

14K visits, 17K pageviews, 3 sign-ups: My Hacker News Frontpage Post-mortem - dclaysmith
http://www.thetaboard.com/blog/hacker-news-frontpage-post-mortem?r=382

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bdunn
I haven't written a post-mortem, but last week I had a post on how
<http://planscope.io> (formerly Projector) made me $119.50 in a month. It got
_crazy_ traffic - about 40k uniques.

I was really surprised how many people went on to explore exactly what
Planscope is. About 20% of people didn't bounce, and ended up checking out the
product tour. I netted about 300 new accounts (which was about a 50% jump in
user accounts!)

I think the winning formula for a good product blog is: Educate your audience
(this is the reason they visited in the first place), have a very clear call-
to-action at the bottom of the post ("Are you a freelancer looking to..."),
and have an easy outlet to view the rest of your marketing site.

~~~
sparknlaunch12
Really like your landing page. However what is your conversion rate is a
visitor comes into your site via another page? How long do they stick around
for? Do they visit any other pages?

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shin_lao
A datapoint that may give an explaination for your low conversion rate:

\- The page does not say what the product does, I don't try demos just for the
sake of trying demos;

\- Nevertheless, I thought I should check out the demo before giving some
feedback... and got an error.

Hope this helps.

~~~
dclaysmith
Thanks for pointing out the error. Was it a javascript error? If you have any
more details about the error please share (here or support@thetaboard.com).

To be honest I'm not focusing on driving sign ups right now because the
project is more a MVProject and not a MVProduct. I actually recommend Trello
to people. I'm working on the collaborative portion of the site and refining
the UX/UI a bit. When I release a v1.0 I'll definitely improve the copy like
you recommend.

Cheers...

~~~
shin_lao
I think your website was simply too busy, got a socket error.

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democracy
Your current niche "PM tools for software industry" has crazy competition
including all big guys - Microsoft, IBM, HP, Oracle, SAP - basically any big
company that comes to mind has something to offer, smaller guys (37 signals,
Atlassian, Assembla, etc). You also get a hundred various project management
apps on Google marketplace (140 products) + around 50 on SourceForge.net +
plenty of desktop/shareware tools.

You should really think about better niche or sub-niche or start as a
plugin/component to existing systems (if you are really into PM).

It is still very good to see some sort of innovation in this seemingly old and
very conservative field.

Good luck with your project, I am sure you will figure it out.

~~~
dclaysmith
Yeah, I went into why I am writing it in a blog post last week
([http://www.thetaboard.com/blog/why-im-making-
thetaboard?r=37...](http://www.thetaboard.com/blog/why-im-making-
thetaboard?r=376)). Most of the apps you mentioned force you in a very
specific workflow. I'd like to build something that is process agnostic. I
hope it's also application agnostic so that you could use it to manage
software dev or a big catering job.

Tons of competition tho, yeah.

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jakeludington
Several comments here suggest your landing page sucks, but the real way to
boost conversions from blog readers would be to move your call to action up
the page. You have the try a demo button at the bottom of your sidebar. Test
making that the first thing in the sidebar. You may want to test having it
both first and last.

You GA blog post (as well as this one) is a classic example of content
marketing, where you lead with something highly useful to the reader so that
they become aware your product even exists.

BTW, I love the personal kanban structure of your todo listing.

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sparknlaunch12
Thanks for sharing. We are really interesting in this sort of stuff.

We are finding that: i) site driven to specific posts very rarely results in
visitors checking out other parts of our blog. ii) twitter drives close to
zero traffic.

This may mean that content has to really excite, menu/side links have to drag
visitor attention, and the right people need to be tweeting/sharing the
message.

We remember reading that some visitors may spend less than 5 seconds on a site
before moving on. StumbleUpon visitors especially just given the nature of the
platform.

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bmelton
I distinctly remember seeing this on HN and, as I generally sign up for things
that even remotely interest me on HN (assuming people may not have perfected
their pitches yet) I was curious as to whether or not I might have been one of
the three.

Then I looked at thetaboard.com, and I knew immediately that I wasn't.

