

I'm creating a website to promote early stage sites and ideas - easymode
http://www.kickoffboost.com/

======
WestCoastJustin
Cool idea. I might suggest creating a static version of your site and hosting
it on s3. This will make it much more stable if you have a high read rate.
Then you can point the new submissions to a app server or something. You don't
have to get fancy with this or anything, a simple 'wget -r
[http://www.kickoffboost.com/'](http://www.kickoffboost.com/') and upload that
to a s3 bucket, etc.

~~~
lukes386
Even easier would be to setup cloudflare in front of the site.

All you have to do is set the cache control headers for your landing page to
something like "max-age=300, public". That way cloudflare's servers will eat
the vast majority of your requests, but no one will see content older than a
few minutes.

We got HN'd the other day and this kept our median response time around 25ms,
even for our slow rails app.

Of course you have to make sure your landing page is publicly cacheable for
this to work (i.e. no user specific data), but that's a small price to pay for
a drastic reduction in the amount of traffic you need to serve.

~~~
joeblau
+1 for Cloudflare. I use them for my site and responsiveness has never been
better. Their service is truly excellent.

~~~
AnSavvides
I second that, Cloudflare is the way to go - extremely reliable.

------
abcd_f
How do you pick what goes on the front page and how long it stays there? Or is
it just FIFO queue with most recent on top? If so, how do you throttle it and
what's the backlog?

One thing that I don't like about BetaList (as a submitter) - there's no
insight into whether your submission is going to be accepted and if it is,
then when it's going to be featured. If you can make your site better _for
submitters_ , you will have an upper hand over BL, which is _the_ competitor
to measure up to at the moment.

~~~
ngoel36
As a co-founder of Bitcast ([http://www.bitcast.io](http://www.bitcast.io) \-
the current top listed "Kickoff"), I can say the traffic from Kickoffboost has
been great!

For some rough data: We actually launched on HN a week ago and had about 120
concurrent visitors for a span of ~6 hours. I assume this link, at it's #1
ranking since ~10pm PST, is getting somewhere around 100-150 concurrents as
well (because of the off timing). As a result, it seems that around 10% of
Kickoffboost's traffic (10-20 concurrents) has been consistently directed to
Bitcast which isn't too shabby. I'll be interested to see what the numbers
look like when traffic isn't being directed from HN.

~~~
abcd_f
How is this even remotely relevant to what I asked?

And haven't you (or someone else from your company) had posted the exact same
comment earlier under a different parent, a comment that is now gone? So
presumably you just "moved" it here to get it higher up on the page. That's
tacky. Don't do that.

~~~
ngoel36
Sorry, that was a reply to a different comment! I was going to speculate on
the selection process, but the OP has done a good job of answering that above.

------
easymode
Hi Everyone,

The response to kickoff boost has been overwhelming and I'm in a bit of a
struggle to keep up, but it's a great thing :)

I'm focusing the showcase algo right now so I can't comment or reply to
everyone individually until later tonight, but I'll post some updates here.

I launched kickoffboost.com rather prematurely not having any idea that I
would get this much traffic. I started coding for kickoff boost the day I read
Paul Graham's post "Do things that do not scale" and basically just built a
front page with DB hook to showcase products.

Right now, I am manually approving submissions. I'm working to implement a
process where after approval, each product will have a "life" (say 300) and
"age/clicks" (starting at 0).

When links are clicked, that product's age will be incremented, and the
product will get front page space as long as age doesn't exceed life. The
life/age bar will be publicly shown for each product. Once age exceeds life
limit, the goes to "archived / older posts" and new products get front page
view ( thinking about limiting front page to show 20 products at a time ).
What do you guys think of this idea? I just want to optimize great new
product's chance of discovery and I thought this would be a fair way to
distribute the traffic love.

Like I said, I took Paul Graham's advice to heart and created something that
really doesn't scale as of this moment. This has been extremely validating
however, and now I am in overdrive to get things done. Please feel free to
help me out by giving me ideas about how I can improve this.

