Show HN: I've this wonderful app – but no users | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I've this wonderful app – but no users

4 pointsiveqy5 comments

I've made a SaaS, http://git-publish.com and released it yesterday.

There's a lot of similair services out there, so from that and my own experience I know that there's a need for such a service. However after several hours I got no users. Now a hours isn't that long, but just leaving a site up without promoting it won't lead anyone to find it.

So the question is, what do I miss to make this a service that people wants to use? Is it just marketing? The design of the site? Or maybe something lacking with the service?

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Unlike other responses here, I don't think your landing page is bad or your message is unclear. Don't waste more time tweaking your styles now, go spread the world.

How will you do that I don't know, but be aware that you're not alone. There are thousands of nice well-done useful services out there on the internet, all them with little to none users, only because people who actually need them don't know they exist.

For example, it is super-common to some programmer to post here a service built from ground-up that is exactly the same as other existing services, just because he didn't notice the existence of these before starting to write the code. Now, this happens with technical people (who love the internet and know how to use it), imagine what doesn't happen with normal people.

The main problem I experience with your web site that (a) it is not instantly clear what service you are providing, some graphics could help wonders in combination with a more catchy title. and (b), possibly more important, why I would need/want to use your app.

Now the main message of your website is 'publish your webpage'. Along with the url that made me think instantly of github pages, but then with some reading it turns out that I'd need a separate FTP server for this service. But if I need a separate server, what is the advantage of this service over just scp'ing the contents of my website which might be in a local/cloned repo straight to my ftp server?

It does look like a cute service, but I suspect it'll need time to see if you pick up users via constant constant advertising, self-promotion, and luck.

Presumably you've talked to people and have found people interested in the idea? I'm surprised that people who would use git, who are presumably technical, would be struggling to deploy via rsync, ssh, ftp, or something like capistrano, rake, fabric, etc.

So your market looks odd to me, although I certainly appreciate there are a lot of low-end hosting companies who sell FTP-only access, with cpanel, and other horrid things.

PS. Good luck. Launching is always impressive.

I would say marketing, and describing what is actually happening or problem you are solving (along with features), security concerns and how you handle them, and what happens after you publish (meaning examples).

Check dribbble for "landing" pages, or just view some common technology examples like https://consul.io/

Wait...you launched yesterday and are already worried about no users? The web isn't really "if you make it, they will come" type of place anymore. Do some marketing.

This is all assuming that you've already validated your market BEFORE you decided to make it...

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