

Ask HN: How to get users/traffic who are actually interested in this webapp? - oms2010

Hi HN,<p>I've launched a web application earlier this week called www.organizemysearch.com<p>The idea is to let users organize things like used car searches, apartment rental searches, or other types of searches they do online.<p>For example, if someone is looking for a used car, they will go to several different sites and look at various car ads. This website allows them to save all the ads found on different websites (automatically loading all the data). This way the user can more easily see all the ads he is considering and have everything in one place to sort and compare all his/her options.<p>The problem is I can't figure out what keywords I should use that would actually represent what the application does accurately, which is "a tool for organizing your online searches" (eg. organize your used car searches, organize your apartment rental searches, organize your search for 'blueberry muffins',etc)<p>I would like to optimize the site so people who are actually looking for such a tool will find it easier in search engines, but I'm not sure what approach I should take. I don't even know what category this web application falls into?<p>Most searches about 'organize' on google are things about physically organizing your garage, home, garden or apartment. And anything with 'search' in it gives very generic or non related results in google searches.<p>Example of some keywords I've tried:<p>organize search [very generic, most google results are articles about seo and search engines]
organize car search [1 hit on google]
organize appartment rental search [no results]
organize shopping items [tons of articles about how to organize your groceries]<p>Any ideas on how I can better market this web application, or optimize SEO for this website so I can attract people who are actually looking for such a tool?
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rlpb
Your problem is that people don't know that they would find your product
useful until they have it. Who is actually going to be looking for your tool?

Drew Houston has talked about this in respect to Dropbox
(<http://www.justin.tv/startuplessonslearned/b/262672510>) - who knew they
needed Dropbox until they found out about it? USB sticks and email work just
fine, right?

I have exactly the same issue with Synctus - VPNs and Terminal Services work
just fine, right?

What you need to do is find a channel. People who are already in the business
for whom your product is a value-add.

For example: for Synctus, I am reselling through IT professionals - the people
who might recommend and install VPNs and Terminal Services for their
customers.

In your case, you might see if you can approach specialist car search and real
estate search sites - if you can work out something that you can give them
which will add value to their service too.

------
apowell
Perhaps you could work with some of the classified sites themselves (start
with smaller ones) to add an "Organize My Search" widget. Pitch it as a way
for them to increase engagement and drive more return visits.

Also, many car enthusiast forums have "Cars for Sale" sections, and they're
utter disasters. It would be valuable to be able to save those listings easily
(bookmarklet?). A little word-of-mouth campaign on a forum can go a long way,
and you can kick it off with a forum sponsorship with commercial posting
rights.

(Side Note: The question in your header is implied -- don't state it, just
answer it.)

~~~
oms2010
Yeah, I was thinking about the car forums approach actually, but the widget
idea is a good too. Thanks for the feedback.

------
JarekS
Excuse my buzz word but I think the only way you can make it spread is to
embed a virus. One of the things you can do is to enable user to share his
search with friends/family over facebook, twitter etc. They could help him
adding additional elements to the search (i.e. if they find something on the
web that user is looking for they can submit a link), or give other advice.

SEO will not work - as it didn't work for Dropbox. Nobody is waking up one day
and start searching for such a tool that you provide.

~~~
oms2010
"Excuse my buzz word but I think the only way you can make it spread is to
embed a virus".

I guess I can't take that as a compliment, but will acknowledge much room for
improvement of the website :)

As for SEO, I'm not just looking to optimize it for SEO as the main method of
'putting it out there', but rather looking to figure out ways to market it and
place it in it's niche (which I'm still not sure of).

------
adam-_-
By the way, the homepage is bit of a mess on Safari + Mac (I know you're not
asking for that kind of feedback but yeh...).

Side-scrolling main frame thing is just awkward. Some of the images overlap as
well.

I don't think this is something that people will know they need, or at least,
not know what to call. So approaching potential customers through forums,
reviews on relevant blogs, widgets/partnerships sounds like a reasonable route
to take.

~~~
oms2010
Thanks for pointing that out. I have rushed a bit through the css part in
order to get it out there, otherwise bugs and ideas keep piling up and you
never release (even small apps like this).

I have planned to switch to Blueprint css framework to simplify the design
part (design is not my strong point).

------
imp
I'm not sure who your target audience is. I've searched for apartments, a car,
and a house. Every time I used a spreadsheet to keep track of those things and
it worked great. From my quick look at your site, that's all you really seem
to be offering. I'm not sure what extra value you're adding.

~~~
oms2010
I hear you, and thanks for the feedback.

The idea of this webapp however is to do things more than that. You could say
some people prefer using even bookmarks or in my case sometimes I used to use
notepad for keeping track of car ads for example.

But the websites has some advantages.

1) It parses out data for you automatically [unlike excel or notepad], like
car mileage, color, price, etc (or in the case of other types of searches -
parses out relevant information like monthly rent, number of bedrooms,etc)
(which allows the user to really sort and compare all the options)

2) With future enhancements it will automatically detect ads which have
expired from everything you saved (not easily done with bookmarks)

3) Also it can be accessed anywhere, being a web application

4) But most importantly it saves one time to look through everything, eg. all
options.

For people who really take their time to make decisions when buying certain
items like a used car, an apartment rental, or something else, it would be
useful to be able to really compare everything you found for things like best
price or lowest mileage across all ads you found from different websites.

Try doing that in notepad or with bookmarks and it quickly sucks up your time
(which was one of my main personal motivations for creating it).

~~~
imp
Cool, sounds like you have a lot of features there. I didn't know about the
parsing part. What I would love is if you would poll those sites daily and
then alert me whenever a car of a certain model is listed for a specific
mileage and price. That would be amazing. It sounds like you have the parsing
part already done.

~~~
oms2010
Yeah. The parsing works for websites that are 'monitored' by
organizemysearch.com (and more will be added as the website grows). So if you
paste in a car ad url from cars.com it will parse the basic info for you (eg.
mileage, price, make, model, etc).

The advantage here is the user can add their own fields which they think are
relevant to a car search. So someone could add something like "my comfort
level in the backseat" and anytime they add another car ad they could specify
something like 'good','average','bad' which will be associated with that car
ad so in the end they can sort things very easily and weigh their options
better.

As for your alert idea, I can see that being an add-on product perhaps.
However I know that most of the major new/used car websites provide alerting
capabilities based on certain criteria, so that functionality may already
exist.

------
famfam
I think you're a feature. A perhaps sorely missed feature, but still a
feature. I agree trying to drive traffic is hopeless. You need to find
partners that want to embed your functionality. You shouldn't be a
destination, you should be a service for destinations.

------
oms2010
I forgot to add a clickable link <http://www.organizemysearch.com>

feel free to use user/pass:hn/hn to test it out if you want!

