To get more users, have you tried approaching bloggers in different niches with different article ideas? The use cases for your app are different for different sets of people. Just write a one paragraph abstract about your app and email bloggers and editors to see if they'll cover your just released app.
Some headline and abstract ideas when you approach bloggers:
1) Tech/Business -- Popcorn: The hot new app to network at tech conferences
2) Student Websites/Newspapers -- The messaging app you need when a zombie apocalypse happens at SDSU (insert campus here)
3) Dating Blogs -- The newest app for singles: Popcorn lets you chat with others in high density bar areas
4) General -- When disasters strike, Popcorn lets you talk to others in your vicinity
5) Social media bloggers -- What are young teens using if not Facebook? Apps like Popcorn: hyper-local and addictive
6) Music -- Perfect for Coachella and SXSW: Popcorn lets you chat with others at music festivals
7) City Websites/Local -- New app "Popcorn" lets neighbors stay connected on what's happening on the block
8) Gaming -- Popcorn, the app you need to coordinate your next LAN party
If you get a bunch of these articles and blog posts up in the next week or two, it can help push that 1,000 number up higher.
Writing as an ex-editor gone data-wrangling, I can only second this. I wrote for a student-paper and I would have loved the press release with the "zombie apocalypse". I then got to writing for a website. And there, I could have used some of these as well.
BUT: Most press-releases were discarded, without being read. They came in the normal pool-mail-address. And all the spam was there too. My advice would be, to take a little bit time, try to get hold of an editors real email-address and contact him/her that way.
You will dodge the gate-keeping troll, who's job for the day is to clean out the pool-mail-inbox.
This advice is posted to HN quite a bit, this is the same reason websites have press kits available.
Long story short, journalists are lazy, just like the rest of us, and they have deadlines, just like the rest of us.
Exploit them to your advantage and help them out at the same time, and if you are especially different, they will love to be the first to report.
Speaking of that, be careful about who you send what when, a lot of people will break your story before you officially release something just to say they were first, and then your site will be offline and all that traffic will be for naught.
Good luck. If manually emailing editors is taking too long, you can try doing a press release for a few $XXX through prnewswire, businesswire or prleap as well. Might not have the same success as personalized emails, but it's an option if you're busy.
I think you need a 5th takeaway: write a follow-up blog post about how your HN post got you 1000 users, subsequently getting you another 1000 users that missed the post the day before.
how about a 6th takeaway in a follow up, in which he discusses retention of these initial 1000 users? I think it's great he was able to obtain those numbers early but I think those users are a bit ephemeral.
(Yes, taking the opportunity to also get a little attention on HN. Sorry, this is important.)
Analytics tells us that LinkedIn, in particular didn't have good engagement. A few strategic posts on CraigsList probably did ten times better LinkedIn.
The best results we got have been due to friends, family, neighbors and local teachers making a push to reach to their immediate connections (their friends, family and co-workers) to have them engage. Also some blogs produced results here and there.
In general terms building an audience for just about anything on the internet is really hard these days. Luck can be a factor, but more and more it seems to require a lot of hard work and "street smarts". For example, I contacted every host at a local TV station with slightly different versions of the same story in order to see if anyone would be interested. Call it A/B testing. One was, and that helped a bit (just a bit).
> I've learned Facebook and LinkedIn can produce really disappointing results.
(...)
> The best results we got have been due to friends, family, neighbors and local teachers making a push to reach to their immediate connections (their friends, family and co-workers) to have them engage.
Do you mean facebook ads in your first use of Facebook? Because I would think "organic" use of Facebook would be a contributing factor to "reach ... immediate connections"?
I've never quite understood the idea of Facebook "ads". If you want to do "viral" marketing -- let your product/cause spread via social media via actual human connections. If you want to do advertising, do advertising.
Reaching a mass of people via Facebook is, to some degree, relatively easy. If you have 50 to 100 people you can reach directly and they, in turn, reach out to their direct connections you'll "touch" a pile of people quickly.
However, from that to getting people to take action --be it install and app, vote for a cause, visit a website-- that's an entirely different matter.
In our case one of the things we came across is a demographic that simply does not use Facebook. Older parents of the very kids we are trying to help.
The next issue was triggered by a dialog that pops-up when you click on the vote button. Facebook tells you that you are about to share your profile and your friends list. Of course a lot of people recoiled at that immediately. The last thing parents of children with special needs want to do is open the doors to their facebook account. I get it. I absolutely do. We probably lost hundreds of potential supporters this way. It is perfectly understandable. I don't understand why facebook would not have the option to be able to simply log in or vote on something as a means of identifying yourself yet without granting access to your life (or projecting the fear of this happening).
