
Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users - chaddeshon
There are many stories on HN about great product launches that get money from tons of people on the first day. If we hear about slow launches, the store comes years later, after the product is a success. I'm writing this so that we'll have another perspective. I'm ten days into a slow, frustrating launch, but I am hopeful and excited.<p>Thirteen users have signedup for my hosted PhantomJS web service (BromBone.com). That's a lie. Four of those 13 accounts are test accounts I created. Why I am so excited about these nine accounts? I have nine people who have decided to take my service for a test drive! The great thing about that is that nine is only one less than ten. Ten doubled is 20. Find another 20 and I'm up 40. That's almost half way to 100, then 200, 300, and 400. Soon I'll have a 1000.<p>That may be a little optimistic. I've read so much about gathering interest before launch and talking to customers. But it din't go as smoothly as I would hope. Posts to mailing lists take me longer to craft than I would like. The discussion is positive and generates some traffic. But honestly it is a trickle compared to what I need. I posted twice to HN, but no one clicked the upvote button.<p>Why then am I so positive? I got two sigups overnight. And I hadn't done any new marketing the day before. My traffic is tiny. But every time I do a little piece of marketing, I see a spike. The spike goes away, but it leaves behind a residual traffic increase. Additionally, the nine users I have are actually playing around with the service. They're using something I crated! I think if I keep my efforts going, traffic and users will increase.<p>If anyone else out there is excited about getting just a handful of signups, you're not alone. I'm sure we won't all make it big, but I think there's reason to be excited. Just because my "launch" didn't bring in a flood of users doesn't mean that I can't grow the trickle into a stream, and then a river. Or maybe this is denial. Time will tell.
======
joelg87
In the whole first month of Buffer, we had less than 100 signups. For
comparison, we now have 560,000 users (2.5 years later). We now sign up 100
people within a couple hours. It amazes me to think about it.

I had a previous startup that also started slow, but never really changed. The
key difference between the two, was retention. So I would highly recommend
anyone who's getting started to closely watch retention. Does anyone keep
using the product into their second week after sign up? That's the first thing
I'd focus on with what I know now.

~~~
switz
I recently hacked together a product that aligns with buffer's philosophy, but
is inherently different. I have about 70 users, but zero paid users and not
much activity. I've been ignoring it from a development standpoint in favor of
other projects. Meanwhile I still use the site daily. I hope I can put some
more time into it, but for now I'm just letting it scratch a personal itch. If
anyone is interested: <https://tweezer.io>

~~~
dendory
I was wondering why no one was tackling the issue of posting to multiple
social networks, and instead all we saw were services that clone posts from
one network to the next, services that usually get shut down from the
networks. So I made my own a while back that can post to Twitter, Facebook,
G+, etc in customized ways depending if I have a URL or not, automatically
shortening it, etc. Otherwise I would give yours a try.

~~~
Snoptic
Do you have to constantly change your web page scraper to maintain G+ support,
since it has no API?

~~~
darkmagnus
<https://developers.google.com/+/api/>

~~~
estebank
The G+ API is read only.

------
mixmax
Oh, I can outdo you!

Many years ago I did an upstart that was a combination of delicious and
facebook, using bayesian filtering to locate links and people you might be
interested in from what you posted yourself. Incredibly clever product. Before
Google had even thought of pagerank. We got funding, we had great engineers,
and I was the CEO.

But you know what? We never launched. We ran out of money before we got that
far.

You launched - I didn't.

Congratulations! You've made it further than most.

~~~
shelf
MixMax, as in the cakes? You wonderful human being. Those cakes rock my world.

~~~
mixmax
I had no idea it was a cake - it's just a silly name I thought up 2024 days
ago when making an account for some strange newfangled startup site I'd found
through reddit. :-)

------
tg3
My advice: stop advertising PhantomJS and let me sign up for your service. Why
did I have to scroll down 80% of the page to get to a sign up button? And
nothing on your page convinced me that I should.

I am in your target market - I build websites for a living, and I hate testing
in multiple browsers. Convince me, in one sentence, why this is a good idea,
and give me the option of doing something about it.

Good luck.

~~~
vellum
This. It's a wall of text. I guarantee you, 90+% of people who go to your page
are going to hit the back button long before they finish getting to the “sign
up” button.

-Condense the value proposition into a few sentences, or better yet, one.