I am really hopeful that I can turn this into something very helpful people
like me who build things and often don't get the recognition they hope or
deserve.

Thank's to everyone who pointed out bugs and optimization tips. I am getting
to them one at a time. Thanks to everyone who submitted their products.
Because of the premature launch, I cannot guarantee that I'll approve and
showcase all the products just yet, but I feature all the submissions (as long
as they are not troll submissions) in a just and fair way. Thank's to everyone
who took the time to write to me and say that they see this as something
useful. Thanks to everyone for checking it out. And thanks to PG for that
essay "Do things that do not scale". I don;t know how, but the idea came to me
within an hour of reading that essay.

Cheers! easymode

------
samelawrence
For anyone who likes this sort of thing, you should also check out
[http://betali.st/](http://betali.st/)

I'm not involved in either btw.

~~~
fbnt
The Museum of Modern Betas (MoMB) has been around for many years now.
[http://momb.socio-kybernetics.net/](http://momb.socio-kybernetics.net/) It's
worth a visit too if you're into this sort of stuff.

------
samweinberg
Even though I'm already subscribed to betali.st and erlibird, I just can't
seem to get enough of sites like this. Bookmarked.

~~~
dmgrow
Are there other similar sites that you could name (either for closed or open
betas)?

~~~
murtza
[http://www.reddit.com/r/sideproject](http://www.reddit.com/r/sideproject)

Note: I moderate r/SideProject. This subreddit has similar content to "Show
HN," but each link spends more time on the front page. It is also a good place
to test submission titles before posting to HN.

~~~
joeblau
I've already posted my side project in another subreddit, is it bad form to
post it in r/SideProject as well?

~~~
murtza
Submit the link to your project in r/SideProject. It is definitely not bad
form, since it is a subreddit for sharing side projects.

------
hdivider
Interesting - bookmarked. Will probably try it out next time I launch a
product.

Stuff like this is why I prefer /newest to the front page. =)

(Edit: Okay, it's on the front page now. Still, /newest is always worth
checking out.)

~~~
easymode
Thanks so much :D I'm trying to gather how many eyeballs each listing can
gather, and I'm trying to optimize getting the traffic to the listings. I'll
post the updates in this thread.

Thanks again :)

~~~
grey-area
Really nice site. To maximise traffic, consider starting a mailing list as
well which mails out new sites once a week.

------
mountaineer
Twitter auth is not functional

[http://imgur.com/70sPKpM](http://imgur.com/70sPKpM)

~~~
juretriglav
Same for me. The author should set up some kind of exception notification, so
as to catch exceptions he or she doesn't see. Easiest to set up is
[https://github.com/smartinez87/exception_notification](https://github.com/smartinez87/exception_notification)

I'm sure it's all very test-driven though :)

Also, a nicer error page would be ... nicer. The default Rails error page
oozes professionalism (I'm guilty of delaying error pages styling for way to
long too - who's ever going to see them, right?)

~~~
mountaineer
I've been guilty of not setting up notifications and pretty error pages too.
Thanks for the link. There are some free Saas tools as well: New Relic,
Logentries, Honeybadger that can make it easier.

------
shearnie
How many eyeballs do you think will come across your site?

I've recently been featured on beta list and thinking about applying on
erlibird although erlibird requires payment.

~~~
easymode
Hi. Thanks for checking it out :) In short, I have no idea how many eyeballs
it's gonna get, but I have google analytics open and I've gotten 300+ visit
since I linked it here already :D

I would love to feature your product though. I'm really glad you took the time
to check it out. It'd be extra helpful to know back from you about how many
eyeballs you got from kickoffboost.