I suppose the efficacy of trying to build an audience through facebook depends on your demographic. If your audience lives on facebook it is probably a great channel. If you audience does not or if they are concerned about their privacy there could be issues.
If you log in, and no one is around, the app gets closed pretty quickly. I have checked back multiple times, and always seem to miss everyone chatting. I would love to know if someone close by is online or chatting, so that I don't have to sit there hoping someone sees my tepid 'Hello?'.
I don't know if push notifications are the correct answer, but letting me know that there was activity that I missed, after my last post, would be a good start. Letting me know if other people are active in my region would be nice, but it's mostly that I don't want to have a conversation with myself.
I would love to know if other people are chatting, because I want to join in.
In any case, thanks for the app, have you got a public issue tracker, or anything similar?
Yes, you're absolutely right. I was kickin myself all day yesterday because push notifications weren't working. I couldnt figure out why but my guess was it had to do with the provisioning profile. i resubmitted late last night, and requested expedited review. hopefully itll be out in the next few days. either way, thanks for the constructive feedback!
I was writing that comment, and kept thinking of the possible annoying implementations. For example, I probably don't want a notification every single time someone within 1 mile sends a message.
Some seemingly sane ideas off the top of my head, which I think would be useful and not too annoying:
* A timeout, where I get a notification if there is a new message, after a period where no messages were sent near me
* Notification if I send a message with no reply, close the app, and then someone replies
* Notification if there is a particularly active conversation around me
* No way to create hyperlinks (which would be awesome)
* Emoticons seem to disappear
* New people are very confused by the badges
* I had a weird bug where it kept asking me to wait 5s before posting, I hadn't touched it in ~10 minutes. It had been cycling between "Need 1 more person to unlock this area" and being unlocked for some of that time too.
Seeing the usage pick-up has been fun! Looking forward to seeing how things progress.
I like the app idea, but not a huge fan of your methods of attracting users. Because this is a highly localized app, I think the key takeaway is that you need to really push a single (or multiple) locations at once, rather than "everywhere" at once.
The app will do far better with 1000 users in one location than 1 user in each of 1000 locations.
Also, could you onboard users with no registration required to get them using it, then ask them to register if they want to use across multiple devices / retrieve their login?
Absolutely. This app is going to completely rely on network effects. Just like Facebook, once there are a few area "spheres" with a lot of active and concurrent users, this can start to take off.
I predict this may end up being the next big Snapchat-like app within a year. I may be totally wrong, and/or I may just be biased because I've always wanted an app like this (in part because I always enjoyed the local small-region chatting in MMO games, and this is the same thing applied to real life), but I think this has a ton of potential.
Right now it needs to be aggressively marketed and spread around.
Congrats on the success! I'm curious: the condition of <1 mile proximity isn't transitive, so wouldn't users be seeing only one half of a lot of conversations? Like if A was close to B, B was close to C, but A wasn't close to C, then A would only see what B says to C but not what C says back. Or have you divided up space into fixed cells roughly one mile wide to prevent this?
This was probably my most embarrassing oversight. Your first point is the way it's working. I'm trying to figure out if there's a way to make that work without segmenting the map into fixed cells... any thoughts?
Does this really solve the problem though? What happens if someone 3 miles away is talking to someone who's 1 mile away from themselves, but 4 miles away from you? Then you'd see the transparent text of them talking to some person you can't see messages from, yet also see transparent text of them responding to people you can see messages from.
I personally don't see how you could completely avoid this without some kind of fixed regions, unless you required people to do some kind of an "@user Hey..." for every message so that you would know if you share the same sphere with the destination user. This makes it more tedious and less fun, though, plus it takes away the whole idea of multicasting.
This sounds like a solid and scalable approach, most others that come to mind relate to being able to join a conversation based on seeing part of it and then being added, but if the app isn't doing identity-based messaging (e.g. if A replies to B does it become more like tweeting at each other?) then there's no real way to do so.
Another nice aspect of keeping it strictly distance-based is that it makes it simpler to scale - all persons within a geographic region are able to see only other people within that region, so within limits you can run separate backend instances as required.
And of course there are all sorts of potential growth directions by allowing communities (e.g. "Students at XYZU and people within 1 mile" or "Students at XYZU who are within 1 mile").
