

Ask HN: How do I know if I'm ready to launch? - foxhop

I’m petrified of launching my web application because I’m fearful that I won’t …<p>acquire users,
support my users well,
scale in a timely manner,
react quickly to feedback, or
monetize the application<p>How do I prepare myself mentally for launch?  Do you think I'm ready?<p>web application: http://linkpeek.com
======
polyfractal
Prepare your expectations accordingly. Have you been collecting emails from a
landing page while you were developing? Do you have organic search traffic
coming to your site? Do people know about your app? Have you validated the
market for your application?

If you answered no to those questions, expect zero people to know or care
about your app. Launching and running a successful web app is 10% development
and 90% marketing.

I'm telling not trying to discourage you, the opposite actually. Just because
no one signs up when you launch doesn't mean your app sucks. It means no one
knows about it. Start marketing, start blogging, start SEO, start guest-
posting, start doing everything you can to get the word out.

As an aside, you should probably have a way to monetize the app in mind and
put it in place before launching. Very few apps can get away with ads or
freemium effectively, especially if it is a small micropreneurial endeavor.

Edit: Looks like you have an email list. That will help you convert well on
the first few days and give you a morale boost. Don't worry about the rest,
tackle it as it comes. You'll never be ready enough, so just go for it when
you have a working product :)

~~~
foxhop
Wow thanks for the insight! I think I need to work on my marketing skills at
this point.

Do you have organic search traffic coming to your site? (no) Do people know
about your app? (no) Have you validated the market for your application? (not
really)

As for monetizing I plan to eventually allow subscribers to choose bounding
box sizes or access to the raw (and large) screen shot. My competition in the
market charges lots for this service but I have no idea what a fair price
would be. I was thinking monthly subscription based on usage: 1gb $9.99, 5gb
$19.99 and unlimited plan for heavy hitters. Is that a fair price, I have no
idea.

Thank you agian

~~~
polyfractal
A trick you can do is A/B pricing schemes to see which gets you more
purchases.

You can even do this before your product is ready. Make two pages with
different prices, A/B test them and track conversions on the "Buy" button.
Since your product isn't ready yet, just show a "Thanks for your interest, but
we aren't done yet!" page. Collect email addresses too.

This gives you an idea how many people will buy at what price-point, and help
provide more email signups. The caveat is that it requires some level of
traffic coming to your site first

~~~
foxhop
Yeah, I guess I would need much more traffic to even test the smallest a/b
test. Currently I only get about 20 hits per day on the homepage. Seems like I
should have started marketing first.

~~~
polyfractal
You can test even with low traffic...it just takes longer. :)

Try testing incrementally. Run some tests where your conversion is going from
Home Page -> Pricing page. This is pretty easy to do since clicking through to
a pricing page is a lot less friction than buying a product, so you'll have
more data to work with.

Once you get a good conversion there, move on to the next step in your funnel
(probably Pricing -> Buy)

------
Lukeas14
I'm a potential customer who has been researching the available options for
web screenshots. I need to be able to download 1024x1000 screenshots of
websites in real time available through an API similar to what you have.

I'm sure there are a number of potential customers just like me who have their
own unique requirements. But you'll never know if what you're building is in
line with what your customers need until you launch. Good luck.

~~~
foxhop
Thanks for the suggestions,

I hope to make <http://LinkPeek.com> useful and fair for the majority. You are
correct, to do this I'm going to need to communicate a lot more with potential
customers and fellow developers.

------
md1515
Hey foxhop, I understand your fear (we all do to an extent).

Most people advocate a MVP approach (minimum viable product) for many reasons.
First, you can do less work before releasing. Second, it allows your ideal
users to help you develop the product further. The few users you have (heck
even if it is only 5) will be able to tell you what they like, how it is
useful etc. You may not know all the uses for your product and a group of
people might find that it is useful for X. Then you can market it as the
"perfect solution for X"

Your initial users will most likely be HN members. Most of us know how hard it
is to do all of those things so we're not going to worry if you don't scale in
a timely manner etc. If your site crashes, we'll calmly inform you, if you
take a while to respond to feedback, we will understand.

I'll send you an email and I'll see if I can help you..

~~~
foxhop
I would love to have feedback and running this service alone might not be the
smartest move. Please contact me via email anytime.

------
happyfeet
As most people say, you can launch a half-feature not a half-assed one. If you
think you have the minimum features necessary to make your app 'useful' for
your initial customers you should just launch.

I do not see a blog link on your webpage. If not, start doing it soon. Start
talking about your app, use cases, problems and how you are solving them.
Anything that you think is relevant for your broader audience.

And iterate based on feedback from your initial customer base. Don't worry
right now about scaling. If you have that many hits on your app that is a good
problem to have. The worst is indifference.

Good luck with you app and I am sure you'll do well.

------
damoncali
It's going to suck. It's going to break. People will not sign up. Get over it.
You cannot change that until you launch it.

~~~
dholowiski
Absolutely true - when you launch and it breaks, you will fix it. When nobody
comes you'll have to figure out what you did wrong and fix it and when it
sucks you'll make it better. You can't do these things in a vacuum and without
real, live people using the service.

------
Skywing
Are you ready to launch? Then launch. You could spend years wondering if
you're going to be good or bad (but can improve) at doing the items you
listed, but you won't ever know until you just launch it.

~~~
foxhop
Thank you for the advice. Also I just joined up crowdwoo twitter lotto
<http://twitter.com/#!/RussellBal>

------
nfm
In some sense, you launched when you posted this Ask HN!

I think this is a good way to do it as well, as you're likely to get some
helpful feedback and tyre kicking from HNers.

~~~
foxhop
Haha, you are correct. Looks like I might have walked off the cliff without
knowing it.

------
petervandijck
Launch isn't the bad part, do a search for the trough of sorrow :)

------
davidhansen
In direct answer to your question: just launch.

In response to your app itself: I would suggest offering arbitrary thumbnail
sizes( not just 72px ), up to and including full-screen resolution. In
addition, I would suggest a snapshot scheduling service, such that regular
images are captured for given urls on a regular schedule.

A company like us, for instance would probably pay for a service that allows
us to build a design history of our web properties automatically, instead of
adding "screenshot the existing live site before deployment" to the design or
technical workflow, or relying on the Wayback Machine to do so.

