How to handle Hacker News feedback on your beloved app

Research has found that novices disproportionately seek positive feedback, whereas experts seek negative feedback[0]. Would you rather be more like a novice, or more like an expert?

Doyen of entrepreneurs, Elon Musk, also advices entrepreneurial wannabes to seek negative feedback[1]:

"Always seek negative feedback, even though it can be mentally painful. They won't always be right, but I find the single biggest error people make is to ignore constructive, negative feedback."

[0] http://blogs.cuit.columbia.edu/sf2559/files/2011/08/FF_JCR_F...

[1] http://news.investors.com/management-leaders-in-success/0821...

I'd say you should just focus on answering people's questions/criticisms as long as they aren't trolling. I did a Show HN today, and while a lot of it was critical, I think most of it was valid: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5828480 - we also got some great suggestions on parts that were confusing.

We require Facebook, we have a credit card with up front payment. This is literally as bad as it gets, in terms of HN standards. And we got plenty of people who paid us money up front and Facebook connected (some people are paying us $200 and giving us access to a lot of Facebook information and they've never met us before). When you're dealing with money and identity, I think you should address people's concerns and take it seriously. Difficult to sweep that stuff under the rug and pretend like it's not a big deal to take someone's money or identity and use it in some way.

I'd say expect that HN will be critical, as will most people. At least HN is telling you. Most people won't care enough to take time and comment.

Reminds me of a quote that I really like: "The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference." - Eli Wiesel

Remember: all passionate arguments about technology are close to being total irrelevancies in the face of the leverage good pricing gives you.

Rails vs Node, Ember vs Angular, ConfusingName vs PuntasmicNomenclature: these arguments have next to zero influence over your profitability and cashflow.

It is a lever you will not get to pull very often, so you might as well take a little time to think about it.

[1] http://chester.id.au/2012/09/12/review-the-strategy-and-tact...

1. Provide a demo option if login's required To avoid asking for people to use features like facebook connect upfront allow them to use a demo version of the app. This gives them a chance to have a play with the app before committing to it / exposing their identity. That's particularly useful for HN audience who will pop to your site in order to give you feedback, but also useful to potential users who want to understand more about what your site is than they read on the blurb on the front page.

2. Read all feedback and decide what's relevant Ignoring feedback on particular subject areas just creates a blind spot. Read all feedback and use your own judgement to determine if the person has a point or not. They may be wrong, you may be wrong - but at least if you read the feedback you'll have considered things you may not have previously.

3. Focus on the constructive feedback. Pay more attention to comments which give a problem coupled with a solution - those pointing out issues with no suggestions are more likely to be ranting (~generalisation) whilst those singing your praises aren't giving you anything to improve what you've put out there (though a few such comments are always nice to soothe the ego after reading some of the harsher posts).

4. Look for common themes in advice. If lots of people are giving the same advice (e.g. I wouldn't pay $100 for this up front, but I would pay $10 a month) consider what they're suggesting - whereas if one person's ranting that something's too expensive you can probably ignore it. As with all advice it's about using your judgement rather than ignoring the advice outright because it's about xyz.

5. Avoid asking for a credit card upfront Same as #1 - provide a demo option which avoids the need for a credit card / perhaps give a first month free option to allow use of the product without card details. If someone from HN goes to check out your app and give you feedback, you shouldn't charge them for their advice. If a potential user can't play with the app before paying for it (or trusting you with their details having seen no more than the front page) they'll also be less likely to join.

Case in point was a submission from a few days ago called Unsplash (http://unsplash.com) a guy gives away ten free high quality images you can use for anything every ten days. The first ten images were geared towards startups of his Macbook, iPhone and iPad. There were some, "Thank you, nice work"'s and then there were people complaining about it breaching Apple style guidelines because the phone wasn't face on, etc.

Take any feedback from this place with a grain of salt.