-Use pictures, include screenshots or drawings of what it does. People don’t like reading a wall of text.

-Use multiple sign up buttons. Top, bottom, and between the text. See how <http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/> does it.

~~~
andrewem
Good luck to the OP! This seems like a potentially useful service. Having said
that, on to the constructive criticism.

It's not clear on what kind of service it's trying to be, and thus what
problem it should try to solve.

If it's for running a product's suite of automated tests, then it's going to
be competing with Tddium and CircleCI. I can't imagine choosing it over one of
those for my company's continuous integration, because it only runs PhantomJS
tests and we also have tests that don't require a browser.

If it's for making a crawler-friendly version of a single-page app, that
sounds really involved to get working, and requires you to insert this new
service into the loop of your interaction with Googlebot. It also makes me
wonder if Google will decide this is cloaking and ban your site for doing
this.

Also, each of the plan names should be clickable. Right now it looks like I'm
going to get the $199/mo plan when I click on Sign Up (and when I click on
that I get taken to some other domain, and I'm on a Sign In form rather than a
Sign Up form). Also, typo in "absolutly".

------
nate
I know how hard this can be. I've been doing startup stuff for 7 years. And
it's still awfully painful. I'd encourage teaching to find an audience.

I've been blogging and blogging and blogging. I ended up giving that up at one
point. I thought I had more important things to do. I thought it wasn't
growing enough. But that was foolish.

The biggest thing that's changed a lot of things for me in the last year is
simply sticking to a schedule of writing once per week. It all eventually adds
up. It eventually opens up new doors.

It doesn't happen over night either. But the audience that finds you tends to
stick with you. And tends to help market all the new projects.

What about creating BromBone.com was hard that you figured out? Any hosting
problems that you solved? Any bugs in PhantomJS? Anything you can open source?
Did you learn anything about what kind of mailing list post gets more traffic
than others? Learn anything about making collecting signups easier?

I continue to collect tons and tons of ideas as I go through life that I feel
were hard and I figured out or were interesting. A bunch of people just pass
on when I write about them. Meh. But then every now and then, something
spreads like crazy. An open source project here. A motivating post here. And
years later you find, a lot of awesome stuff has built up. People following
you. People wanting to see your next project and spread it.

Doing what we're doing is a career. It isn't a lottery. It isn't going to
happen in one launch. It's something that we should expect to get better and
better at. Forever.

> If you launch and no one notices, launch again. We launched 3 times. \-
> Brian Chesky, Founder of AirBnB
> <https://twitter.com/bchesky/status/312438036929576962>

~~~
pd_drawexpress
Seven years is a long time. I am pretty on the same timeframe as well. I took
a chance to redo everything over and this time with 5 months I have already
launched my new product. My HN launch is kinda depressing as it just gave me 6
visits LOL. That traffic graph is my new motivation factor. I love to improve
my writing to write blog like you but for now I am sticking to similar goal
and that is to release an upgrade to my product every week.

~~~
yoshyosh
I have to wonder if releasing an upgrade is better than other things. Also you
should leave your contact in your profile! My first reaction was to email you,
but I have no way to reach you.

~~~
pd_drawexpress
I think releasing frequently give me an opportunity to keep user interested.
So far it pressured me to keep on adding values. Either way I think it does
have possible effect until I burned out :). BTW, I updated my profile so feel
free to contact me.

------
TallboyOne
Right off the bat.

I'm kind of buzzed so take my advice as twice as important related to
usability

No pictures = not interested (for 'scripts' this is okay.. but if its
something that you expect users to sign up to it must have imagery).

If its a script that you put into your own app, then make a video to show how
it works.

You need a much better summary at the top of exactly what it does and why i
should sign up.

You use ALL your _prime_ real estate explaining what a headless browser is. I
already know what it is, and lose interest immediately.

just my .02, now I will go back for real and look a second time in detail but
I wanted to give you my raw first impressions.

===

At second glance, your call to actions are terrible (raw but honest, I want
you to succeed).

