Comment by koopajah | Hacker News Reader

Comment by koopajah | Hacker News Reader

I really dislike sharing links of future products/projects to my friends as it's like "recommanding" something I haven't tested yet. So even if the incentive seems great (1$ per referral seems almost too much for me) I don't think it would make me jump ahead and forward it.

The problem is that you seem to target a specific kind of people that might think like me and not immediately provide a referral link on the FB/twitter/whatever profile to have as many people as possible to signup for.

Anyway, I love the idea, this kind of shirts are 90% of my current clothes so I'll signup for it right away.

What prevents you from trying with ONE design first and see how it goes? Maybe rely on another t-shirt design shirt for your first go? In France http://www.lafraise.com/ is pretty well-known or websites like teefury.com could be a good start!

How will you handle fake accounts and people trying to game your system? Most of the time, the 1$ incentive is tied to "someone signing up AND ordering something on the site" first, no?

EDIT: Some additions, the email you send right after signup is nice but I think the first part should be on your website! It describes clearly who you are, why you're doing this project and also why your design would really be better, it would be great along with your examples.

EDIT2: Why not have part of the website already done? I have to "pretend" I sign up in the launchrock page to know wether anyone used my referral link? Why not have a "normal" login system and a detailed page where I can see who accepted the referral link? To avoid spending too much time on the websites first you could use something like www.dailycred.com to handle signups properly (this was shown on HN a few weeks ago).

Love the feedback! Ok, let's see if I can address this.

"The problem is that you seem to target a specific kind of people that might think like me" - Hmmm, that very well could be. Maybe this going viral just isn't possible for a market like us. If others back this up, then I'll have to accept it.

"I'll signup for it right away." - This is very encouraging, thank you!

"What prevents you from trying with ONE design first" - We want to build a brand, not just drop the designs out there. So instead, we're applying to Kickstarter with a base of 5 designs. That way we can make sure that we've got something here.

"How will you handle fake accounts" - There is a definite possibility for hurt here... but it should be pretty easy to see if someone's messing around with us

"I think the first part should be on your website" - You know, I have tossed this idea around. Do you think it's a pretty big selling point? I had just wondered if people wouldn't care about that story as much as they cared about the seeing the designs themselves...

"you could use something like www.dailycred.com" - I've never heard of this, but I will check it out. Launchrock is really simple and quick to set up, which helped us put our page up quick and start to get people involved. And since our next step is Kickstarter, i was hoping to transition fairly quickly into a full blown shop once our Kickstarter goal is complete. I'm going in to this site right now though.

Glad the feedback is useful !

About your page getting viral the problem, for me, if that the project doesn't exist. I will not recommend something that don't exist/I haven't tried first, except if I'm sure it will work/happen. If you have a real store I will definitely forward it to most of my friends that would wear this and/or like to buy this for me (like I just did with my gf who likes to buy me this kind of shirts).

For fake account you really should reconsider it. I don't think it's that easy to detect in the end (except for people trying to earn 1M$ of course), but it seems pretty easy to game the systems for 100/200$. And I don't think that tying the 1$ reward to a real order is a stopping point in the end.

For the email part, I don't know if it's a big selling point, at least not as the first description, but it could be nice to have a small description of you and your wife like on the right or an "about us" or "Meet the team" (a lot of current YC startups use this with their launchrock page). The thing is that, for me, the signup confirmation email is a bit too long.

I can understand that a launchrock page is really easier to easily garner emails and have an idea of how many people could be interested. The site/idea would juste seem more real if it was not just a launchrock page.

I like the idea to apply to kickstarter. But part of me thinks that most of the costs link to your project would be handle upfront by your customers, no? If you provide links to 5 t-shirts designs and offer a pre-order option you can ensure you have enough orders before starting producing and then don't have to spend a lot of money before being sure you'd sell anything.

Maybe we can add a cap to the incentive. So if it was gamed, the max someone could get would be, say $20.

I'm seeing more and more the importance of the real store. I think the question comes down to how easy is it to show that it truly is a pre-order system, and that you may not get your shirts for a little while. With Kickstarter, I think that is pretty clear because you have up to two months to get a group of pre-orders together that would be large enough to mitigate the costs of the shirt printing. On a real store, people may become more impatient if it takes awhile to get a large enough pre-order group. But, the problem that you state, where people may not take us seriously until we have a real site, says that we need to move beyond Launchrock. Maybe getting our Kickstarter project up ASAP and directing our domain to that would both help us get taken more seriously and allow people to be more willing to share us. And meanwhile, get a store set up to launch as soon as that project finished.

Hmmm, for me the cap wouldn't be enough, I'd just have to create an account, fake for twenty referals, then do this multiple times. But maybe I'm over-paranoid on this. Just that money/discount reward just for pushing people to signup seems to really start by hurting your business plan. Let's wait for other opinions on this.

You might consider posting your site with a different title, like a "Show HN : launching a new brand of t-shirts targetting programmers" or an equivalent? Because the current title seems to ask advice on how to go viral and a lot of people might not even know your project exists even if they would like it!

I'm not completely familiar with Hacker New's rules, but I'm a little concerned about being considered spam if I post again. Do you think it'd be ok to just go ahead and make another post?

I'm not really sure but I guess you're right, posting again would not be really useful, because a Show HN would only show a "launchrock" page for the moment. Maybe after improving the website or starting the kickstarter campaign you could come back here and ask for feedback ?

Yah, I think you're right... we'll definitely have to do that. Also, glad to hear that you're on board with Kickstarter :)

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