When You Don't Make the Front Page of Hacker News | Hacker News Reader

When You Don't Make the Front Page of Hacker News

blog.interviewsy.com

57 pointstimsegraves30 comments

...Write A Blog Post About It That Makes the Front Page of Hacker News Instead?

I can almost 100% guarantee you that having an automatic slider killed a lot of upvotes for you. I'm not trying to be a dick, I've actually seen this over an over, and I experience it as a user - if I see a Show HN, I'm upvoting unless I have a reason not to. I despite automatic sliders, and yours is particularly egregious. Long term, it's a tiny mistake in what seems to be an otherwise interesting project, so I'd do a way with it immediately to avoid the distraction.

Fair point. I'm actually not a big fan of the automatic sliding either. I just didn't think to take it off. I'll definitely do that now.

The upside is that people have to be quick to spot the typos, e.g. "miriad" ;).

Made that teeny bit worse by the following 'of'.

Upside really is, hey! Feedback! That's what HN is good for, not finding users!

Truly and honestly, if you don't have a product that is perfect for the HN crowd as a niche, it's still important to get on the front page if you can take feedback well. It's the best you'll ever get, it actually may make or break your business. If you don't get it here, get it elsewhere and fast.

I completely agree. There is a paragraph of text that you can't even read because it moves to the next slide too quickly. Since I couldn't read it, I stopped trying and left the site.

In addition to removing the slider, it also could help to find a way to quickly sum up the benefits of the site using a very short sentence instead of a paragraph.

I keep on swearing to myself I'm going to create a Chrome extension that kills all the sliders, slideshows, and welcome pop-up windows of the world.

Not only that, but there's plenty of data showing that sliders are horrible for conversion. I guess could I pull better sources, but here is one with a bunch of links I found with a bit of light searching:

http://conversionxl.com/dont-use-automatic-image-sliders-or-....

...which is strange since sliders are among the most popular premium plugins for WordPress. In fact, many of then earn six-figures on ThemeForest alone.

Don’t take not making the front page on HN as product validity as 99% of posters here are not the target market of 100% of the ‘Show HN’ posts here.

btw: You summed it up pretty nice in your blog post!

Thanks! It can be a little disappointing not making a big splash but I just hope that little post helps others in similar situations remember to keep the longer view.

I am interested what happens when you don't initially make it to the front page, but then your postmortem does, and it links you to your original project. What is the conversion % of people who then check it out?

Yeah, I think that will be an interesting followup post.

Which will itself be posted to HN, continuing the cycle.

I'm even more interested in the conversion rate for the front page HN generated visitor boom, and actual long term gain. But that might be too hard to measure.

I myself always visit the sites but I cannot remember I have been using one for longer than a day.

If he's using Google Analytics it should be fairly straightforward to tie conversions back to the referral source.

Aside from just having a good article/project, it takes good timing, good luck, and sometimes some good upvotes from friends to make the front page. I've had a few things which I was sure would take off not make the front page, including a combined ruby and rails security vulnerability, as well as a project with plenty of publicity and 50,000+ views on XDA.

Wow, you hacked HN whit this post to be on the frontpage congratz you made it and now i will check interviewsy.com.

Upvoted for the irony!

My 1st two start-ups made the front-page.

My current and I think best yet hasn't had the same good fortune.

good luck to you!

Haha, I know, right?? What's your current project? I love checking out what people are passionate about.

Thanks

Our web app turns a crowd & their devices into a huge stereo system; all devices play same audio in sync.

http://SpeakerBlast.com

We think it's cool, but maybe people don't see it being useful? We use it at home to fill our house with audio.

I think it's a pretty neat idea! Might have to get a few friends tomorrow and try it out.

One minor suggestion - when I went to the homepage using Firefox, I was a little confused how to get to the actual functionality. From a cognitive standpoint in the age of the internet, it's 'a lot' of work to scan through the list of supported platforms, realize your current platform isn't in that list, and guess that there's only a way to get to the real functionality if you switch to one of the platforms on the list.

Thank you!

Hmmm so do you think we should use images of the supported platforms/browsers instead of all that heavy text?

Potentially, depends how it would look visually I guess. You could just display a little message saying the platform isn't supported yet and linking to the FAQ perhaps.

Yeah, that's a pretty cool idea. I'll definitely play around with it a bit more tomorrow.

Your landing page is not the thing. And you get the right feedback to tell you that: no votes. So why complain about it instead of working on it? You seem to have spent a lot of time on your tool. Landing page is were you have to work on now!

It's name has a spin-off air about it.

irony at its best...

That's what you get when a bunch of virgins decide what gets to the front page.

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