My eyes move around the page like a dead rat rolling around in the wind.

look at examples of places that do it well:

<https://stripe.com/>

<https://bundlescout.com/>

<http://www.discourse.org/>

Your signup button is literally -100/10. I can't rate it worse. I looked
around how to sign up (I actually _tried_ and still couldnt see it)

~~~
rschmitty
Also naming something like one of your plans after 'Katrina' brings up
negative connotations

------
zenocon
Disclaimer: I'm a hardcore phantomjs user. Add a service that scrapes results
and I think you'll be overwhelmed with interest. Scraping is a pain. It takes
a special niche talent -- but a ton of people want it. Let people submit what
information they want off a page -- you write the script that does it for
them. Pay as you go, etc. If it saves people time, they will pay for it. I do
full-time consulting -- building out software systems for people, but I could
just as easily keep myself 100% busy just building phantom/casper scrapers for
people that have no clue how to do it -- and I'm not talking about stuff that
falls into the "be evil" bucket. You're just building web services where there
are none.

~~~
kgen
Just curious, but isn't this what ScraperWiki does?

~~~
zenocon
Never head of ScraperWiki. Took a quick look, and it looks they do provide
this kind of service. Regardless, that hardly means the market is saturated.
Businesses need this kind of thing A LOT. If you do it right, it could prove
quite fruitful. I'd remove all the stuff about phantomjs / headless browser
and all tech jargon from the home page, and just focus on how you can provide
fast value through this path.

------
ryanio
I find it odd that the hacker community likes to completely disregard non-
technical people[1]. It's situations exactly like this where it would bring a
huge amount of value to have someone dedicated to marketing/community outreach
and evangelism for the product.

Even though it's a technical project, explained well and with patience even
the most non-technical person could wrap their head around it and develop a
plan to get it to market.

Being both a dev and a marketer, I've found there are two, entirely separate
brainstorming mindsets: product design and development, and product marketing
and execution. It is incredibly taxing and inefficient to frequently switch
between these two mindsets, which is why I believe most developed companies
evolve into having two distinct departments: product development and product
marketing. I'm working on my own startup now in RoR doing exactly this (i.e.
trying to switch between the two roles frequently) with much frustration.
Luckily I have a great business partner that is entirely focused on strategy
that can knock some sense into me when I become too bogged down in the
development/coding thought pattern.

Going to a business school with essentially zero CS majors, I personally know
a dozen people that would be interested in jumping in on a project like this,
not even for the lucrative rewards of success but the experience of working on
such a project and jumping into the tech world.

Just some thoughts...

[1]: Most recent example I've stumbled upon: "No
marketers/MBAs/designers/unicorns/whatever." Source: <http://hackerho.us/>

~~~
Kanbab
The ultimate is when you get a marketer who understands what APIs are used
for. For example, I can say that the OP should probably consider pasting his
sample code higher up on the page in a more prominent position. Show the end
user he can succeed easily with the product and he won't mind clicking the
sign-up button. Marketers these days also need to know where you can find
these users. They should have an account here, SO, SlashDot, r/programming,
Quora and so on.

------
c16
I once read 'If you build it, they won't come'. I think this is the case for
most people. Getting people to your website or service is the hard part, not
the development. We're all in the same boat here. For a product such as yours,
I can imagine going to events, posting on relevant forums etc... would be your
best bet at getting more users. Best of luck with your product, what you
currently have looks promising.

~~~
t0
They won't come. At least not automatically. It requires some effort on your
part, even if it's a tiny bit.

I love that quote. Is this the original source?
[http://jasonlbaptiste.com/featured-articles/if-you-build-
it-...](http://jasonlbaptiste.com/featured-articles/if-you-build-it-they-wont-
come/)

------
downandout
Good luck to you. Not getting a single upvote for new stories on HN seems to
be the norm, at least for me, so I wouldn't worry about that very much.

What you should focus on right now is whether or not the users you have
actually use and like the app. If they do, then you've created something that
people like and you should focus on growth. If they are not really using it
after registration, then you should focus on improving the product until the
usage rate goes up to acceptable levels.

------
vict
My startup in 2008 spent 3 years in development limbo and never launched. My
next one in 2011 launched with similar numbers to what you described here and
we eventually scrapped it because we had no way to effectively promote it. We
launched a new site in 2012 and we now have over 7 million unique visitors a
month to our site and hundreds of partnerships with other services. The
biggest change we made was focusing on building partnerships in the industry.
We never went to any conferences or sales trips, everything was via email
introductions. Try to find a way to make yourself useful to people who have
distribution channels, at least that worked for our individual case anyhow.

------
citruspi
Hey, I'm going to be in the same position soon. :)

I haven't launched yet, and while I feel that there's a large audience for the
service I plan to provide, I feel like the majority of my potential users are
content with what they have right now.

Either way, great job. I'm not sure if I could be so optimistic. Besides
talking to potential users, have you tried advertising/promotions/etc?

Edit:

As justhw said, a demo or two and screen shot wouldn't be a terrible idea.

And while this may not make a great difference, add a favicon and change the
title.

The title is currently set to "A headless browser as a service built on
PhantomJS - BromBone"

So, in my sea of tabs, all I see is "A head" which isn't as helpful when
trying to find the tab as "BromBone."

------
rethaw
First of all, congrats on actually shipping. You've already accomplished more
than 99% of people.

Second of all, you're actually charging money for your product. That's
awesome. When just one of those users converts to a paid plan you'll already
be making more money than any of those hyped social startups with big launches
that never turn a dollar profit.

Kudos.

------
cubicle67
Re Pricing - I'd be interested in being able to buy a number of "credits" for
this service instead of paying a recurring monthly fee. Something like $20 for
500 requests that I can then use anytime over the next 12 months.

Your service looks interesting but also something I'm likely to use a lot for
a few days then possibly not at all for a while so I'd be reluctant to pay a
monthly fee for it. A "credit pack" or pay-per-use ability would be a great
alternative

