Comment by basil | Hacker News Reader

Comment by basil | Hacker News Reader

I'm in the situation you describe right now. I blogged about it a couple months ago: http://neat.io/blog/diary-of-a-programmer-with-no-clue-about.... The resulting HN discussion has a lot of good tips: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6686290

My launch didn't go 'well' to the standards that I constantly see on HN. I got < 10 users and a lot of those were existing beta testers.

Now I'm 2 months in and I have been getting a fairly consistent number of new users each day, however its dropped in the past couple of weeks (I'm blaming the holiday season).

Here's what I've learnt so far:

- SEO is very important for discovery

- Keep your product evolving to fit the needs of your current users

- Keep current users happy

- Be ultra responsive to support enquiries - this is key to keeping happy users

- Adjust your pricing model based on feedback

- Get your site linked to on other sites even if seemingly unrelated - I get a bit of traffic from a design site that has my site in a list of 'beautiful, flat landing pages'

It would have been nice to get a whole slew of users on day 1 but realistically this doesn't happen unless you have an existing captive audience. It does dampen the expected meritocracy that comes with developing your own product.

One of the most constructive replies. If you don't mind me asking, how did you get into SEO? Did you get professional help or try to tackle it yourself?

PS: Kudos on the product, you just got yourself a future customer with the Atlassian integration :)

I initially launched the site promoting my app as just 1 page. In hindsight knowing what I know now that was ludicrous. (You need more pages, more content and more targeted content.) I went into it here: http://neat.io/blog/the-bee-website-redesign.html

I still don't really understand SEO and my site is still not ranking for the keywords I want but I'm trying to learn.

I did get one-off semi-professional help from experts that emailed me as a result of my blog post blowing up on HN but end of the day, you're going to have to dig deep and learn about it yourself. This is frustrating because looking for quality content about SEO is ridiculous. Everything out there is so dubious and I don't know what is credible and what isn't.

Today for instance I just got a tip about content placement and how it can be effective for SEO. I Googled around and found this list: http://www.mywebschool.com/blog/seo/seo-tips-for-keyword-pla... so I'm going to try and apply it later tonight. No idea if it will work or if its a waste of time or if the tips in there are good...

--

Oh and another thing I forgot to mention is that a lot of people asked me to make a video showcasing the app because they wanted to watch something rather than scroll through a list of features. This was a good idea, no idea if its helped with people downloading the trial but I get good feedback on the video and at least it educates people about what my app does. Video blog post here: http://neat.io/blog/creating-the-bee-video.html

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