I haven't used the app because I have an android phone so I don't know how it works, but is there any way to have someone outside of the 1 mile radius ask to "join" people within another radius? Or would that break the idea of the app.
I can't think of any other way off hand. I'm assuming you don't like cells because of edge cases where two people could be near each other but in different cells? If the cells were carefully selected it might not be too big of a problem. For example, you could put each college campus in its own cell. But that could take a while and you'd have to drop the one-mile guarantee. I'll let you know if I think of anything else. I don't think it has to be a dealbreaker for an otherwise great idea!
I think that if User A "replies" to User B, you then allow anyone who can see either party to see both parties, at least in that one conversation.
To detect replies, one option is to do a statistical analysis of the typical time between two messages on the network. Anyone who replies in the upper 70% percentile is "replying"
You could make the effect fuzzy and have a back and forth conversation (which would probably be obvious in the data) have a stronger effect and could use that for training your algorithm.
Maybe, something similar to hearing, a person who is closer is louder while the one far is faint....
So nearby people have a stronger font while the one who is far has a lighter font ?
Note - I've not used this app, so don't know how it is working ...
I have a side project (dmtri.com). It lacks active users right now. I don't mind not having too many registered users as the website doesn't require you to sign up. I just wish that people would visit more and write more. Obviously the problem is that there isn't much going on actively on the site.
However, I detest the thought of spamming every facebook groups and such. I tried organically growing by writing really good content (http://dmtri.com/posts/28/alexis_ohanian_-_%22i_don%27t_regr...), but that in itself is a problem because I have to get visitors for that.
I worked hard on the project but I feel a bit discouraged by lack of interest so far.
The real problem is I'm not quite sure what you're offering that hasn't been done a million times before.
I'm not trying to be a jerk, I'm being curt. What differentiates dmtri? It looks like just another site to post stuff anonymously. Why would I use it over 4chan or reddit etc etc.
These are things to think about if you want it to take off.
Thanks for the input and thanks for checking it out. I am doing a poor job explaining the core product feature on the website.
People on Reddit create throwaway account for anything they want to disassociate themselves from (controversial stance on politics, science, religion etc). Dmtri has ability to post anonymously whether you are signed up or not. When you are signed up you can either post revealing your username or post anonymously.
4chan is very situational and temporal. Dmtri is not like that. Content stays on the site.
As someone with several side projects, I feel your pain.
You probably need to make the site appear more active, until there's enough interesting content to keep visitors there a while and encourage them to post.
I would report your facebook posts as abuse if I saw them on my newsfeed, most likely. "I joined a bunch of groups so I could advertise to them." Scummy.
You could easily change the tone here.
"I joined a bunch of very specific types of groups so I could manually write a post that tells them about a free app that I built for their demographic."
I felt the "scum" right away, but then I thought about the source of the feeling. Scummy is when you write bait. Telling people about your app - sometimes that requires a door to door cold call.
I think this app deserved to be shared with that group, and it's particularly un-scummy considering the fact that it's brand new, free, and isn't trying to mine for email addys.
Many others might whether you believe in the product or not though. I guess I am looking for less intrusive and disruptive way to acquire user, but the downside to this is that it is way harder to gain users. But I think your facebook group selection was smart. A lot of freshmen would like this app.
I feel like what you did might be considered spam - posting on FB groups, and reposting on HN. It's not adding any value to the community. But hey, what works, works.
there are ways of posting tactfully. i believe in the app thus i think it's useful for those students. i dont continuously post over and over, so far, only once per page. i have students liking and commenting, even friending me telling me they like the app.
What if there were 1,000 developers with similar apps, each who thought their offering could be useful for the students in question? Even just one post from each of them would likely flood a community.
If you post like that in a community of mine, I generally delete your post and blacklist your link preventing people from discussing it even if they discover it organically. There is just too much spam coming through to give benefit of the doubt.
If you want to announce something in someone else's community, I think fairer and more polite behaviour is to speak with an owner/moderator about what they think is fair - it might be that they allow such posts or they ask that you advertise, etc.