If thetaboard is a project management product, I have no idea how it does
that. Compared to Basecamp, which is what I use now, and basecamp's current
homepage lets me know that it has todos, documents, projects, blah blah blah.
For what its worth, I don't think that basecamp's current landing page is as
effective as past pages have been, but it also has a lot more brand
recognition and trust than a new startup.

Compared to the thetaboard landing page, and there are literally zero details
as to how it makes team collaboration better. Also, its <title> attribute says
"Simple Team Collaboration [...] and Product Managment[sic]", but all I can
see is "Simple Team Collaboration", which to me at least, is a different
product than Product Management.

There's a screenshot that looks like Outlook, and is too small to see. It
appears to work on an iPad, but we don't use iPads, so that's moot. Does it
work on Android? Is that really a Samsung tablet?

Again though, the main thing is that there aren't any details. There's nothing
on the home page that sells me, or even tries to even the least little bit.

In short, it disheartens me when you say that your biggest mistake is not
leveraging Twitter. That's not it at all. Your biggest mistake is in having
worthless copy on the home page. Your signup ratio is 3/14,000, .0002. If that
were even just half of a percent, you'd have a ton more signups.

Having people tweet links to a page that isn't converting means that if every
person in the world saw and clicked your link, you still wouldn't have the
registration or conversion of the average message board.

~~~
debacle
It looks like a Trello-type clone, however the interface seems more simple and
easy to use. I suppose the site is focusing on development more than marketing
right now.

~~~
dclaysmith
Yeah, Trello came out after I began development--so not a clone so much but
definitely a similar product. I won't be able to compete on price (that was
the worst part of seeing Trello launch) so I'm going to focus on a few other
things. Simplicity and ease of use is at the top of the list.

~~~
debacle
I didn't see any pricing information. I'm assuming it wont be free, then?

~~~
dclaysmith
My goal is to create something worth charging for but there will be a
free/personal plan. Whatever you can do now, you'll be able to do for free
when premium plans are introduced.

It would make things a lot easier (for me) if Fog Creek was charging for
Trello. They are hiring developers for software they are giving away while I'm
working on ThetaBoard on nights and weekends and hoping to charge... I think
when I'm done there will be enough differences with Trello and I'll be able to
get some paying clients on board.

~~~
bdunn
There will always be people who won't pay for products. These people
borderline accuse you of stealing if you attempt to charge, or are obsessed
with open-source, self-hosted everything.

Ignore them. There are _plenty_ of people who will gladly pay for things that
benefit them. If you can build something that kills pain or makes money,
you'll get paid.

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vibrunazo
I know it's hard to keep up with peculiarities of every language. But
thetaboard sounds like "tit board" in portuguese. Probably not a big problem,
but probably doesn't help much either.

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ArekDymalski
Nice post. Now I've got a good reason to sign up for Thetaboard.

~~~
klapinat0r
Maybe we should see a post moterm post mortem :)

I'd like to see what amount of new users this blog post has generated.

~~~
ryangilbert
Yeah, that would be nice. :)

It's always encouraging to see how much traffic a post on HN can generate for
a new startup.

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ChrisNorstrom
ThetaBoard is awesome, your landing page just sucks. It's a GREAT todo list.
You just to change the UI a bit so it's not in the way in certain places. And
then from there on start adding social features like dragging and dropping
tasks (don't call them stories, that's just weird) into team mates' panels.
That would be AWESOME.

I've been working on a todo list / team manager like that too Tasck.com, But
thousands of dollars, 3 developers, and 4 years later my stupid fucking todo
list is still incomplete. I learned a lot because I made a lot of mistakes. It
was my very first web project / startup-to-be. I'm not pouring any more time
and money into it until I can find a local developer within driving distance
who's willing to help me out with it.

I think you could use a few of the features from my todo list. I invested so
much time and money into it I don't want to just ignore it. I'd rather see it
merged or tied into someone elses solution or something. I'm insanely busy
this and next and next month but click on my username and send me an email.

~~~
dclaysmith
Thanks Chris. Will definitely email you.

