Show HN: A Calendar from Tweets | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A Calendar from Tweets

8 pointsjuretriglav7 comments

Hi HN. I built this (http://hashtagEvent.me) web app over the weekend, which starts to solve a problem that I'm sure many of you have too: I want a way to get calendar events from tweets.

For example, if someone you follow is going to a GitHub meetup next week and they tweeted about it, I want this information displayed somewhere in an organized manner. That's what hashtagEvent.me does, it gets tweets (which for now follow a simple syntax) and creates events with the extracted dates and descriptions. In my mind that's a valid concept, but I'm slowly running out of venues where to gain more exposure. I posted it to HN, but it tanked, naturally. I posted it to Reddit, where it kind of tanked. Reddit is huge, so I'm not afraid of trying again, but are there any other sites where such an app could gain a bit of exposure?

I've always been fairly good at building things, but it's definitely high time to start internalizing the other side of the equation and get some marketing chops as well.

I would like to hear your opinion on both, the app itself, and ways you can market X (maybe some tips from the trenches).

Thanks.

Not positive who you're trying to attract but if it's the average Joe, "A daemon will get the tweet from Twitter’s API and create a new event with the extracted date and description." won't matter much to them.

Just tell people how they will benefit from using it and leave out all the nerdy implementation details. Talks of daemons/apis/data extraction/etc really shouldn't be on your marketing page unless you're marketing something specifically to devs and really even then it's questionable.

Position your product as something that benefits people. Not something with daemon processes.

Thanks for the tip, I've been fiddling with the landing page copy a bit and I can see that it needs improvement. I think that you not figuring out which customers I'm trying to attract is already a failure of mine; it needs to be clear that it's for everyone, not just tech people.

I do have a fairly good conversion rate, but that's mainly because it costs nothing to "Sign in with Twitter", i.e. no form to fill in.

In the interest of transparency, I've had 132 uniques to the site of which 20 signed up.

Clickable: http://hashtagEvent.me

Thanks :)

Just told all my co workers about it and they like it and see its appeal. Nice site design too. I may give it a try.

With Reddit you really need to know how to game them, and it isn't hard. Talk to the moderators of whatever subreddit first so your post doesn't get insta flagged. Offer some kind of incentive, if it's a paid product, offer a coupon.

You need a story with your release. Nobody cares if you're just another guy who likes to code, we all are.

I can't remember what the site was, but someone posted somewhere reddit traffic statistics and found 4PM to be the best time to post. I ran a repost bot that always posted at 4PM and that gave me (usually) the highest number of upvotes in the least amount of time.

I think that post was on a Reddit blog.

Thanks for asking your coworkers, rfnslyr!

My current story is that this is scratching a personal itch of missing out on events purely because I'm not aware they exist. As a developer in Ljubljana (not really San Francisco, although the startup culture is really starting to bloom here) and one without Facebook, it would help me with networking.

I'll think about strategies for Reddit, so far I've posted r/twitter and r/webdev and got a modest response, to put it mildly. People I've talked to one on one all like the idea, so I think maybe it's a matter of presenting it better on the landing page.

About the reddit traffic statistics, I couldn't find the blog post you are referring to, but having one of these for reddit http://www.retronator.com/clock would probably be helpful.

No problem. That's a nice site, thanks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com