~~~
ryanjm33
agreed

------
slig
Clickable link: <http://www.brombone.com/>

~~~
TheHippo
It's down... :-(

~~~
Mahn
Looks like he is reaching the tenth user today :)

------
troymc
I checked it out to see if it's something that interests me.

It took me a while to "get it" (i.e. understand what it does). The aha moment
came with the sentence, "It doesn't display the page on a monitor."

If you can, try to get to the explanation sooner, using simple words. I think
I'd seen the phrase "headless browser" before but I'd forgotten what it meant.

------
adambenayoun
You posted twice on HN and no one up voted you - posted this 'Tell HN' and
this time you're on the front page, I'm sure that a bunch of interested
hackers will visit your website now and register with your service. Keep
telling the world about your service, find out what works better and do it
again.

~~~
csense
> no one up voted you

This is a problem with HN. I've submitted 6 stories with this account, all of
which seem like they're definitely interesting material highly relevant to
HN's audience, and rather similar to stories that _have_ made the front page.

But they've gotten at most 3 upvotes, as of this writing. Heck, I have single
comments that get more upvotes than all of my submissions _combined_.

I don't want to think about having the success or failure of a product riding
on HN's ability to find my submission and upvote it.

If you want to personally do something about this, next time you read through
the front page and still want to procrastinate, look at the New feed, and
upvote some stories that _don't_ already have a big group of people looking at
them!

------
mkr-hn
I passed it along to 0-7000 people, depending on how things play out in the
noise of G+ and Twitter. It's not something I have a use for, but it looks
interesting.

~~~
chaddeshon
Thank you.

------
netvarun
As a former PhantomJS user, I certainly would have used you guys. I went
through a lot of shit trying to set it up (this is phantomjs v1.3 i am talking
about - mainly xvfb - which kept sending shitty screenshots). I am pretty sure
you have a good market out there.

My suggestions: 1\. Change your name - since you are doing a hosted phantomjs
browser as a service, try to have either the word phantom or browser in your
name. 2\. Change your design - Go with bootstrap-based template for SaaS apps.
3\. Too much content on your page. Cut them down. 4\. Spin off couple of
specialized tasks as separate services - screenshot capture and web scraping.
5\. Quite a bunch of phantomjs and casper.js user groups/mailing lists.
Actively participate in them.

Good luck!

------
djunod
Application Error An error occurred in the application and your page could not
be served. Please try again in a few moments.

If you are the application owner, check your logs for details.

~~~
chaddeshon
Oh no! Heading home to fix it now.

~~~
chaddeshon
I did nothing, but it seems to be working fine. It must have buckled under the
traffic. I threw another dyno at it in case it happens again.

When the post started to get traction I booted more phantomJS instance, but I
didn't think the simple landing page would have any trouble.

