
Ask HN: You built and they just came? - zerr
Are there any stories when you went ahead and just built something, did minimal (or no) marketing and users just came?
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SyneRyder
Yup, twice. When I first started making Photoshop plugins and selling them, I
did nothing but make a website & mentioned it on a Photoshop developer email
list. I was extremely fortunate that one of the readers mentioned my plugin in
their own newsletter of 30,000 subscribers. Google then picked up the site,
gave me good rankings for the phrase Photoshop Plugins, and that carried me
along for a while. Though I wish I'd been more proactive with my marketing &
product development in later years.

Before that, I made a website called the South Park Kenny Translator [1] and I
don't recall doing any promotion at all, besides it being on the same domain
as my Photoshop plugins. It's been around for almost 20 years now and even
landed me an interview on BBC Radio. The Kenny Translator is inherently viral
though: the whole point is sending Kenny-encoded messages to friends.

Nowadays I'd be much more proactive about marketing. My current Indie
Conference [2] side project went nowhere for a couple of years, but suddenly
got a spike of subscribers when I mentioned it in a reply here on HN last
month. It wasn't intended as deliberate marketing, but it had more impact than
2+ years of nothing but hoping the Google gods would look favorably upon me.

[1]
[http://www.namesuppressed.com/kenny/](http://www.namesuppressed.com/kenny/)

[2] [http://www.indieconference.com/](http://www.indieconference.com/)

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pzzld
I think these stories would be accidental more often than you think. In our
world of internet you have to be promoting yourself for any kind of attention.

Your product has to be outstandingly super good to gather users without any
marketing.

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Jack000
depends on how minimal I guess.

I once ran a p2p site called flashseed. The basic premise was that it was a
torrent tracker that solved the two major failings of bittorrent - initial
seeding and incomplete swarms, by hosting a static copy of the file.

I posted it on a forum, but due to the ill-conceived name people thought it
was a free seedbox rather than a tracker. It blew up overnight and crashed the
server. 99% of the files uploaded turned out to be pirated movies and TV
shows. At the time isohunt was being sued and the legality of the site was
unclear, even if I did comply with DMCA. After some thought I decided it
wasn't worth the effort, and let it die a natural death...

If I were to do it again I'd probably make it invite-only

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erickbarto1
I built Badabing! An app to see your friends bikini pics. And they just came,
in droves. This was 2012

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sharemywin
what happened to it?

