

Show HN Aftermath: Releasing Followords.com this morning - bcambel

This morning I've submitted our project to HN.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4099054<p>Got pretty helpful feedback. But that wasn't the only thing.<p>478 people requested invite out of 755. 63% conversion rate. Almost 9K unique visitor visited our website. At some point in the morning I was seeing 400+ active users on the website. Unbelievable. 35 people registered without telling them how to register. ( You cannot register directly, there is only a login form - but they figured out a way :) 
http://imgur.com/Kbf9J<p>6K people visited directly from Hacker News, 1K from Twitter ( I guess Popular Hacker News post )<p>I was afraid that Nginx might not hold up, but that was not the problem. I wasn't ready for it! Stuck on my chair from 08:00 am till 02:00 pm. I am still feeling anxious.<p>People tweeted about us without using our application. https://twitter.com/#!/search/realtime/followords (even in Spanish)<p>Today another lesson learnt: So if you are working on a project. Release it. Ship it. Let people tell you how much your project, website or tagline sucks. Embrace it. Think about it, thank them and move on.<p>I need some sleep, tomorrow is another great day.
Thank you all for your contributions.
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glimcat
"I was afraid that Nginx might not hold up"

Seeing articles get nuked by a sudden spike in traffic tends to give one
unrealistic assumptions about what servers can handle. Most can take quite a
bit if you're serving mostly static content.

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mikeyouse
Just wanted to let you know, there's a typo on your landing page. "Archieve"
should be "Archive". Otherwise, looking good!

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nuhm
"478 people requested invite out of 755." Does this mean 755 requested an
invite and 478 got one?

~~~
bcambel
755 opened the registration form, 478 completed it.

~~~
leejw00t354
All you really need is an email.

Asking for first name and last name too, even if it's optional, will probably
discourage some people when they see the form.

~~~
bcambel
If they're discouraged because I'm asking their names, than it's fine. There
is nothing I can do about that.

~~~
bmelton
Not to sound contrarian, but the 'something' you can do about that is to not
ask for their first and last names.

I'm not suggesting that's the right or wrong approach, but you should ask
yourself the following questions every time you ask the user to do _any_
thing, especially so when asking for their personal information:

\- Do I really _need_ this? Does the app break if I don't get it? Does the
quality of the app diminish? Is there some measurable way in which this
impacts me negatively?

\- Can I rely on this? Can it be verified? If a user enters his name as
"Pinocchio Dandelion", can I say that it isn't? At this point, if it IS
incorrect, refer back to question #1.

By my estimation, generally, if you're asking for names, and it matters, you
should probably also be asking for credit card information, or some other way
to vet that data. If you aren't expecting to bill them, you probably don't
need to ask for it.

Of course, you might have something in the app that does need it that we can't
see from the outside, but most commonly in these scenarios is that people
_think_ they need the information and really don't, which means that you might
have captured an even larger percentage of users in the signup funnel.

In regards to signups, you really really really want to make it as
frictionless as possible. Once you have their email address, you almost
certainly have a more 'committed' user than someone who hasn't filled out the
form at all. If first and last names are nice for you to have (but not
strictly necessary), then you can ask for them later, after you have their
email address.

Once you have the email address though, that gives you the ability to try and
lure them in further. Patio11 (as usual) has more detailed information on this
topic, so I'll refer you to his posts as to why having an email address is a
really good thing, but suffice it to say, it is.

~~~
bcambel
I totally agree with the question "Do I really need this?" No I don't. But
there is an idea behind asking those information.

I don't care about their data. But I do care about them and I would like to
see people who care about the app which will try to solve some problem of
them. I would like to have a passionate user base(100s) rather than collecting
1000s of emails. I would like to talk with them, one by one and ask them if we
can help them.

Some people told me there are similar tools, some asked me questions, some
shared their love and interest to use the app. Some said "Landing page sucks"
which I agree a lot! Some asked for a job.. I wouldn't get this if I was only
asking their email address.

173 people even wrote something to remarks. Only 60 people did not write their
names ( some of them did not write their names but put some remarks )

448 people filled out their name. Only 1 of them has name-surname "In Valid"
and his email address is avalid@email.com I bet he is a bot.

First name - Last name fields are not required. People who follow Hacker News
are already experienced Web users who knows clearly a sign of Required Field,
they might easily skip it, but they did not. The rest of the emails are
already indicating their name and surname.

If they don't care and they don't request an invite; which means I would be
more efficiently spend my time.

It might have a better conversion rate without asking their name, but I don't
care about the conversion rate that much.

Don't get me wrong, I am not against what you say, I am trying to rationalize
the behavior with data.

~~~
bmelton
It sounds like you have valid reasons for your rule-breaking, and that's
a-okay by me. If we all followed the rules all the time, there wouldn't be any
progress.

It also sounds like you're deeply passionate about what you're doing, which is
great.

My only caveat to that is that it's hard to have both success at a grand scale
and a dedicated group of users at the same time. If you're not looking to be
successful, or aren't looking to strike it big (ala Facebook or Twitter),
there is of course nothing wrong with that, but for the type of service you're
operating, you'll have a harder time tracking statistical trends with a
smaller audience I'd suspect, which could make the service overall less
effective.

~~~
bcambel
As you might know, without committed users Twitter would not have # tag and @
sign. They have talked with their users at one point. They don't have an
option. You have to.

What their advantage right now, Facebook already have 3200+ employees which
also means users that they can get feedback. Twitter has the same nature. But
believe me, they are talking a lot with their customers(advertisers), not with
you or me, coz we are a small fish in the ocean. Our lives are not dependent
on FB or TW, if we find a better app, we will sell them in a second.

That's also why I believe 37signals, Evernote, Dropbox are much more valuable
brands than Facebook & Twitter. They might not have 100s million of users, but
if you can't monetize, it does not matter

We will be going Freemium, but in a way that Evernote does. Not in FB or TW
modal.

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bmelton
I didn't see it this morning, but seeing this now and just signed up for the
beta. I'm _still_ not entirely sure what it does, even after reading the
linked thread, but I try to do whatever I can to support all the 'Show HN'
threads, so even if it sucks, you've got my registration (and I'm not
presuming that it will suck.)

Nginx is almost certainly not going to be your failing piont, and can
certainly scale to beyond 400+ active users, assuming that it's configured
correctly and on decent hardware. Your database could crash, or one
questionable join could tear the whole thing down, but Nginx is probably the
least likely component in your stack to fail.

As for the lesson learned, that's spot on, and one that I waffle on every now
and again, even though I've done it and know it to be canon.

Best of luck. It's a space I've got a lot of experience in, and
'interestingness' vs. 'importance' isn't really gotten _right_ anywhere yet.
Hopefully you've nailed it.

~~~
bcambel
Thanks Barry, interesting vs importance highly personal and it's a hard topic.

