What I Learned From Launching on HN

http://blog.sidwyn.com/post/11696185581/what-i-learned-from-launching-on-hn

by sidwyn • 15 years ago

59 17 15 years ago

blog.sidwyn.com

afdssfda• 15 years ago

Good points. I'd add: There is a good chance that HN users that read your post are not your demographic; it is made of of a mix of tech entrepreneurs (people that don't have a company but wish they did, or 1-2 person company CEO/CTO) and other IT professionals/developers. This may be a place to get helpful critical feedback from a technical and small tech business sense, but is not a good indicator of what others outside that realm think.

sidwyn3• 15 years ago

Great point as well.

eggbrain2• 15 years ago

I'll be completely honest, this felt too much like a fluff piece with advice that was too general to be helpful.

I can break down your post into this advice:

  1) Listen to what people say

  2) Ignore the people insulting you

  3) Post on a weekend

  4) Reply to feedback

  5) Use feedback to improve your product

The problem is, you really go no deeper than that. For example, in #1, (Comments that are targeted at you can be hurtful at first, but don’t take them personally), you say "However, it is important to not take them personally. View it from a larger perspective. Why are they criticizing you? There must be a reason why. Try to understand them and see what you are able to do." What did you do to understand them? What were you able to do based on their comments? How can you iterate off that? Why do you think people said that? How did you incorporate their thoughts into your product? Your second paragraph (For the record, English is my first language and I’ve been speaking it since I was born) sounded too much like you were still taking the comments personally.

#3 is another example. You seem to only have one data point to support your theory. You also said yourself you added samples and changed prices. Could that have been it? Could it have been luck? Could it have been the hour it was posted at? It sounds like it might be true but you have barely any evidence to support that claim.

#5 is another example. I would hope that you would always use feedback from a community to improve your product, especially a community with it's pulse on the tech world and entrepreneurship. How did changing things increase your sales? What other things are you trying to do to improve?

I hope you don't take this as a negative comment, just more constructive criticism. When I read a blog post, if it offers advice to me, I want to read something more specific than "Use suggestions to improve product".

kgtm• 15 years ago

This is great post! I would like to iterate on #5 though: HN as a community is an anomaly in that mostly everyone is likely to be much more tech-savvy than your target audience. The feedback you receive from highly intelligent, tech-savvy people is not always addressing the pain points your potential customers have. For instance, the latter can, and will pay for a wrapper service that takes a hacker 5 mins to deploy even though the product might get shot down at HN for its triviality.

This is ok and to be expected but keep in mind that a service that can be sold is usually judged not on its complexity but on the number of potential clients you can reach.

Edit: I now see that afdssfda mentioned something along the same lines below. I'll just leave this here though.

temphn• 15 years ago

For god's sake. Sidwyn just experienced something only creators experience. Namely, that creating something often leads to a wall of hate rather than receptivity. It is useful for people to know this. It's probably the single most surprising thing about beimg an entrepreneur.

abbasmehdi2• 15 years ago

I think you're confusing two very different concepts. Observations and analysis. An observation is a fact, something that happened at a point in time, the analysis is a series of hypothesis justified through logic and evidence.

The OP does an excellent job of sharing his observations, things that caught him off guard. Will these be useful to someone launching on HN? Definitely, because they will observe all the same things as the OP, who is now eliminating the surprise factor and enabling the next launcher to create a strategy around their launch.

Will the analysis be useful? No. Because the analysis is limited by the OP’s capacity to analyze and is limited to the scope of his project. X will not happen to both A and B for the same P reason.

Hope this makes sense. You're asking for fluff when the OP gave straight facts, because me observing the same facts for my launch might have completely different reasons.

eggbrain2• 15 years ago

I can see what you are saying, but I'd disagree that this would be useful to someone launching on HN. The advice given is very general [besides the "Post on a weekend" suggestion]. Even as children we were told that "sticks and stones may break our bones, but words will never hurt me", a very early version of "filter out the unhelpful".

For me, if the advice seems obvious, I at least want to know how the author came to that observation, why it is beneficial, and how he will use it going forward. For example, check out this blog post on "What I learned from watching notch code":

http://gun.io/blog/what-i-learned-from-watching-notch-code/

You can see that while the author of this piece gave perhaps generic advice with things like "incredibly thorough testing", he told the story of what he observed, how it is beneficial, and at the end showed us how he would use that knowledge to improve himself. I didn't get that feeling with the OP's submission, such as when he said "However, it is important to not take them personally. View it from a larger perspective. Why are they criticizing you? There must be a reason why. Try to understand them and see what you are able to do." What did he do to understand the comments? How did he finally reach seeing it from a larger perspective? What was he "able to do" at the end? The author doesn't touch on this at all, and so all we are left for is very generic advice.

For example, with #5 as well, we get a single instance of how he used feedback to improve his product. But what about the other feedback? What feedback did he disagree with, and why? What we get is just "We saw the top comment was to divide the videos into smaller chunks. We did that."

Mizza• 15 years ago

I've learned that HN traffic and Reddit traffic are good for quick feedback and high viewcounts, but not for repeat visitors or people stick around. It's almost entirely bounce traffic.

amandalim892• 15 years ago

you mentioned posting on a weekend is a gd strategy to get traffic. yet now you posted on a weekday morning. why did you switch your strategy? just curious.

chad_oliver• 15 years ago

I suspect because he wasn't so interested in traffic this time.

sidwyn3• 15 years ago

Yep, just interested in sharing my observations.

jsavimbi2• 15 years ago

> (how many of you even know where Singapore is? ;)

I'm quite uncertain that goading people based on a stereotypical notion that Americans are map-ignorant is the ideal manner by which to overcome initial resistance to one's proposals. Even if you're idea were a good one and perfectly executed, you still have to practically ram it down people's throats in order to convert them.

HN is not a great place to sell tutorials; video or otherwise. I looked at your site over the weekend, kept it open in a tab as a tickler and then last night decided that buying updated Xcode and Objective-C materials would be both a cheaper and better option. That wasn't based on your experience, lack thereof or price. It was based on my own process and interest in learning, and judging by the number of books people produce and sell on the subjects of programming, I'd say that I'm not alone in that category. You may have picked the wrong audience.

Also, in regards to this post, you've let your dissatisfaction with HN's receptiveness towards your idea get the best of you. One submission and a "lessons learned" follow up post five days later is not a sign that you've externalized negative feedback or that you've been able to collect sufficient data to pontificate over the HN submission process and provide useful advice for others. If anything, you should create a marketing campaign, gather and interpret your data and use it to back up your assumptions.

Either way, I wish you the best of luck with your endeavors. Based on what I've seen so far, you're far ahead than many people your age.

ps. Yes, I've been to Singapore. It's okay.

sidwyn3• 15 years ago

Thanks for your advice. My post was more of observation than analysis (like someone else said on this thread)

Also, you were mistaken. I didn't goad nor chide Americans. The Hacker News community is international (I'm proof), and based off visitor stats, there were a lot of them from the U.K. and Canada as well.

jsavimbi2• 15 years ago

> Thanks for your advice.

You should've left it at that.

Meai• 15 years ago

Well since you like criticism:

1. Your post was common sense material and provided me with no further necessary info to even see it in context (of your launch) Which link did you post to HN?

2. You disabled the standard scroll bar, I can't use middle click to scroll on your page.

What I Learned From Launching on HN

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