Great Article, thank you for sharing. It's interesting to follow a Product Launch and see what works / what doesn't work. I like how you've integrated a specific UX into the Product. Right now the Signup is probably one of the most important aspects to focus on (as you onboard Users). Choosing to skip E-mails (and E-mail verification) for a faster signup lowers the entry point barrier and makes the UX more enjoyable. This is something I'm currently working on with my App (the initial Signup Process). I've performed some customer validation and the results were in line with my assumptions. The preferred experience seems to be minimal time investment, and minimal effort. Following this train of thought, here are few basic options:
1. User manually inputs an E-mail Address and Password (commonly w/ E-mail Verification)
2. User manually inputs a Username/Password (less to type, no Verification needed)
3. User taps twice and uses Social Media Integration (example, Facebook Login)
Of course each of these has Pro's and Cons. I will follow Popcorn and see how it works with the second option. I'm leaning towards the third option (minimal time investment), but I'm concerned about perceptions of the associated Social Network(s) and how that might impact the User's desire to create an account. For example, if a certain Network is "not cool" with the younger generation, and you present the "not cool" Network as the Logon method, would that make the App also "not cool"?
You need to really think about 3. Asking someone to sign in using facebook or twitter is much more than the physical action of tapping twice. you're asking for something emotional, their personal data. It would help others and myself if you posted what your app does. i would only use those as a form of login signup if your app absolutely depends on it - Tinder is a great example of this.
I completely agree. Using option 3 has its own set of con's, and this is one of them. Many Users have been misused/tricked in the past and don't like the idea of associating a new (aka unknown) App with their Social Media Accounts. For all they know the App will steal their data and spam their friends. This is in line with some of the feedback I get when validating with potential customers.
You may have hit a sweet spot there with option 2. Keep us updated! An interesting Metric would be comparing the Bounce Rate between these options above (ala A/B Testing).
> If your post doesn’t gain traction on Hacker News initially, delete it and try posting another day. This probably holds true for sites like Reddit as well.
Most of us aren't here to be the audience for whatever startups and sites that treat HN like a marketing tool. This morning when I checked HN there was 4 advertisements on the front page excluding the official yc hiring notices - exitround, envato, statuspage.io, aws.
42floors' the other week described HN's front page as part of their SEO campaign - we're literally being exploited just to boost their visibility on google.
It's making HN unattractive to me at least.
Note: I'm not talking about "Show HN" posts. Those I like because they generally tap HN for feedback.
At the same time, I'm quite glad the OP reposted a few times. I may not have seen this app otherwise. The hustle required to delete and repost doesn't feel spammy to me. And, furthermore, the original post made it to the front page and retained its location per the algorithm, which gives a lot of power to time.
I think the value prop for a lot of HN readers here isn't so much about whether or not this was an ad - I think it was more about "this is a cool idea that could spark other location-oriented ideas" in the thread, and quite a few folks did treat this as a Show HN.
It's a fine line, for sure, but it's also a gamble - will people look past the outer layer of "spammy" to the inner layers that can be learned from? I felt this way about the Envato article today too. Disclaimer, I write articles for their tuts sites periodically. But I knew when that article hit the front page, it would be received as spammy.
We need people like you (benologist and the clear-headed readers of this comment) to maintain a strict hold on what is considered valuable on HN, certainly while simultaneously appreciating and giving space to the efforts of other programmers in the space.
Right, because of all the spam and overposting. You visit "New" from time to time and know what I'm talking about, I'm sure.
Historically, there is no solution to this outside of moderation and banning, so it's just as likely that HN has jumped the shark for most individual purposes and people will have to move on to other venues that are not being clogged by The Verge and Business Insider using them for spike traffic.
I think it's pretty easy to separate - this is a place where people like patio11 might tell you why you're doing it wrong, that's the value of HN. If all you want is traffic you're just wasting this opportunity.
Not to mention this is bad traffic for most purposes. There was a site that posted followup numbers the other day with I think 70 trials and 1 paid customer out of 15,000 visitors... you can't build a company that way.
>Most of us aren't here to be the audience for whatever startups and sites that treat HN like a marketing tool.
In a very literal sense that's exactly why we are all here. HN is ad supported just like most every no-cost website.
Never forget that HN is YC's marketing apparatus. HN is incredibly valuable to YC the VC firm (an incubator is a sort of specialized VC firm), to the YC startups, and to Paul Graham personally. HN is one of their most valuable strategic assets. And that value is derived from us, their adoring audience-participants.
The other side of this coin which makes me uneasy is: if HN is the only place that get traction for certain projects, what does that say about the value proposition of the project? In other words, is what we have here a self-validating pyramid? Do non-HN people actually have a need for new software that isn't already supplied by the big 4?
As the author notes, the fact that he finally did get a bunch of upvotes sort of proves that his posting wasn't spam to begin with. It was relevant to the community. What it shows more than anything else is that the system for achieving the coveted front page status is broken. I'm not sure what a good solution would be though.