Anyone still having trouble?

~~~
ilaksh
Yes same application error.

------
Sgoettschkes
I looked up your page (I'm a web developer, interested in testing, using
zombiejs right now), and there are two things. First: Way to much text.
Second: I don't care what you use as an underlying software stack. Tell me
that you parse the whole page, executing js and everything, and get the result
back to me. Thats your message. And then add some text somewhere to tell me
that I can write phantom.js tests which are executed against the page.

What I really don't know is why I need a phantomjs web worker. I mean if I am
that deep into testing, I have a CI which does this for me. No need to add
another external service to the stack. I'm also worried that 1000 requests for
$29 are a little much? I don't know about phantomjs, but zombiejs was
installed in way under a minute (using npm). So while you are saving me a few
minutes for installing phantom.js (doesn't look like rocket science to me),
you are taking my time for integrating your API and you are charging me?

I think by refining your messages and thinking about what exactly it is you
are selling you might have a decent service there.

------
NateDad
It's odd that your site isn't coming up in a google search for brombone.
That's probably hurting you a ton. You might look into that. I've had even
tiny pages come up pretty quick in google searches.

Good luck to you, man. I am really glad to see a real world example of what
startup life is actually like instead of those one in a million instant
takeoff sites that make real people feel so discouraged.

------
revorad
Congrats on the start. Post it here again on Monday 9-10 am eastern time.

~~~
chaddeshon
Like this: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5362235> :)

Posting at the right time is not a guarantee you'll be seen, and you're post
doesn't stay on the new page very long during peek times.

Don't worry though. I'll be back next week sometime between 9-10am Eastern
with a new blog post.

~~~
revorad
There are no guarantees. But you have to keep trying until you're on the top
of the homepage. Don't get too complacent with your 9 users :-)

------
jnardiello
I don't mean to sound like a scrooge but... it's really expensive! I'm super
interested in this service, but before paying 29/month (that's more than what
i pay for a VOS server) i want to be sure that the service 1) Is working
properly according to my needs 2) It's efficient 3) will be helpful. A.K.A.
Add a free plan to try it!

~~~
chaddeshon
I'm not sure if you singed up or not. But right now all plans are free during
the beta. When the beta period ends, I'll make sure there is still a free way
to try the service.

------
bredren
One challenge I've noticed is how quickly you can become accustomed to better
results. Right now, a 100 sign up day would blow you away. But when that
peters out, even to a point elevated from your current state, it isn't as
satisfying.

Metrics continue to mess with you, long past the earliest stages.

------
stackthatcode
Impressive. Congrats on shipping and launching.

Constructive criticism: it looks like something I could _actually_ use i.e.
automation, server-side rendering, useful for SEO. But, I left the landing
page and couldn't tell you _exactly_ what the product will do for me. I have a
vague idea that it might be useful for SEO or automation. I'm too busy to read
the long copy. I'm not too busy to write this post, though :-)

I'd like to see different headlines (or landing pages) that speak to my pain
points. "Having trouble getting your Knockout.JS website ranked?" "Frustrated
by trying to automate testing of your JavaScript-heavy site?" etc.

Again, kudos. Something tells me this service is going to do fine... patience,
right? ;-)

------
alexvr
Great post. Those super-early adopters are awesome. I consider myself lucky
that, as a high school senior and one-man team who utilizes free software and
services like AWS EC2, I don't feel compelled to amass a userbase to put
dinner on the table. It's really a great experience to have nothing more than
$10 (for the domain name) and a bunch of (well-spent) hours invested in a web
service. And the best part is: I built it for myself and anyone else who finds
it valuable. I built it because I wanted a web-based alternative to iTunes on
iOS. It's pure freedom - the idea that almost anyone can build something they
want to use and put it online makes me appreciate the Web all the more.

------
nazka
To add more points of view. For me, your design is not that good. It is a mix
of a website for a web framework and something with a menu plus the sign in in
the same page. Copy the same design than the other service providers do. The
design is not perfect. The texts are not well placed.

I think 4 different prices is too much. 3 is good or do something like "user,
team, company", and then if we need to have more options we can contact you.

Your website is your biggest investment in Marketing. You should polish it.
You also need to understand what your customers need. Their needs are
certainly different than what you think.

------
darkxanthos
The creator of Bingo Card creator I believe said on here before (or maybe on
his blog) that he had a similar growth. Now it's his day job. So I'd just keep
thinking about it the way you are. Good luck! :)

------
duck
Although just a side project, one of the most important things I've learned
with Hacker Newsletter is to just stick with it. It seems like too often we
(the HN crowd) lose our passion for something a bit too quickly and move on to
our next big idea.