You can submit your product on the site, or I can even put a posting up for
you if you just give me your link :)

Cheers!

~~~
shearnie
Cool. Just signed up.

My signups from betalist have dropped off, so I'll let you know how we go with
you guys if we get approved.

------
jaxbot
Submitted my latest project, [https://sparklr.me/](https://sparklr.me/) Out of
curiosity, is there a criteria for what gets showcased, and if so, what is it?

Also, noticed that all the new things are appended to the bottom of the page.
Makes it look like the site hasn't changed, imo, but maybe that's intentional

------
seldo
It's like Freshmeat, for web apps!

(Edit: apparently Freshmeat is now called Freecode? I guess it's been a while
since I visited...)

------
awaxman11
I'd add authorization. Right now you can access all the edit and show pages as
long as you're signed in

~~~
devinegan
Yep, direct object vulnerable.
[https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Top_10_2013-A4-Insecure_Dire...](https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Top_10_2013-A4-Insecure_Direct_Object_References)

------
cheeaun
Is there an RSS/Atom feed of newly released apps?

~~~
dovyski
Please! A RSS/Adom feed would be great, it will save time visiting the site
everyday to check for new and cool stuff :)

------
nickfrost
Yay! Another resource for early traffic.

StartupLi.st, which I created from my tent while on deployment in Afghanistan
(crazy!), was an early mover in this space, and has some new features in the
pipeline.

Kickoffboost looks pretty cool, and is in the same category as Erlibird,
BetaList, KillerStartups, Wikindu, MoMB, StartupLift, etc. It's great to see
so many sites looking to help boost the early traffic of very early startups.

Also, Mevvy and Ocitrus are newer resources to showcase your early startup.

All of these resources are recommended to use when looking for exposure and
feedback on your early product/ prototype.

Eventually... TechCrunch will be an afterthought when looking for early
traffic/ users. Cheers!:)

------
esschul
Here's an even cooler idea: instead of listing emerging ideas, ,and beta
projects, what about creating a website service for finishing almost done apps
(alpha projects if you like). That would be a more interesting list. People
could upload their started, but not finished projects and outline what's left.
There must be millions of good ideas that has been started, but never finished
due to the fact that the developer didn't find the problem interesting
anymore. Specialize in one thing, like iphone-apps.

~~~
stdbrouw
Why would developers who aren't interested in a problem any more be interested
in documenting the code enough for someone else to take over? Color me
skeptical :-)

------
ghc
Okay, I'll go for it. I'm very curious to see how the traffic will compare to
Hacker News. Yesterday I put a link to my company
([http://algorithmic.ly](http://algorithmic.ly)) in a comment and the response
was overwhelming. I've heard that traffic from different sources can behave
drastically differently in terms of conversions, and HN is notoriously bad
with conversions, so I wonder how it will compare.

~~~
gabrielrotbart
Going to hijack and tell you that you've got all the right buzzwords to get me
interested but I still have no idea what you're offering from the landing
page.

So much so as to dissuade me from signing up (to what?)

~~~
ghc
Thank you! I'm glad someone finally agrees with me. I keep getting overruled
on this point, but I wanted to put an interactive product demo on the landing
page.

Algorithmic.ly is a simple service for certain kinds of algorithms without
needing to manage the infrastructure. So if you're building, say, an
e-commerce site, and you want to add a feature that adds a "people who bought
this item also bought these" presentation box onto each page, you can use
Algorithmic.ly to build a data model, choose the "item similarity" algorithm
to continuously run on your model, and then use Algorithmic.ly's REST API to
push data into the model and query results from the algorithm.

I hope that help explain it, and I hope someday I'll get to build a cool
interactive demo into the landing page :). For now, the conversion statistics
are not helping my case for putting more on the landing page.

~~~
gabrielrotbart
Guess I'm in the minority that likes to know what they sign up for.

Thanks for a solid explanation.

------
yodaiken
FYI, I submitted an app ([http://memn.io/](http://memn.io/)) to this an hour
or so ago and while I don't see it in any publicly available section, I am
getting more than a few hits with kickoffboost.com as the referral. Playing
around with your URLs showed that you can just increment the number to view
any submitted product. You might want to switch to UUIDs or at least add more
security.

------
chmike
I'm surprized there are very few apps presented from a user centric point of
view. "This app is a ..." bad, "Make better ..." good.

This makes it clear and easy to grab how the app will contribute to make my
life better, anf why using and buying it might be worth for me.

Hey Kalzumeus, your marketing lessons are starting to work on me! I was just a
dumb programmer before.

