

How I got my side project's first 3500 users - rory096
http://ottoplay.tv/first3500

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dang
Please don't put "Show HN" on blog posts or follow-up posts.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

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rory096
Whoops, TIL. Sorry about that.

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tasteup
Awesome! Did you use a tool to generate that graph?

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rory096
Just Excel for the line graph, image-maps.com to avoid doing all the map
<area>s by hand. I was actually wondering if there's some way to do this
that's less... 90s.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/3fs6kl/my_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/3fs6kl/my_side_projects_first_3500_users_oc/ctrficx)

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siquick
Well done for hitting 3500.

How do you plan to continue growing?

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rory096
Thanks. A big part of my strategy was to build up
[http://reddit.com/r/ottoplay](http://reddit.com/r/ottoplay), which is up to
130 subscribers – I've been pushing it in all my posts so far. (At first it
was just me talking to myself so there'd be something interesting for the
first viewers to read.) I'd like to make that more of a self-sustaining
community, to encourage people to stay involved and share it with their
friends. Right now I'm working on a much-requested feature (customizing
channels) – my plan is to roll that out with private beta invites to help keep
people engaged.

Once that's rolling I'll try for another, bigger round of press coverage. Up
until now things have largely not been in my control – the first two articles'
authors approached me after my reddit posts, the later ones never bothered
interviewing me, and it got Product Hunted by a power user who noticed my
failed Show HN. (I actually didn't even realize it hit PH until the next day,
took even longer to get commenting access.) But that's probably not going to
last – I expect I'll have to do much more actively reaching out to
journalists.

I'm starting to run out of new reddit communities to reach, but there's some
smallish ones I still haven't hit. Maybe I'll try another Show HN. Mostly
though, I think I need to focus on the core subreddits/communities that like
this sort of thing, figure out exactly what they want and build a loyal
following who'll bring it up when a tangential topic comes up. This already
happens occasionally, which is beyond awesome:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/3fc0h0/netf...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/3fc0h0/netflix_needs_a_i_have_30_min_before_ill_fall/ctnp1f2?context=2)

Longer term, I'd love to get this on some sort of ChromiumOS stick. Nothing
useful on the market for that yet, so I'm chatting with some manufacturers in
China. Seems like a good product for a Kickstarter, hardware's more
interesting than browser extensions, and it solves the real problem of the app
being too hard to get onto a TV if you're not already used to HDMI cabling it.

