I'm creating a website to promote early stage sites and ideas
kickoffboost.com
kickoffboost.com
All you have to do is set the cache control headers for your landing page to something like "max-age=300, public". That way cloudflare's servers will eat the vast majority of your requests, but no one will see content older than a few minutes.
We got HN'd the other day and this kept our median response time around 25ms, even for our slow rails app.
Of course you have to make sure your landing page is publicly cacheable for this to work (i.e. no user specific data), but that's a small price to pay for a drastic reduction in the amount of traffic you need to serve.
One thing that I don't like about BetaList (as a submitter) - there's no insight into whether your submission is going to be accepted and if it is, then when it's going to be featured. If you can make your site better for submitters, you will have an upper hand over BL, which is the competitor to measure up to at the moment.
For some rough data: We actually launched on HN a week ago and had about 120 concurrent visitors for a span of ~6 hours. I assume this link, at it's #1 ranking since ~10pm PST, is getting somewhere around 100-150 concurrents as well (because of the off timing). As a result, it seems that around 10% of Kickoffboost's traffic (10-20 concurrents) has been consistently directed to Bitcast which isn't too shabby. I'll be interested to see what the numbers look like when traffic isn't being directed from HN.
And haven't you (or someone else from your company) had posted the exact same comment earlier under a different parent, a comment that is now gone? So presumably you just "moved" it here to get it higher up on the page. That's tacky. Don't do that.
The response to kickoff boost has been overwhelming and I'm in a bit of a struggle to keep up, but it's a great thing :)
I'm focusing the showcase algo right now so I can't comment or reply to everyone individually until later tonight, but I'll post some updates here.
I launched kickoffboost.com rather prematurely not having any idea that I would get this much traffic. I started coding for kickoff boost the day I read Paul Graham's post "Do things that do not scale" and basically just built a front page with DB hook to showcase products.
Right now, I am manually approving submissions. I'm working to implement a process where after approval, each product will have a "life" (say 300) and "age/clicks" (starting at 0).
When links are clicked, that product's age will be incremented, and the product will get front page space as long as age doesn't exceed life. The life/age bar will be publicly shown for each product. Once age exceeds life limit, the goes to "archived / older posts" and new products get front page view ( thinking about limiting front page to show 20 products at a time ). What do you guys think of this idea? I just want to optimize great new product's chance of discovery and I thought this would be a fair way to distribute the traffic love.
Like I said, I took Paul Graham's advice to heart and created something that really doesn't scale as of this moment. This has been extremely validating however, and now I am in overdrive to get things done. Please feel free to help me out by giving me ideas about how I can improve this.
I am really hopeful that I can turn this into something very helpful people like me who build things and often don't get the recognition they hope or deserve.
Thank's to everyone who pointed out bugs and optimization tips. I am getting to them one at a time. Thanks to everyone who submitted their products. Because of the premature launch, I cannot guarantee that I'll approve and showcase all the products just yet, but I feature all the submissions (as long as they are not troll submissions) in a just and fair way. Thank's to everyone who took the time to write to me and say that they see this as something useful. Thanks to everyone for checking it out. And thanks to PG for that essay "Do things that do not scale". I don;t know how, but the idea came to me within an hour of reading that essay.
Cheers! easymode
I'm not involved in either btw.
Note: I moderate r/SideProject. This subreddit has similar content to "Show HN," but each link spends more time on the front page. It is also a good place to test submission titles before posting to HN.
Stuff like this is why I prefer /newest to the front page. =)
(Edit: Okay, it's on the front page now. Still, /newest is always worth checking out.)
Thanks again :)
I'm sure it's all very test-driven though :)
Also, a nicer error page would be ... nicer. The default Rails error page oozes professionalism (I'm guilty of delaying error pages styling for way to long too - who's ever going to see them, right?)
I've recently been featured on beta list and thinking about applying on erlibird although erlibird requires payment.
I would love to feature your product though. I'm really glad you took the time to check it out. It'd be extra helpful to know back from you about how many eyeballs you got from kickoffboost.
You can submit your product on the site, or I can even put a posting up for you if you just give me your link :)
Cheers!
My signups from betalist have dropped off, so I'll let you know how we go with you guys if we get approved.
Also, noticed that all the new things are appended to the bottom of the page. Makes it look like the site hasn't changed, imo, but maybe that's intentional
(Edit: apparently Freshmeat is now called Freecode? I guess it's been a while since I visited...)
I shared kickoffboost on hackernews just to see if anybody would be interested in this kind of thing. I'm getting so much traffic now and I was not prepared for it at all.
StartupLi.st, which I created from my tent while on deployment in Afghanistan (crazy!), was an early mover in this space, and has some new features in the pipeline.
Kickoffboost looks pretty cool, and is in the same category as Erlibird, BetaList, KillerStartups, Wikindu, MoMB, StartupLift, etc. It's great to see so many sites looking to help boost the early traffic of very early startups.
Also, Mevvy and Ocitrus are newer resources to showcase your early startup.
All of these resources are recommended to use when looking for exposure and feedback on your early product/ prototype.
Eventually... TechCrunch will be an afterthought when looking for early traffic/ users. Cheers!:)
Would be real cool if you share what kind of traffic you got from there in a day. Thanks!
So much so as to dissuade me from signing up (to what?)
Algorithmic.ly is a simple service for certain kinds of algorithms without needing to manage the infrastructure. So if you're building, say, an e-commerce site, and you want to add a feature that adds a "people who bought this item also bought these" presentation box onto each page, you can use Algorithmic.ly to build a data model, choose the "item similarity" algorithm to continuously run on your model, and then use Algorithmic.ly's REST API to push data into the model and query results from the algorithm.
I hope that help explain it, and I hope someday I'll get to build a cool interactive demo into the landing page :). For now, the conversion statistics are not helping my case for putting more on the landing page.
Thanks for a solid explanation.
This makes it clear and easy to grab how the app will contribute to make my life better, anf why using and buying it might be worth for me.
Hey Kalzumeus, your marketing lessons are starting to work on me! I was just a dumb programmer before.
I am thinking about Metacritic and how they evaluate someone else's review but still link to it.
For example here is a pretty great rundown of CSS pre-processors (http://www.slant.co/topics/217/viewpoints/1/~best-css-prepro...). You can click through to see discussions, previous edits etc. (please ignore the lack of data in the bar charts on the "summary page", it's a brand new feature)
(also, I did a little stalking, you will like our stack: node, backbone, coffeescript, stylus. All single-page as well :)
A good stack to have :). What are you using for server routing and the `package.js` compilation?
And this would be a terrific way for small startups to get the word out. There would be a moderator who would decide which startups are good enough. I would rather have the moderator decide if something's interesting enough than HN crowd.
And are people paying you to feature them? Or just companies you like
Great job again man. i love it. Def bookmarked
Also, unsure if this is actually a meaningful place for our product, as it's a mobile app and so not as direct, but that shouldn't really hurt I don't think
Btw found a silly bug. When I signed up by mistake I used myname@Gmail.com and now I can't login with myname@gmail.com
I'm planning to work all those stats into an algo that would reward better ideas.
Will keep you posted. Thanks!
how do i give this guy my money.
step 2: nah do step 1 first.