~~~
StuieK
How did we do? "We help people quickly make decisions between competing
options."

~~~
agilebyte
Stock options? Or just options in general? So is it like a friend giving you
advice?

~~~
StuieK
We're trying to build a site that gives people the information they need to
decide between different products/services/options. For example:
[http://www.slant.co/topics/697/~what-is-the-best-cross-
platf...](http://www.slant.co/topics/697/~what-is-the-best-cross-platform-
note-taking-tool)

~~~
agilebyte
So you are writing new reviews for each product in a "viewpoint" kind of way?

I am thinking about Metacritic and how they evaluate someone else's review but
still link to it.

~~~
StuieK
It's actually all crowdsourced. Anyone can add new Viewpoints, improve
existing ones etc. Reviews typically go out of date very rapidly so we're
building something that can be constantly updated/improved. I guess the UI has
a long way to go before it's obvious how it all works.

For example here is a pretty great rundown of CSS pre-processors
([http://www.slant.co/topics/217/viewpoints/1/~best-css-
prepro...](http://www.slant.co/topics/217/viewpoints/1/~best-css-
preprocessor~stylus)). You can click through to see discussions, previous
edits etc. (please ignore the lack of data in the bar charts on the "summary
page", it's a brand new feature)

(also, I did a little stalking, you will like our stack: node, backbone,
coffeescript, stylus. All single-page as well :)

~~~
agilebyte
OK thank you. Actually, the Suggested Edits interface is quite good. Maybe one
could also comment on the edit they have just made ala git.

A good stack to have :). What are you using for server routing and the
`package.js` compilation?

------
chmike
I would love to be able to receive the new one by mail with some presentation
text.

~~~
Void_
I would love to receive an email every week with new startups.

And this would be a terrific way for small startups to get the word out. There
would be a moderator who would decide which startups are good enough. I would
rather have the moderator decide if something's interesting enough than HN
crowd.

~~~
derrick_l_grant
Thats a great Idea. At the moment I trawl angel list but it's not really built
for that type of interaction

------
grafrein
This is really awesome! :) I submitted our iPhone App 7-Minutes Workout
([http://www.tapelicious.com](http://www.tapelicious.com)) I'm looking forward
to see it on your site!

------
pla3rhat3r
Great idea! I love this and give you props for putting together a site that
showcases new ideas. There's so much noise out there that it's nice to have a
site that weeds through that noise. Awesome.

------
mrothe
Your links are broken; middle-clicking on a link does nothing. Also, please
let me decide, if I want to open a link in the same tab (left-click) or in a
new tab (middle-click). (Linux/Firefox)

------
speg
There was another site posted a month or two ago that was similar. Post an
idea and get feedback. I even registered for a credit but now I can't remember
the site, anyone remember?

------
olalonde
Reminds me of [http://www.killerstartups.com](http://www.killerstartups.com)
back in the days (not sure if they are still doing that though).

~~~
Dj_Anthony2013
Yeah! It's similar to killerstartups which is actually nice, isn't it?

~~~
olalonde
Yes. It got me pretty nice traffic back then and it was much easier then
getting featured on TechCrunch. I will submit on Kickoffboost for my next
project!

------
alfg
Suggestion: Maybe make the thumbnails link to their site as well.

------
nccong
Would be useful if you have newsletter for recently added/updates of the day.
Consider feedpress.it to read your RSS, it already has the newsletter feature.

~~~
nccong
Or better, make it push to a Facebook Fanpage daily.

