

Ask HN: How would you promote this weekend project? - IgorPartola

I have just launched a dead-simple site/server monitoring service, and now am trying to grow the user base. I realize this is a very competitive environment, but I run with very little overhead since it's a weekend project only. I already have two dozen free users, though most are inactive. What would you do to get new users to sign up? Does it make sense to run AdWords campaigns for this type of service, or is the ad space so saturated that I won't get any quality clicks anyways? What other venues are available?<p>URL: https://www.pingbrigade.com/signup<p>Thanks!
======
by
Try to find places where there are people who would benefit from your product.

Post free links to your site on non-spammy relevant places. If you get
creative this should produce a nice set of inward links and a bit of traffic.

Look at your competition. They probably have relevant expertise. See where
they advertise and are listed.

~~~
IgorPartola
Thanks. So going the non-ad route would work better then. I have a few
communities to target in mind. Specifically, I think Low End Box and WHT would
might work well. I am just worried that giving away free premium accounts
would devalue the product.

~~~
by
Maybe I did not phrase that well. What I was thinking was not to give your
premium accounts away free, I agree that would devalue your product, but that
you could get free advertising by posting details of your product in places
where the community will be interested. Places where there is a high
concentration of people who would benefit from your product. I do not have
particular sites to suggest, you will need to do some extensive Googling. My
experience was getting some nice links to something I did by applying some
effort to find people who were particularly interested in the subject. Do not
think I am an expert, I was just throwing in some small ideas.

~~~
IgorPartola
Ah, that makes sense. Thanks.

------
pharno
well, posting it on hackernews is a good Idea, you've got a new user :).
Besides that, I have no plan of promoting

edit: 2 Ideas: you should be able to name targets, and give them a max value.
So if ping time exceeds 0.5 seconds, you get notified.

~~~
IgorPartola
Thanks :). Right now the ping timeout is a pretty high 2 seconds and is not
user-configurable, but I'll add to my TODO list to make sure that it is.

