zmitri

What's your take on stories told in photos -- eg this http://backspac.es/r/V0bCokJWnt/how-it-happens

That was also made on a mobile phone

I'm wondering if the new iPhone is going to have better video capturing abilities due to the way the App Store is promoting video apps right now. They often feature video apps, and sometimes throw up large "In the director's chair" features on the front page, despite the fact that no one (at least right now) seems to be downloading the apps in them.

Mobile app churn is insane. Unless you can bring people back into the app every day, or it is a super utility, they will leave. Period.

I run a much smaller app that's bootstrapped, but we have hit top 100 free apps in the App Store before, and have been featured in the section our app is in, so I'd like to think I've learned at least a couple things -- tweens and teens more or less dominate app store explosive growth with regards to social apps.

I think the sticker chat is definitely something that those teens are into. That being said, those same teens mostly just care about followers and likes, which is why Instagram is quite the 100 pound gorilla in the room. Believe it or not, there are tons of folks on IG with tens of thousands of followers, who on twitter or Facebook have 10-100 followers. It is the de-facto mobile social network.

Honestly Path is a damn beautiful app, but because Path does not have enough content, people will leave. Period. It would be interesting to hear what the engagement numbers are on that 6M.

This would be absolutely wonderful! Literally a dream come true.

Although I wouldn't put these on a consumer site, I might throw it on the personal one. These are absolutely beautiful. Great work tholman.

I hope this is the case.

Any founders feel they fit this bill in NYC? If so, would like to meet with you and talk shop. We're almost at 60K users on a "project".

Email is dmitri [at] backspac.es

That's how a lot of it works.

You'd be surprised at high the conversion rate is from google -> your download page -> app download

Getting a lot of people to do that is a lot harder than just being front paged though.

I'm sorry, but I don't understand any of this hating on Rap Genius.

There's a reason they are the fastest growing YC company ever, and got a16z in for 15M -- because they are straight killers. They have quietly created an internet empire until this point, and are building something that people love and use everyday.

A lot of folks wouldn't have the chutzpah to call out Heroku like that or are just too small to make this kind of attention. To me it seems as though they are helping Ruby devs save money and time. 8 dynos vs 4 dynos is a hell of a big difference when you're starting out. Also, seems like something that would be pretty fun to do if you worked there.

Getting your website covered by TechCrunch will bring in a few hundred, maybe thousand, "one time" users. Front page of the App Store can be 50K over a week.

Not necessarily the case. It depends what your market is. The early adopter App Store audience is quite diverse, and not at all like the tech early adopter crowd.

In terms of growth, being on the US front page is absolutely huge, so there's lots of politics about getting on there. If you have connections, it's a lot easier to get up there.

As someone who builds an app with slightly less than 60K users, I'd say this is quite telling of the app industry. A lot of people just dump gas on the distribution flame without any sense of retention. They blow up kind of quickly, but then completely burn out. A lot of investors poured money in to mobile startups over the past 2 years, without product or traction and people are starting to panic. They are pivoting and cloning apps in a last ditch effort to get bridge financing.

Perhaps I'm biased, but I think people are going to start rejecting the notion that real time social networks are the end all and be all of consumption and creation on the mobile phone. Users are getting tired of it, and they are giving us that feedback like crazy.

I've heard YC folks always talk about making something 100 people really love before trying to make something 10^n (n > 6) people will really love. I think it's a good approach because it's hard to know whether you're on to something unless you can measure how many new users each user brings in.

Have you used crashlytics before?

I use it in production with an app that has >50K users. It shows you the exact lines, and break down where it happens. What you showed isn't even important.

Crashlytics has literally changed the game with regards to crash reporting. Their UI and customer service has been wonderful (unlike most other mobile service providers...) and I really hope they continue to offer their services to devs.

It seems as though a lot of App Store features can be quite political. Everything is oriented around US front page position -- it can bring in ~10K downloads a day in the US without much marketing.

In order to endorse content like that however, Apple wants to know that the app can handle the traffic and the server costs. If they know you are a big company, or even a funded startup, it plays a role in the selection process.

Hey Luke,

I make a storytelling app, so I've thought a lot about story telling apps in the past. I understand how you see it as a storytelling medium, but do you really think it's an efficient one? A great one? Could you really make a powerful story using Vine? I'm still unsure, but I think they are going to have a pretty hard time conveying a powerful narrative with it.

Here's a couple examples made with our app, would love to hear your thoughts: http://backspac.es/r/sKu44BhXgn, http://backspac.es/r/klfmvMdWD1

In a lot of communities, the "this is my first post" is often celebrated. On HN it definitely is not, which is kind of strange. Glad you put this out there danilo.

You are right on. 3 months for me to go from no ObjC experience to app store, another 5 months to get to 50K users, still no revenue, still no "seed" round. You need to be in it because it's what you really want to do.

For anyone who actually wants to build an app -- This guide is very long winded. For iOS, the easiest way is to download xCode and try to build it.

I would suggest Aaron Hillegass' Big Nerd Ranch Guides for ObjC and iOS programming. I read those books over a few days to get started and felt as though they provided a great foundation for all ObjC things to come. Stack Overflow fills in the blanks.

You don't have to take my advice, but it's been 8 months since I started "building my killer app", it's been out in the app store for almost 5 months, and since then we've been featured by Apple, and have over 50K users. Just plan to start what you've finished and you'll force yourself into having a killer app.

Would love to see a concrete example of where this helped out. What's going on that's so complex under the hood?

Would love to hear insight as to why they choose you guys over others.

To me that sounds like a mechanism to help boost. Not automatically, but definitely an advantage.

My company recently grew by 1000% in less than 24 hours with regards to user base (and even higher with regards to content created and user interactions). Same product, same team, but perception of our company to outsiders has changed entirely. On the inside the only difference has been stepping up our support game, and having the opportunity to try things out on a much large scale -- plus server expenses...

Think about this: YC is a business. YC likes hackers -- hell, YC are hackers. Gaming systems is what hacking is about. Hacker News provides a platform to let their companies get attention. Being front page on HN brings you traffic and tech attention. The HN that you read is the same one potential hires, investors and journalists read.

Not only that, there's a variety of mechanisms built in to boost/identify YC users to other YCers to provide mechanisms of boosting their submitted stories. HN in itself is like a giant voter ring in that way.

Totally on point about getting users to actually use it. That's kinda where I'm at right now with what I'm working on, and it's by far the hardest step. Twitter actually had very few users for the first 6 months I believe, but things like Facebook and Instagram were big hits pretty quickly.

Twilio has done this aggressively. I don't think I've ever seen a tech event that they weren't involved with somehow.

Aviary's filters are actually quite bad (I've done a bunch of research on this because we open sourced a live filter camera picker for iOS) so I'm not sure what Twitter is trying to accomplish with this either.

That being said, I think good filters are quite powerful. Instagram's filter offering is much better than most free filter apps. While not the secret sauce anymore, originally I do believe it was a huge part of it. If you look at Facebook Camera and compare the quality of the filters, maybe you'll see what I mean.

I'm on the other side of the fence now. Yes, it's much harder, and much more stressful, but it's on my terms.

There's a lot more to this story, but I've decided to draw this out over a couple posts.

Funny you mention being risk averse. I've talked about this with my cofounder, and we don't see doing this as being risky. We see taking jobs as being risky, because we feel like we are losing out on doing something we like more and wasting our lives.

If I were American and didn't need an H1B, It would have happened a year earlier.

Surprisingly similar to my situation when I quit (except I didn't have a baby, and I'm not American). So nice to hear things turned out.