

Ask HN: I have some loyal users. How do I get more of them? - stollercyrus

I made a site called http://cyrolaughs.com/videos/267601721-1XF7b_MNEIAg the weekend before Thanksgiving. It's like stumbleupon for videos.<p>I posted it here on Hacker News and got some really good feedback. I've done some very basic moderation and added a few features that users have suggested.<p>I have a problem that I'd love to get some advice on.<p>Right now, I have ~30-40 unique visitors/day after my initial HN spike. They're accounting for ~200-700 pageviews/day (yesterday 600 pageviews on average 15 pageviews per visit and are spending on average ~19 minutes on the site). I'm getting some people to stay on the site up to a couple of hours.<p>It seems like the site is reasonably "sticky" but I don't know how to generate more traffic. I've been posting the "top videos" of the day on my friends' walls  on Facebook and I have been tweeting a video per day, but that will only get me so far.<p>I'd definitely be curious about ideas on how to move this project forward.<p>Does anyone know of old threads here on HN about this? Or other blogs that talk about this sort of issue? I really appreciate your advice.
======
xer0
Are your users referring you to their friends? Are they not? Do you know the
answer to that?

Can you think of a way to encourage your users to send your site links to
their friends? I see the share buttons over on the left, but I think the
button owners' networks benefit more than you do.

I watched a few videos and clicked the three buttons at the bottom. At this
point I haven't signed up, and it looks like I can do everything possible
without signing up, which is really cool but why should I sign up?

Now I've signed up ... and I don't see anything different. In fact, my video
history that you were keeping track of before I signed up (via a cookie I
assume) did not carry over into my account, and everything is set to zero. A
minor complaint, but a nice touch if you pull it off.

In your orange "+" chiclet you list a lot of ways to share. Not everyone has a
facebook or gmail account, but everyone has email, so maybe a mailto: link
should be at the top of that popup?

I see that email is buried down in the list of share methods, arranged
alphabetically. Maybe bring that link up to the top of the initial popup, or
even out into your list of four main chiclets. Or do some AB testing on that
and similar design choices.

I tested you reset password link, and got the reset email quickly, so points
for that IMO.

But, the fundamental question is why should I use your site? It's an
attractive, minimal site, but I don't see anything that it does (and it only
does one thing) that isn't done at least as good by more well known sites like
reddit, stumbleupon or even youtube itself. I really don't mean to be mean
here, but I doubt if I'll come back after this. Have you thought of what you
can do to make your site unique enough that people will come to your video
sharing site instead of someone else's?

Maybe you can let people share a public list of select videos, so their
friends can follow them. Let people write reviews and comments. Let people
_engage_ in some way.

Categories or tags on videos, and a way to search those, I really don't want
to sit there and click skip skip skip until i see a video I like. Maybe I
missed that?

EDIT: I forgot to add, I don't know how to pronounce Cyro. I don't think it's
a common English word or name. Speaking for myself, I don't like to say words
to my friends if I don't know how to pronounce them, fearing embarrassment. If
this is true for other people, you might want to say how to pronounce Cyro,
maybe on your About page. Try to reduce every bit of friction in front of your
users sharing your site.

~~~
stollercyrus
Thanks for the helpful feedback. I really appreciate it.

I think you're right that I need to think about things that you would be able
to do uniquely on this site that you can't do other places. This was
originally a side project so that I could have something fun to do with family
after Thanksgiving dinner. It's already done way more than I expected.

I agree with you that I need to come up with something to make it different,
if I'm going to keep working on this. The frustrations that I've had with
reddit/stumbleupon/youtube is that there are a lot of distractions. So I just
tried to make things as minimalist as possible. Stumbling for videos on
StumbleUpon hasn't always worked well for me either - I often get thrown back
into a "normal" website after more than a few stumbles and the ratio of videos
that I actually like is kinda low. I like your idea of sharing lists of
videos. I'm all ears to other ideas.

I understand the rationale for why you wouldn't come back. Honestly, I was
kinda surprised to see so many people return. I'd say 20 unique people (those
20 people are different each day) are coming back to the site on any given
day. I've emailed them to ask what they like and what'd they'd like to see me
make. The main critique I got was the one about carrying over the session data
after you create an account. I'll work on doing that. I've just been storing
that in the session, which gets reset after you sign up. Good advice.

I like your idea about adding reviews/comments. It also gives people a reason
to sign up.

I'll be sure to add a pronunciation guide in the about page.

These are all great suggestions about how to keep people on my site. I'm also
curious about how to get more people to visit in the first place.

------
anthony_franco
What's your current viral coefficient?

[http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/lessons-learnt-viral-
marketi...](http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/lessons-learnt-viral-marketing/)

~~~
stollercyrus
Hard to say. I've only really sent out 14 invites on their facebook walls to
close friends and posted it here on Hacker News and posted a couple of videos
on Reddit.

------
corkill
Try $100 of reddit ads.

~~~
shiftpgdn
Have you actually had any luck with that? I did $100 of reddit ads a few times
with a super high CPC and a very, very low click through rate.

