Ask HN: What makes you follow and engage with a new product? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What makes you follow and engage with a new product?

Hey HN,

I'm preparing to launch a new product soon, and I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes people truly engage with a product when they first discover it. Not just upvoting or signing up, but actually following along, giving feedback, and becoming part of its early community.

Is it the problem it solves? The way the founder shares the journey? A particular feature or approach that hooks you? Something else? I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences—especially from those who’ve built or launched products before. What worked (or didn’t) for you?

Thanks in advance for any insights!

View on HN

Either fills a void of existing products or service market or similar to existing but cost effective. I'd also add it should meet or has an acceptable ratio of the complexity of its usage vs result, outcome or output, is not heavier on the users equipment than what should be expected, and makes it very clear what users should be interested in the product. Interest soon fizzles once after the prospective user has invested attention, and then finds their equipment doesn't / was never going to meet requirements to utilise it. So unless it's really something, those users are not hanging around on the chance an updated version will fix some oversight or unforeseen issue like full usability actually relies on a resource that's actually behind a wall not all users have access to - unwitting closed environment scenario - generally most users will assume the closed environment was deliberate.

thanks for your pov! The product I'm working on is https://lumigo.ai/ - an AI product search engine that aims to solve the inefficiencies in terms of product search of the search engines currently on the market. Realising that searching for a product on Google (or other competitors) has become tedious due to the uninteresting results and the dozens of sponsored products at the top of the list, we decided to create an AI capable of selecting data from various sources to represent the most suitable products for the prompt entered within seconds.

Well that's nice - a service that can recognise for example that if someone is looking for a brochure or parts list or operators manual for a product, saves the user time, instead of showing the other 100 items that are not wasting the user's time.

I had a look but I can't comment how good it is - which is where launching a site or web service becomes tricky. IMO, the site needs a fall back keyboard key to launch the query to get around a non functional script (for sending off the query.) I am probably the one in a thousand user who has an extensive deny list, which includes a handful of api services. No doubt it works ok for those who have the latest systems and a phone model that's only just been released.

Many years ago there used to be services that offered virtual browser / environments so developers could test as much as they could themselves but with the advent of smart phones made it just a bit too hard offer a comprehensive range.

Quick edit for clarity.

I am not clear on the problem you experienced during the test...could you give me some details so I can try to solve it?

I'll first point out I'm a one in a thousand user and not a good representative of the users that will frequent your site - I have denied a few (I have deemed dodgy) sites that provide API services.

So for your site, imagine using google search bar, one is able to type in the query but when hitting the spy glass icon nothing happens. Nor does hitting the return key do a thing - but in your instance you have a text box so the return key just enters a new line in that box.

The behaviour of the launch icon [which I gather on your site would be the up arrow in a circular button] not working is not unique to your site, I experience this often enough, and no doubt I have blocked the host of one of the APIs used to build the gui instance to return the query data.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com