

Ask HN: How to gain traction with projects? - ecto

I've been hacking away at little projects for months. I make them up, ask my friends to test them, get feedback, iterate, and get them production-ready. It's what I love to do and I'm not going to stop.<p>I get pumped up. I post on my blog, Twitter, Facebook, HN, reddit, and I email blogs. I live in Northern Minnesota so there aren't many people around, but I let the few I see know about my latest projects. I even tell people about my projects at the gas station and restaurants. Basically, I try hard.<p>Nothing goes anywhere. I don't think it's because I make floozy things either; I feel as though my products would interest a lot of people if I could reach them.<p>It's really disheartening spending days of my life working on something to have a handful of people see it. How do you gain traction with your projects? Is there a magic bullet that works for you?
======
gawker
While I don't have much experience with launching anything, it sounds like the
projects that you're building aren't exactly useful to the people around you.
If you don't mind me asking, what are these little projects? You might want to
try and focus on a target audience. Maybe even ask them what they need and
gather some feedback? Just my thoughts. It may or may not apply.

~~~
ecto
In reverse-chronological order:

<http://memify.me/> <http://leftright.me/> <http://mugshotwars.com/>
<http://brainerdcustody.com/>

There are more but these are the apps I've made in the past month or two. I've
tried to experiment with a variety of viral techniques and range my projects
from local to universal context. The only one that got any notable traffic was
Mugshot Wars, but it's tapered off to a few visits a day now.

~~~
gawker
They seem like decent enough projects for fun. But anything long term might be
slightly tricky. I particularly liked memify.me and it seems like it could
catch on. leftright, as someone had pointed out, seems similar to what's been
done. An extension of leftright could be including some sort of question for
people to guess - could be age, location, etc.

------
westy92
Similar to what I asked here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2219418>

~~~
ecto
I see what you did there.

------
nudge
No magic bullets, unfortunately, but you'll get more useful feedback if you
show us what you've made.

~~~
nudge
Let me follow this up now I've seen the sites you posted.

While there's nothing hugely wrong with your sites, there's also nothing
hugely right with them. I'm not trying to be negative, I'm just trying to be
helpful. So mugshot wars is like a fun hotornot clone, and leftright as far as
I can tell _is_ a hotornot clone, and brainerd custody is great if you want to
see pictures of convicts, and memify is probably fun if you're into internet
memes and don't use one of the other internet meme generators and you can be
bothered to figure out exactly what it does (which the screenshot doesn't make
clear) and how to login (which doesn't work for me, mac+chrome, for some
reason).

Again, I don't want you to think I'm trying to crush your spirit or anything.
It's clear you know some stuff about making fun sites. But these kinds of
things are flaky - either people love them and they explode, or they don't and
they fade away. But they're all learning exercises.

It used to be that you could put up a stupid animated gif of a singing animal
and it would be the biggest thing on the internet. But there's plenty of other
stuff to do online now. It's not so easy to make a viral hit.

So I would say that there's no reason that your sites aren't taking off
outside of the reason that there's no reason why they should.

But look at it this way: it's damn hard to monetize junky viral traffic, so be
glad you're not just saddling yourself with enormous bandwidth bills! Consider
all this a learning experience - you're better at making sites than you were
when you started, so when you have an idea that provides value for people,
you'll be able to implement it well.

~~~
ecto
Thanks a lot for your response. I was really looking for honest criticism.

I realize they aren't technically valuable websites. I tried to create them to
appeal to users subconsciously. The reason I asked the question is that I feel
like I need to know that I can get enough momentum with a project to vindicate
taking the startup plunge. I don't want to spend a year on a beautiful product
to not have it go anywhere.

And thank god for EC2. Last month's bill for 4 servers: $6

------
awangstar
hey, I have actually just started an organization to help entrepreneurs gain
traction

<http://www.meetup.com/traction-bootcamp>

Unfortunately the first group's meetups will be in New York, however, maybe we
can include you virtually in our program.

I started this program because I meet a lot of entrepreneurs like you... a lot
of people are good at building the initial prototype, but sucks at getting
traction.

The two major reasons being

1\. Entrepreneurs don't quite know how to gain traction

2\. Entrepreneurs don't necessarily have the support system that goad each
other on to get traction, especially when the going gets tough.

Love to include you in the program, email me (the organizer) if you want

------
timmm
Try and solve a problem.

~~~
ecto
What type of problem? How would you define that?

~~~
timmm
Your clearly a good programmer I just don't see the goal of your apps. In
addition they all seem to be slight variations of the same core idea. Trying
to arbitrarily come up with an idea that you think is going to instantly gain
traction and become viral is just a shot in the dark, unless you have evidence
suggesting your idea has that ability.

If your goal is to start a business/make money then find a problem in society
(with a substantial market) and provide a solution. It's really that simple,
and there are plenty of problems. The type of problem is up to you, I'd go
with something you find interesting.

