio11 (as usual) has more detailed information on this topic, so I'll refer you to his posts as to why having an email address is a really good thing, but suffice it to say, it is.

I totally agree with the question "Do I really need this?" No I don't. But there is an idea behind asking those information.

I don't care about their data. But I do care about them and I would like to see people who care about the app which will try to solve some problem of them. I would like to have a passionate user base(100s) rather than collecting 1000s of emails. I would like to talk with them, one by one and ask them if we can help them.

Some people told me there are similar tools, some asked me questions, some shared their love and interest to use the app. Some said "Landing page sucks" which I agree a lot! Some asked for a job.. I wouldn't get this if I was only asking their email address.

173 people even wrote something to remarks. Only 60 people did not write their names ( some of them did not write their names but put some remarks )

448 people filled out their name. Only 1 of them has name-surname "In Valid" and his email address is avalid@email.com I bet he is a bot.

First name - Last name fields are not required. People who follow Hacker News are already experienced Web users who knows clearly a sign of Required Field, they might easily skip it, but they did not. The rest of the emails are already indicating their name and surname.

If they don't care and they don't request an invite; which means I would be more efficiently spend my time.

It might have a better conversion rate without asking their name, but I don't care about the conversion rate that much.

Don't get me wrong, I am not against what you say, I am trying to rationalize the behavior with data.

It sounds like you have valid reasons for your rule-breaking, and that's a-okay by me. If we all followed the rules all the time, there wouldn't be any progress.

It also sounds like you're deeply passionate about what you're doing, which is great.

My only caveat to that is that it's hard to have both success at a grand scale and a dedicated group of users at the same time. If you're not looking to be successful, or aren't looking to strike it big (ala Facebook or Twitter), there is of course nothing wrong with that, but for the type of service you're operating, you'll have a harder time tracking statistical trends with a smaller audience I'd suspect, which could make the service overall less effective.

As you might know, without committed users Twitter would not have # tag and @ sign. They have talked with their users at one point. They don't have an option. You have to.

What their advantage right now, Facebook already have 3200+ employees which also means users that they can get feedback. Twitter has the same nature. But believe me, they are talking a lot with their customers(advertisers), not with you or me, coz we are a small fish in the ocean. Our lives are not dependent on FB or TW, if we find a better app, we will sell them in a second.

That's also why I believe 37signals, Evernote, Dropbox are much more valuable brands than Facebook & Twitter. They might not have 100s million of users, but if you can't monetize, it does not matter

We will be going Freemium, but in a way that Evernote does. Not in FB or TW modal.

Are you still sending out invites? I registered, said a few words even and am yet to receive one.

We're not sending out invites yet. Can you send me an email to bahadir@followords.com ?

I didn't see it this morning, but seeing this now and just signed up for the beta. I'm still not entirely sure what it does, even after reading the linked thread, but I try to do whatever I can to support all the 'Show HN' threads, so even if it sucks, you've got my registration (and I'm not presuming that it will suck.)

Nginx is almost certainly not going to be your failing piont, and can certainly scale to beyond 400+ active users, assuming that it's configured correctly and on decent hardware. Your database could crash, or one questionable join could tear the whole thing down, but Nginx is probably the least likely component in your stack to fail.

As for the lesson learned, that's spot on, and one that I waffle on every now and again, even though I've done it and know it to be canon.

Best of luck. It's a space I've got a lot of experience in, and 'interestingness' vs. 'importance' isn't really gotten right anywhere yet. Hopefully you've nailed it.

Thanks Barry, interesting vs importance highly personal and it's a hard topic.

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