You can see my subscriber growth rate here: <http://imm.io/ZCRJ>

For almost a year I could not move the needle it seemed, but then finally it
happened and from there it has gotten easier. Now I have 15,000 subscribers
and think I can hit 25k to 30k by the end of the year.

------
donniefitz2
I'm in a similar position, except I'm not trying to get new users. In fact,
I'm trying to maintain a very small set of users so I can test ideas on them
before I try to go bigger.

Getting users is great, but getting traction, meaning users who keep coming
back is a much better goal to aim for. So out of your 9 users, start looking
at the percentage, although small, that are regularly using your app.

I'm up to 83 users with 0 marketing and I'm trying out new ideas, watching the
analytic data and responding over and over. It's a great spot to be in. Keep
it up.

------
readme
As a practicing software developer who works on web applications daily, I did
not get hooked after reading your site.

If you want to acquire me as a user you should post some instructional
tutorials and videos on how I can use your service and why I would benefit
from it.

New relic is doing a great job of marketing this way, with their IRC channel,
reps contacting you to ask how things are going in a non-pushy way, and
they're also giving out cool t-shirts (obviously an expense, but I think you
could do it for someone who buys a $99 account?)

------
mbesto
Exciting dude! I'm in the same position. I've got 57 subscribers (probably 7
from friends, ha!) already on my web app, and it hasn't even launched[1] (psst
- we're launching tomorrow). I was excited to learn that the latter part of
sign-ups included people I had never heard of. One of them being a former
Olympic silver medalist diver who does triathlons that signed up! That's a
pretty cool feeling.

[1] - <http://www.competehub.com>

~~~
gcb0
You need more friends :)

------
cjc1083
You might consider some simplification of your web page... there was a cool
automatic "tutorial" JS app posted here a few days ago... and maybe security
as a selling point. I'd like to throw suspicious pages at it and see what
happens if anything... big market for that and you can charge a lot more than
you are if you make it remotely "cyber" related. Feel free to talk to me/pm if
you want some pointers on the security side of the house.

------
justhw
Congrats and best of luck. You got me laughing real hard on the 4 users part.

Advice: Your site could benefit from some visuals, like a screen shot/ demo.

------
Maven911
Hi, I just signed up, sounds like a neat service, but when I look at the
lowest price plan, starting at 29.99 is pretty steep. Though not comparable,
there's a reason why dropbox starts at 9.99$ a month, and salesforce starts at
5$ a month (per user). Maybe you should look into having a lower price point
but with less features or less requests per month.

------
twanlass
What sort of inbound traffic numbers are you getting? I have to be honest - I
was completely turned off the landing page. Further more, the content
structure reads like a blog to me - I had no idea it was service at first
glance. I'd be happy to give you some action items / critique over Skype or
Hangouts if you're interested.

Drop me a line - @twanlass.

------
kirillzubovsky
Sounds like a cool test app, if you have a lot of time to click through and to
double-check the results. You might want to look at
<https://www.rainforestqa.com> , they do something similar but on a much
larger scale and automated. Perhaps you'd get inspired for the next step.

------
delano
Congrats on the launch.

I run a monitoring service that's built on top of PhantomJS. Happy to chat
anytime about the tech or what I've learned about the business.

It would help to have a clear call to action from the homepage. One thing to
keep in mind is that most major hosting companies don't charge for inbound
traffic any more so pulling data is basically free.

------
rtexal
I am glad you launched! If I can just give my 5 cents here, it will definitely
get you more users if you could summarise your test into easily readable point
forms or short paragraphs to explain your product on your main website.
Similarly, if you are sending out to your mailing list, you will want to keep
it concise!

------
hemantv
Yep its great. I am on similar boat for <http://hirehub.me/> , trying to gain
traction and get some feedback. Which is so important to improve the product.

Congratulation you made it to first page of HN which would be enough to gain
traction to get useful feedback on your product.

------
prathibhanu
You are still lucky that your article is up here and i am sure you have
thousands of sign-ups by now. I tried with my multiplx.com - an alternative
for Google Reader and I am not able to get the traffic i need neither my post
came to limelight in HN. So, it all depends... not sure when and what picks
up..

------
paf31
I'm in a similar situation and it's encouraging to read that this seems to be
commonplace. I'm just about on the cusp of having one satisfied customer
willing to participate in the develop-deliver-discuss cycle, which makes me
very excited, but I'm not sure where to go from there.