------
edotthekid
This awesome man. How muuch traffic are you getting to the site. Pre-HN post?

And are people paying you to feature them? Or just companies you like

Great job again man. i love it. Def bookmarked

------
phdtree
Looks cool. Just submitted our litte side project phdtree:
[http://phdtree.org/](http://phdtree.org/)

------
yapsody
Great website. Just Signed up and Submitted our new online event ticketing
system Yapsody.com on your website. Hope you approve it. :)

------
coindega
This is awesome! I just submitted Coindega
([https://www.coindega.com](https://www.coindega.com))

------
kushti
I've got "We're sorry, but something went wrong." trying to sign in with
Twitter. Please check

------
elisee
Looks nice! Maybe site screenshots should be clickable to make it more likely
people will open each submission?

------
ronilan
Submitted: [http://www.placeunit.com](http://www.placeunit.com) Kick me :)

------
PhilipA
Maybe it could be an idea to be able to comment the sites. Thereby you would
get some retention of the users.

~~~
easymode
Definitely. Getting feedback on ideas is one of my aim. Kickoffboost will feel
much more complete within weeks. This launch was to validate that there is a
need for this kind of product, and I think I have the green signal to now make
it awesome :)

------
jitnut
Much needed! just submitted [http://pepnest.com](http://pepnest.com) :-)

------
sideproject
Submitted - [http://sideprojectors.com](http://sideprojectors.com) :)

------
oceanician
Really good idea, but needs more consumer & business ideas on. Too many geek
tools at the moment.

------
Andrex
An RSS feed would be fantastic, I think. Otherwise the site seems to do its
job nicely.

------
keerthiko
Bookmarked! We may submit our product on here once I consult with the rest of
my team.

~~~
tripley
May I ask why you wouldn't submit a product here? I'm just curious.

~~~
keerthiko
Our product is transitioning from closed to open beta. Among other reasons, a)
We would want to set up tracking for referrals and to better gauge the effects
of different distribution channels, among other things. b) we will have an
explicit need for a traffic bump in a small window in the near future, so I
would rather save an avenue like this to coincide with our other efforts. This
scenario could exist for others too in situations such as looking to ride off
a press story, and wanting to utilize the traffic to boost a crowdfunding
campaign, etc.

Also, unsure if this is actually a meaningful place for our product, as it's a
mobile app and so not as direct, but that shouldn't really hurt I don't think

~~~
tripley
Thanks for answering keerthiko, that makes sense, I did some snooping and
found BitGym, very cool product. Best of luck.

------
rex_gsd
I sent you an email to the one via your contact us link. I like the page!

------
gcforky
Well this is something great. (i just gave you an standing ovation)

------
BuddhaSource
Nice idea, I am also submitting our new launched app
[http://justprecious.net](http://justprecious.net)

Btw found a silly bug. When I signed up by mistake I used myname@Gmail.com and
now I can't login with myname@gmail.com

------
varun1308
Could you also add the stats for hits on a particular item...

~~~
easymode
That's exactly what I'm working on :D

I'm planning to work all those stats into an algo that would reward better
ideas.

Will keep you posted. Thanks!

------
alexshye
Cool, just signed up and submitted Soulmix
([http://www.soulmix.com](http://www.soulmix.com)). Would love to see how a
listing on KickoffBoost turns out :)

------
troels
How do you plan on getting traffic to your site?

------
kamakazizuru
is there something wrong? I´m getting a "This site doesnt exist" error.

------
atburrow
Could you add SSL support?

------
michaelxia
i listened to all the tracks on looti tooti.

how do i give this guy my money.

------
lovskogen
Is there a RSS feed?

------
cmb320
isn't that what hacker news is for?

------
JeroenRansijn
Cool project!

------
tuananh
step 1: get traffic for your site (kickoffboost.com) first.

step 2: nah do step 1 first.

~~~
OGC
step 2: plant links in echo chamber step 3: nah, nothing happens, but everyone
feels really good about themselves