While I can see the argument in that direction, the point he made was to "delete" the other post before reposting. Think of it like first drafts of a story/article/blog post you're writing, you almost NEVER get it right the first time. Sometimes it takes a few iterations (just like software development hmmm?) before you find the right combination to trigger a general interest.
HN, Reddit, Slashdot, all of these share similar requirements of "finding the right combo of post/title/content/etc... to appease to the wider audience".
What he recommends, I think is a worthwhile endeavor. As long as it is not abused...
FYI, I can't find Popcorn if I search for Popcorn in the App Store. I am able to find it if I search for Popcorn Messaging. I can just imagine many more people will find it if you'd call it Popcorn Chat.
Nice post and always exciting to get a good start going. What I'm really interested in is the geographical dispersion of those 1,000 users (and however many you have now), how many conversations where actually formed, and the retention.
I guess people fire up an app just after installing it, wanting to take it for a spin, and if they can't form even one conversation since nobody's around them, it would greatly affect retention.
An interesting metric would be 'conversations per day' and if technically possible 'potential conversations per day', that is to say how many pairs of people with the app running where in 1 mile proximity to one another.
Also, it would be interesting to see whether users take the conversation elsewhere (facebook, twitter, whatsapp), at what stage (as one is leaving the location or before that), and if they do - how does it affect their app usage. Does it make them use the app more (for example, to seek more connections and friends now that they see it's effective for meeting new people), or less (they took the conversation elsewhere and their social needs were met for now).
Just my $0.02. Hope to see an Android version soon to test if myself!
Good luck!
I think I totally misread this title as "how I got my first 1000 users - in one day" rather than, what I think it means, which is "how I got my first 1000-users-in-1-day"! Still, useful tips, and you obviously have a lot of energy when it comes to getting the word out, which can only be admired.
About 14 years ago I used a chat client called popcorn that ran on local networks while I was at boarding school. It allowed us to chat after hours when outside internet access was cut off (around 10pm). Now I cant find any reference to it. Anyone else here heard of it?
How were you able to get Apple to accept the app when it's locked by a login screen? I suffered with 2 different apps that had been rejected because they required the user to register/login before they can use the app.
It's not about that. They say you cannot require the user to share personal info before using your app. Maybe it's because you are registering with a username and not an email.
I could definitely see this being useful/entertaining at a sporting event in a "join the conversation" kind of way. Everyone plays with their smartphone during breaks in the action anyway.
I think having a list of usernames that match the input and have spoken recently when you type @ and then some letters would be a useful feature. Pretty minor, but just throwing that out there.
Nice Idea, localized networks are trending fast.
Do you remember what day of the week and at what time you posted the successful HN post?
what about those that didn't work?
It was wednesday at around 11 AM PST. I'm pretty sure the other times were closer to mid-day like 12 - 2. Although this post was posted mid-day as well, however on Thursday and it seemed to do really well.
thanks!
A few days ago there was another article suggesting that the best time to post was around 19h in the evening (GMT) which is consistent with what you say of 11-12 AM PST. The only difference was the day, he was posting on sunday I believe.
what day of the week were the 2 failed attempts posted on?
I'm trying to sense the pulse of the HN crowd, to see when we all slack off the most ;)
Yup. But even that takes a long time to run in Postgres if you got millions of rows. I usually run User.last.id - User.first.id, and that usually gives me the # of rows (give or take)
Newb question here - Did you use Rails as your backend? How does it fit into your stack as an iOS app? Are you using something like RubyMotion? Just curious...
that's too general. r/apple, r/iphone, r/software are starting points and a lot more specific. If you plan on developing an Android version, then r/Android, r/androidapps
Some headline and abstract ideas when you approach bloggers:
1) Tech/Business -- Popcorn: The hot new app to network at tech conferences
2) Student Websites/Newspapers -- The messaging app you need when a zombie apocalypse happens at SDSU (insert campus here)
3) Dating Blogs -- The newest app for singles: Popcorn lets you chat with others in high density bar areas
4) General -- When disasters strike, Popcorn lets you talk to others in your vicinity
5) Social media bloggers -- What are young teens using if not Facebook? Apps like Popcorn: hyper-local and addictive
6) Music -- Perfect for Coachella and SXSW: Popcorn lets you chat with others at music festivals
7) City Websites/Local -- New app "Popcorn" lets neighbors stay connected on what's happening on the block
8) Gaming -- Popcorn, the app you need to coordinate your next LAN party
If you get a bunch of these articles and blog posts up in the next week or two, it can help push that 1,000 number up higher.