~~~
chaddeshon
From what I can tell, after you get one satisfied customer, you need to figure
out how to get a second satisfied customer, and then a third. You hope that
eventually one of you attempts to get one customer actually gets you 100.

------
3825
This is probably not very important but What is the expected workflow when
someone visiting your site at <http://www.brombone.com/> clicks sign up and
clicks cancel in the following screen? I just get an error.

~~~
chaddeshon
Obviously I didn't test that. Why would someone cancel?

It supposed to take you back to the home page.

~~~
3825
Like I mentioned earlier, it probably does not need to be high on your agenda.
However, to answer your question why would someone cancel... because the
button is there and we users are stupid.

Open up a private browsing instance and go through the workflow. You'll
probably end up here[1]. Did you change something in the last hour? I thought
I was getting a message from dailycred not from you when I checked before I
went for my walk.

Seems like you're logging these errors somewhere. Sorry if I am muddying the
error tables for you.

[1]
[http://www.brombone.com/account?error=access_denied&erro...](http://www.brombone.com/account?error=access_denied&error_description=The%2Buser%2Bcancelled%2Bsign-
in)

~~~
chaddeshon
It isn't stupid to click the cancel button.

That cancel button is actually what cause a few brief periods of
unavailability a couple hours ago. When a user clicked the cancel button it
was taking them to the account page even though they didn't have an account,
and that was crashing the server.

I have fixed the crash, but I still need to add the proper redirects after
cancel is click. Thanks for reporting this. It made tracking down the problem
easier.

~~~
3825
Actually, in hindsight it was my action that crashed your server unless
someone else clicked cancel as well. Sorry about that. I'm glad you were able
to track and patch it quickly.

Maybe HN is a bug reporting tool as well. :)

~~~
chaddeshon
It happened more than once.

------
xur17
I'm getting an application error. :(

~~~
dps
It's back up now.

Useful service, I would use it assuming availability is good (I have
jerryrigged something similar myself in the past and it was a real pain in the
ass to get working smoothly). Suggested pricing seems way off though (I know
it's free right now) - how did you figure out what was reasonable?

~~~
chaddeshon
Pricing is tough. Part of setting a price is getting feedback from potential
customers. Can I ask why it seems way off to you?

~~~
pseut
I'm not really a potential customer, but I'll jump in: $199 and $499 _per
month_ shocked me, and the range $29 to $499 completely confused me about your
target customer. You should have an option marked "FREE" and in the same text
as the paid options, and not just "free beta" but "free trial".

It seems like your target customer is someone who's not going to set up
PhantomJS on their own, right? For 500 dollars I'll figure out how to set it
up.

Another comment: the intro two paragraphs are probably more technical than
they should be. The "what for" should be above the "headless browser" section;
you might even put all of that stuff on a second "technical details" page to
not scare people away. You're not selling "headless browsing" (anyone knows
that they want that can probably set it up), you're selling "testing" and
"screenshots" (and maybe other services too).

~~~
pseut
Late addition: saying "I'm not really a potential customer" isn't quite right.
I'm putting together a hobby-project website with a lot of SVG images and have
been thinking of looking into PhantomJS to generate pngs or gifs for browsers
where svg isn't supported (preemptively in case this sounds stupid: that's way
down the road, so I don't know if what I'm describing makes sense). I read
your post and thought that I would be completely happy to spend a dollar or
two a month (expected non-svg traffic is basically zero, but I'd like to
support twitter cards) to support your project and generate the images on the
fly using your service as a CGI, but 1) the pricing convinced me that the
answer is "no" and 2) I'm no closer to knowing if what I want makes sense.

A few tutorials on how to do various tasks with your service would help a lot
too (beyond the one-liners).

------
derwiki
I started <http://www.cameralends.com> about two months ago, and have gone
from a handful of visitors/day to about a hundred/day, and regular signups to
boot. Hang in there, the fun is just starting :)

------
sonier
After 16 hours, you must have gotten a lot of users? Will you share the total
user count now?

~~~
chaddeshon
60.

Probably not as many as most people suspected, but it is a niche service that
not everyone needs.

