Ask HN: How to grow a service that is popular but never took off? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to grow a service that is popular but never took off?

33 pointsherval12 comments

Maybe more of a naive question than an enterpreneurial (or even hackerish) one, but here we go.

In 2005, out of pure boredom (and as an exercise to learn a new programming language), I came up with a Google Maps mashup. The idea here would be to allow visitors to click on the map and leave a funny little icon, a message, a link, whatever. Each site owner can setup their own map. The reception was very good (since I only expected to use the service myself): around 10k people signed up on the first month, and a lot more followed (it eventually declined over time, probably because I just left it there collecting dust!), but the fact is the site is still active today, still brings a lot of 'thank you so much for your little service' emails to my inbox every week... And gives me a feeling that I'm leaving money on the table here.

Funny incidental story: one of the 'competitors', Frappr, was actually one of the first 100 MyGuestmap users. Their story, though, is a completely different one: http://mashable.com/2007/10/18/platial-frappr/ (execution is way better too, I admit!)

With regards to business model, it's basically 50/50 between adsense and donations (I get some incredible donations from time to time, and a relatively large number of small ones).

Question is: what can I do to get the service out of its current letargy and maybe make it a viable side-business (not planning on making a living out of it, really)?

oh, the site is at http://www.mapservices.org/myguestmap (I also bought myguestmap.org a couple of years ago, but just redirect to mapservices.org for pagerank reasons) - any other comments (positive or negative) are also welcome!

And gives me a feeling that I'm leaving money on the table here.

That is a virtual certainty, considering you are not charging money.

My advice is to consider splitting the service into two levels (does the Maps API let you make money with it? I guess that is moot since you're already doing it) and selling some portion of the people on the upgrade. It is a rare, rare, rare application that will take in more in donations than it will in payments. One useful feature might be allowing embedding in other people's websites. (Remember, with a freemium application you need to make the -mium something that solves a pain point for people. "I want to offer maps" doesn't strike me as an obvious pain point, but given that people are actually using this, "I want people to not leave my site" does strike me as worth paying for for a business.)

Don't be put off by free competition -- I have scads. They're wonderful people, and they display AdSense ads for people charging for similar things. i.e. you.

I actually have the feeling I can make some money because

a) people already donate (the donation ratio is around 10%)

and

b) adsense already generates revenue enough to, at least, pay the service costs and buy beer :-)

The service actually already allows you to embed the map on any site (in an iframe model or just putting a banner with a popup) - the average user of the service has usually not a lot of experience with html, so I provide the snippets on the site itself to make it easier for them.

If you do go down the freemium route, don't forget to give the people who've already donated free access to the premium features in excess of the amount they donated. Keeping these users happy strikes me as the key to expanding the user base via word of mouth.

How do you calculate your donation ratio? 10% seems like a very very good conversion rate.

the number of maps that donated divided by the number of free users. It's not linear, though: there are months when I get a lot of donations (on various sizes). The smallest one being two cents (that was just once, though) and the biggest one having reached 120 usd (yay!!!). The donations are also higher during specific periods of year (like christmas)

"they display AdSense ads for people charging for similar things. i.e. you."

So funny. I thought you could block certain sites from getting impressions on yours, though. Maybe most people don't know about that.

> Question is: what can I do to get the service out of its current letargy and maybe make it a viable side-business (not planning on making a living out of it, really)?

How about establishing a small but steady stream of improvements to keep the interest, and charge for the password protected maps in a freemium model? Be sure to do lots of testing e.g. A/B testing, to assess the impact of your changes.

(Disclaimer: I have no experience.)

Freemium and improvements seem like a good idea.

Nonetheless, what I see here is that you have an audience, but no visible business model and possibly an inadequate revenue model. Having this will help you develop a unified plan and maybe even give you a few ideas on what changes to make on your website.

You might want to experiment with some of the ideas you receive on YC as well.

(Disclaimer: I have little experience.)

Keep making it better. If you're out of ideas, ask some of your users what they use it for, what if anything annoys them about it, what more they would want. Take everything with a grain of salt but maybe it'll be helpful.

It might be handy on your homepage if you linked to some popular examples of people using this. That will get them some more traffic and make your top users more likely to use it in the future.

Add a send-to-friends feature after someone has made a map.

If some of the maps are public, how about having a combined map that shows all notes live as anyone using your product posts to it. That will give people a sense of what they can do with it.

Add a video showing people what they can do with it.

Try to white-hat SEO your site a bit for searches like [make your own map]. Do you get a lot of traffic from Google? What are those searches for? Looking at that might give you some ideas for what they are looking for.

Make widgets that make it easy to embed these map in peoples' Myspace or Facebook pages.

Make a mailing list for people interested in your product. Or a forum. Start creating some community; talking to your users will help you understand what they want or need.

Start a blog where you talk about and link to cool uses of your product.

Make a twitter mashup where anyone who tweets with a lat & long gets their message posted on the myguestmap. (Maybe you have to ask people to add a #mygm tag too.)

Just some thoughts. Good luck!

Maybe a little design realignment (http://www.alistapart.com/articles/redesignrealign) would help (not that it's ugly, but that would help). For example, clarify the font in the logo, play a bit with the general colors. The header background could be re-arranged. It would be refreshing for your audience to see that it's evolving.

Make it look fancy! Good luck. :)

yeah, that's DEFINITELY one big improvement that needs to be done...

I'm still wondering how to make it hit more people, though - I suppose updating the looks wouldn't be enough (although an important step, of course).

> Question is: what can I do to get the service out of its current letargy and maybe make it a viable side-business (not planning on making a living out of it, really)?

Increase its visitor number by posting a 'rate my website' style question on ycombinator.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com