Comment by rfnslyr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rfnslyr | Hacker News Reader

Fantastic series of articles. I like that you included strategies you've used and actually uploaded documents for the public to see. Keeping it real is the only way to go.

I'm tired of articles written by someone hard working, trying to abstract all their efforts into a certain few points relevant to really their own situation only. The most you get out of these is an ooh or ahh. These types of articles are unintentionally predatory to wannabe entrepreneurs, which in reality, only serve to boost your revenue and traffic.

I want to hear specific conversations you've had, email exchanges, social strategies you've used, things you've read that have literally changed your life and perspective. Give us a peek into your mind and how it works. Not one off points you thought of on an evening and decided to make a blog post. Spend a month, two months, three months, a half year gathering data, and make a post full of integrity with defined goals in mind. Outline a path you took, tell us where you went wrong and why.

Looking forward to more in this series.

OP what do you recommend as reading material? Any books/authors that helped you?

Too often on HN, a "How My Company Did X" post doesn't include how Company actually performed X. They're typically generalized stories about platitudes. Kudos to Groove for following through with a concrete series of steps they performed that helped them accomplish their goal.

Thanks! We promised to bare it all :)

How many extra customers would being number 1 on HN bring? Would love to hear if you ve got such a number.

Post coming up very soon about that affect :)

Congrats! Glad to hear a fellow surfer making it :)

Looking forward to it.

There are a lot of well-intentioned opinions here but it'll be interesting to see if there's any correlation with your real-world data and conversions.

I -for one- am really interested in following your growth but I'm not in the market for a support service (yet). I'm not your customer, why would you care what I think about your UX and whether or not you should have a video lander?

It really depends on the product and the article content. When Lollipuff (women's fashion) was at the top of HN for "Our YC Application", we had very few real signups -- but lots of pageviews and time on site.

Having read the Groove blog post... I still have no clue what it is they do. Just putting a simple one-liner in the blog post may have improved conversions significantly.

EDIT: If the author of the article is listening... What Groove does is at least as important as your bio at the end of the article. Put something in the post. Or in the sidebar. Or somewhere!

Love this feedback :) Thanks so much for sharing. We try hard not to promote the product on our blog, having said that I think a simple 1 liner in the bio about the app would do well.

Thanks again, Alex

For me, and I've seen this feedback here in HN as well, it's annoying when I click on your logo and it takes me to the blog home rather than the product home - even when I'm already on the blog home.

That said - this blog entry is amazing! I'll check out the others in this series as well. THANK YOU for sharing all this!

My business, LiberWriter.com was at the top of HN at one point in time. New signups? 0. Our target market is completely different from the HN crowd, almost all of whom can do what we do for themselves.

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