So hearing praise is nice...I greatly appreciate it that people take the time out of their busy days (or HN browsing, and what have you) to check out the link and then take the time to say something positive...but the substance of the praise isn't usually constructive, because if I've done something good enough to praise, then theoretically, it's natural that people like it for the same reasons that I had for even making it.

But criticism...well, I usually self-critique pretty hard, but I don't think you can ever impartially critique yourself. When people rail on the shortcomings that I know exist, even just putting up a defense or an explanation is valuable to me, because I may have underestimated critical flaws...but if my judgment was right, it's still a useful critical process to re-examine those assumptions.

And of course, the gold standard is when you get criticism for things you didn't even realize were problems...and that's immensely helpful. To use that cliche saying, what's worse than harsh criticism is being ignored. And I think it's much easier to psychologically motivate yourself in times of criticism than it is to persevere when no one cares even enough to troll you.

And one last thought...the anonymous nature of the Internet does make it easy for strangers to flame each other. But the other side of the coin is that the personal nature of face-to-face contact often stifles much needed constructive criticism. Maybe HN's level of constructive-to-trolling criticism isn't perfect, but it's one of the better places to get free, useful analysis of your work by likeminded people.

it's not only because of hate, but because people who use facebook not necessarily want to share access to their profile to every random app.

Figure out what people do like about your app and drill down. Remember, your aim is not to please everyone. Your aim is to just find some people who love your product, however crappy it may be.

The extreme example of this, however, is that you end up building your product for one person. I mean that's an obvious failure mode, and in practice you'd certainly hope to get more users than that, but at some point you've got to decide what market you're going after beyond just, 'The people who like your product just as it is.'

Ideally everyone would like your product. That's rarely going to happen, I suspect, because people have different needs for most things - but generally the thing with the more general appeal seems likely to win unless your thing is worth an incredible amount to the few who like it.

The feedback you should pay most attention to is that from your actual target market. Heck, most products in existence that generate tens of millions of dollars per year in sales would be flogged mercilessly if posted to HN with a request for feedback.

Screw all that. Go find actual customers and use their feedback to figure out how to meet actual needs sufficiently to make some kind of transaction happen. And if your target market is HN, then may God have mercy on your soul.

I think you are slightly off on the FB comment though. >HN hates Facebook with a passion, and using only FB connect will make sure you don’t get any useful feedback on the actual app.

Actually, HN hates when developers use FB as the only method of signing in. I haven't complained about it, but agree with HN on this topic. Two things magnify the hate: 1) No discernible advantage of using FB for the user. 2) Asking for permissions which the user does not understand why you are asking.

+ People complain about too many share buttons.

If you post an app. I will spend my time critiquing the design and it would be annoying to do that, only to have my comments jettisoned out of hand.

1) People are cheap.

2) Bikeshedding.

Dunno why folks like to single out HN (or any other geek commenting venues). A lot of people wandering by are thinking the same things HN commenters are - people who are cheap or people who nitpick the easy-to-spot visual stuff... they just don't have an easy and convenient venue to talk about that. When you open yourself to feedback more directly by posting to a place like HN, all that silent junk becomes vocal. Happens the same anywhere.

One way to help yourself here is to remember the Reid Hoffman's quote:

"If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late."

I believe calmness and coolness of another time can reveal so much about what people were trying to communicate early on. There is so much to learn about your product/messaging that could have been, and that's where negatively coated feedback comes in handy. Call it shameless or thick skinned but be prepared for all sorts of feedback.

In fact, getting rejected feels like a win now. It feels like accomplishment and relief.

[1] http://rejectiontherapy.com

And once again a post that is deeply dismissive of HN (basically "don't listen to anything but hurrah's, and they're all cheap bastards anyways". Well if you're going to butter us up first...), posted to HN.

There are a growing contingent of "positivity-only" champions who seem to misunderstand the point of Show HNs. Is this some sort of generational thing? Some sort of side-effect of the positive-feedback experiment?