------
spo81rty
I would recommend for BromBone to simply say first thing on your site that you
provide a service to get screenshots of a web page. Could eliminate most of
the rest of detailed explanation about headless browsers. Never even heard
that term.

------
tianshuo
I didn't understand the product on the first scroll. You should put the
product in easier words. What is the use case? Why should I use it? A video
demo/lots of screenshots would fit better. And get a template from
wrapbootstrap.com

------
arash_milani
I really suggest you to change your pricing names. "Hans Plan ... Ichabod
Plan"?! Change them into something much more meaningful to your users: the
name of your customer segments. like "freelancer" then "design studio" and so
on...

------
daniel_sim
I've just finished reading The Lean Startup. There is so much in there that is
relevant to this if you haven't already read it I highly recommend you check
it out. Especially the sections on engines of growth and metrics.

------
Joyfield
Pfff. 13 users are much more than my pet project (<http://www.DNSDigger.com>)
has. It is a couple of years old but i recently started with paid accounts and
API-access.

~~~
xur17
That's actually a pretty cool service! I was looking for a reverse dns lookup
site like that a while back.

A few thoughts:

-You should make the explanation of what your site offers a little bit more clear. It took me a few minutes to figure it out.

-What is the Google Analytics/Adsense lookup Database part? I can lookup sites that use a specific google analytics or adsense id?

~~~
Joyfield
Yes. If you put in a Google Analytics code the site will show you what other
site share the OwnerID-part. Same with adsense (and soon AddThis). I am not a
designer and the first thing i would do if i had some money over would be to
hire a designer to make my site look more pro.

------
munimkazia
I think a trial or atleast a demo will go a long way for brombone. Also, it
doesn't look like you are selling something from the first look at the
website. It looks like an article or a blog post to be honest.

------
tyang
Just Make Lemonade. If you start with a low base (9 sign ups), then just focus
on percentage increases in user growth rather than actual users. This can make
your growth charts look great for several months.

------
bert2002
Is your service available in country's that restrict access to certain
websites? It could help them to access them. May be get some attention from
vpn provider to increase visibility for that kind of matter.

------
pawelkomarnicki
My first impression when I opened your site was "Oh, another open source
project!" — I think this was not the impression you wanted me to have :) Apart
from that, very interesting service, well done :)

------
pnathan
Heya,

Do you plan to license this for self-hosting? If you do, I think you might be
surprised at the enterprise buyin on this sort of thing. I can _immediately_
think of $confidential projects that could use this.

~~~
chaddeshon
If someone were interesting in self-hosting, I would talk to them.

~~~
pnathan
OK. Can you send me an email (In HN profile)?

------
Mahn
Working on a web product for +1 year here and we are still a few months away
for release. Personally I think I'll cry when I see the first sign up that
_isn't_ a test account. If I ever see it.

~~~
chaddeshon
If you're like me, you'll probably spend ten minutes Googling trying to see if
the account is from a bot or a spammer of some sort before you convince
yourself that it is real.

------
Comkid
I was just wondering if you were planning to integrate CasperJS too, which is
an awesome addition onto PhantomJS. If not, it'd be interesting to have access
to an online PhantomJS REPL.

~~~
chaddeshon
I've been seriously considering it. However, I've never used CasperJS myself,
so I'll have to get a better handle on what it is offer first.

------
jamesjguthrie
Same thing happened to me, posted twice to HN with no up votes then I got my
first sign up and I was super excited. From that point there really should be
no turning back.

------
dendory
Having great ideas and failing to get any traction is something me and I would
be many people are familiar with. Of course we mostly hear about the
successes.

------
makyol
You should definitely do something with your landing page. Other than that
seems like an interesting service, hope you'll do well with it.

------
kbar13
> Beta accounts are absolutly free and have the same privileges as the Baltus
> Plan.

either typo or ingeniously relevant reference to beverage

------
viach
Wish you the best of luck. Btw, is it possible to submit html + JavaScripts to
your service, not only the site URL?

~~~
chaddeshon
That isn't possible yet, but it is something I want to support.

------
jnettome
I'm also getting the 500 error page. Sorry, but this is a big problem.
Stability counts, uptime counts.

But I really want to try it!

------
donebizkit
It's all about who you sleep with. Good luck to you and remember that we all
share this experience.

------
moccajoghurt
I think it's a useful program. Keeping it in mind.

------
cipher0
Good luck man :)

------
paolord
Good luck dude!

