

We did a Show HN and it landed on the front page of Hacker News - nesbot
http://blog.pitchit.io/2014/3/13/we-did-a-show-hn-and-it-landed-on-front-page

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gdulli
I feel like half of what I see here is advertisements thinly disguised as blog
posts. Now this company needs to promote itself a second time by calling
attention to the first time it promoted itself?

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chavesn
"Show HN" is already kind of meta, so this definitely strikes me as meta-meta.
I think the main problem here is the post title: _" We did a SHOW HN and it
landed on the front page of Hacker News"_. Good for you. Really. That's an
accomplishment, or exciting to say the least. But by definition there are
hundreds of front-page links a day -- we don't need a briefing on all of them.
What would be next, "We did a post about our front-page experience that landed
on the front page."?

The best part of this article was seeing what they did wrong, how they
listened to the feedback and made changes.

Maybe a bit wordy, but I would have gone with something like, "What we learned
we were doing wrong when our Show HN landed on the front page."

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nesbot
Yes, your title suggestion would have been more appropriate. It is all about
how we reacted to the honest feedback.

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waylandsmithers
| Less than 1% of those visitors actually tried our presentation demo (only
about 5 did) which was surprising (and disappointing).

I think it's been documented that engagement from reddit/facebook/etc is very
low because you're often using a shotgun approach instead of targeting people
who would actually become customers. On the other hand, this product would
really be in the wheel house of a site frequented by tech entrepreneurs. It's
cool to see that you were able to get feedback and act on it.

If I could throw my two cents in, I, and I assume anyone else visiting your
site while at work, will always be hesitant to click a play button.

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nesbot
Very true. Just a note that the play button is actually just for the video.
The larger green button below it is for the instant demo.

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thu
I have posted a blog post[0] explaining I was building a redundant storage
service for developers. It was on the front page for about 4 hours. I think
the best place it got was about 18th. I didn't put analytics and wasn't very
careful about my logs. Actually the logs report the same IP all the time: the
HTTP proxy and no referrer URL :)

I got very few people who sign up (which amount to choose a login and a
password, no email required), I think it was around 10. Only one person tried
really the service (i.e. uploaded an SSH public key and uploaded a few files).

The interesting thing is that even when the post had slipped from the front
page, it was still generating a bit of traffic, possibly doubling the number
of person registering.

The best thing I got from that post though was some feedback on HN itself but
also a couple of persons sent me an encouraging emails. For that reason alone,
even if you're not ready (you never are), post publicly your work as soon as
possible.

[0]: [http://hypered.io/blog/2014-02-17-building-
reesd/](http://hypered.io/blog/2014-02-17-building-reesd/)

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nesbot
As another commenter mentioned "it's been documented that engagement from
reddit/facebook/etc is very low". It is all about the unfiltered feedback and
what you do with it.

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simias
I think it's very easy to miss that there's a video in your homepage. The
first thing I saw was the green "Try PitchIt now", I had to go back to search
for the video.

I think it's because it's the same colour and roughly the same size as the
surrounding text so it looks like some kind of a logo. Maybe you should
display the video player to make it more obvious?

See for instance, straight from the frontpage at the moment:
[https://www.useslate.com/](https://www.useslate.com/)

You can't miss the video that way, and I know what will happen when I click
the "play" button (I won't be taken to an other page for instance). In your
case the video puts itself on top of the rest of the page, meaning I can't
listen to it while I idly browse the rest of the content.

As for the actual "hands on" demo the first thing I see is a prompt for me to
input an email address. I immediately closed the tab. You want 0 friction here
IMHO, use fake addresses to give the potential user a taste of the
application. Then maybe at the end prompt for more info.

~~~
nesbot
Yes, we didn't have the room for that type of change before with the extra
text heading. We'll have to try that out as well... it would be more obvious
for sure.

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eiji
Since you asked:

The name is not working for me at all. I read it as an abbreviation of
Pitchlet. The l and I are too close together for me. Only when I saw the link
with a lower case i the lights went on. But that is not the only reason. And I
can see why I might be the only person thinking of applets here.

A pitch is a "Sales presentation". There is only one thing worse than a
presentation, and that is a "Sales presentation". As soon as I see "Pitch", my
entire being prepares itself for a person bothering me. I think of car sales
people and evereyone else who approaches me when I enter a store.
Unfortunately there is only negativity associated with all that. So for me
"Pitch" is a negativ word. Hey, that could just be me. It has a lot to do with
cultural background. Maybe I would call it KeyPoints.

~~~
nesbot
Interesting feedback. I think we are way to close to even see that. A font
with the bars on the top and bottom of the I would be a better fit.

Sales (and by extension pitches) is a necessary reality for all companies.
Selling is hard. I am not good as sales and we built it to help us sell which
is always easier and more effective with visuals.

There are a lot of other uses for PitchIt besides sales but so far the name
has clicked with us. Besides I would have to remove my tatoo if the name
changed!

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nesbot
Delay? We were originally using youtube to play the video but now we have
switched to Wistia. It is much better and we can link directly to the instant
demo at the end rather than showing other random videos.

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chavesn
> _" Since we made those changes, we have noticed the ratio of people who try
> our presentation demo now is up from an embarrassingly low 1% to a much
> healthier 28%."_

I think you've made positive changes, but don't forget that your organic
audience is much different than the burst traffic from a link aggregator like
Hacker News.

Not that your conclusions are _necessarily_ wrong, but it's easy to make false
correlations when more than one variable changes.

~~~
nesbot
We have made a lot of changes so drawing conclusions is difficult. Removing
the name/email on the instant demo instantly increased activity there. Moving
forward we also introduced a 30 day free trial which will now be our target
metric. We are iterating a lot of things and hopefully can limit are changes
and get more targeted data.

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defcon84
Maybe it has something to do with the 15 second delay between the click on the
play button and the actual start of the video.. unacceptable these days imho.
Nice read thou :)

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sharemywin
Why would I just use a webinar company?
[http://banckle.com/pricing/meeting.html](http://banckle.com/pricing/meeting.html)

They have a $14/mo plan?

~~~
nesbot
We have used other webinar type sw in the past. For every user of webinar sw
you can quickly find a story when a meeting was started late or users
(connections) dropped out. Internally (read internal network) it works great
but as soon as you have others included or someone who doesn't have the plugin
installed issues arise.

PitchIt started out as an internal app to help us show our slides remotely
while trying to sell a different app. After consecutive calls where clients
only asked about what presentation software we were using and if it was for
sale, PitchIt was born.

Our focus is on simplicity and the ability to respond to adhoc meetings and
opportunities to "Pitch" your products. Your attendees must only click a link
and they are in. No plugins to install and it doesn't require high bandwidth.

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pmcpinto
The landing page looks so much better now, still the 3 images are a bit heavy
and maybe distract the user (2 of them are very dark and the other one have a
lot of colors). I would try another images

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nesbot
Yes, you are probably right. We have gone as far as we can ourselves and our
next action would be to bring in a designer to help out. I am only pretending
to know about colours.

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pattle
It's always ironic when a post about getting on the front page of HN, get's
onto the front page of HN

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huhtenberg
Don't forget to follow-up with a post on how "We did a Show HN" post did.

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nesbot
Ha ha. I think the chain will end here. Besides the max title is 80 chars and
the "We did a post about how our post about how our post ..." will fit!

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cjf4
This is all too postmodern.

