Building a Web App in 1 Hour For Promotional Purposes (IsHilarySwankHot.com)

http://blog.ramamia.com/2009/01/building-web-app-1-hour-promotional-purposes-ishilaryswankhotcom/

by markbao • 18 years ago

51 51 18 years ago

blog.ramamia.com

keltecp11• 18 years ago

This is a great idea. You should do this for more celebrities.

twampss• 18 years ago

+1 for The Office (and the site is great, too!)

Mystalic• 18 years ago

My friend built postcard.fm in a day, and got on lifehacker. It helped promote the real business, www.thenextbigsound.com

It works.

Shamiq• 18 years ago

I know those guys. Northwestern University, go!

fuzzmeister• 18 years ago

I had a similar experience building songerize.com (since sold/redesigned). I had built some MP3-finding code off of the SeeqPod API for another site, and on a whim decided to make a UI for it. A few weeks later, it spontaneously got covered on Lifehacker, Mashable, CNet, etc, all in one day, with essentially no promotion on my part. Strange how the things that take the least work can get the best results.

r7000• 18 years ago

Throw in a disqus widget so people can state their case à la the show.

jsmcgd• 18 years ago

It needs a forum.

t0pj• 18 years ago

Cool.

Looks like the cookie the only thing from keeping people from voting more than once.

To everyone here:

How else could you keep people from vote bombing low friction (no required login) sites like this one?

Does it even matter in this case?

Why the hell are people voting NO?

markbao2• 18 years ago

We just dealt with one guy that just voted 2800 times from the same IP. Deleted the rows, and made it one vote per IP.

It works because to see a Yes/No it depends on if you have the cookie set, but to actually vote it checks the IP.

So if someone legitimately votes from a multi-user IP that already was used to vote, it'll show a Yes/No, get sent to the vote page, but won't go in–but it'll seem like it did :)

callmeed• 18 years ago

Seems like that could seriously skew the results ... I'd imagine a lot of people are trying to vote from behind home/small office routers.

jgilliam2• 18 years ago

The biggest problem with one vote per IP is that you block pretty much all AOL users.

jasonlbaptiste7• 18 years ago

Ha, someone just did that. We took care of it. It's fun to break apps, but 1000 no votes was a tiny bit much :-). She's not THAT bad looking. Regardless, were getting like 20 votes a minute legitimately.

pyroman3• 18 years ago

I like quick projects like that. I put together http://isthemarketdown.com in 3 hours, but I haven't spent much time promoting it.

The twit this button is a good idea.

run4yourlives• 18 years ago

Ok, I'm really curious... how much money do you make on that?

pyroman3• 18 years ago

It's only been up for 3 days and it hasn't gotten much traffic. I haven't made back the cost of the domain yet. Each click on those ads is a good amount though so I can see breaking even soon.

pyroman3• 18 years ago

I created a link that says "Share this on Twitter" instead of doing an image. I don't know who made that one and I didn't see any others that I like.

I'll see if many people use that.

uniwiz• 18 years ago

http://dnsthru.com Built in few hours to have quick access to dns lookups. If anyone has ideas how to improve it, more than welcome to contribute :)

bigbang• 18 years ago

Looks cool.

The links in A,CNAME etc was confusing, I thought it was more like a search option. i.e to list only CNAME record etc(just like search web,images)

The report bugs/features should ideally be a form. Its very frustrating when clicking on that starts to open a mail client.

Otherwise looks good, pretty fast.

xenophanes• 18 years ago

Maybe it needed more unit tests.

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_IF in /home/1874/domains/ishilaryswankhot.com/html/vote.php on line 11

markbao2• 18 years ago

Just fixed it. Problem when pushing a quick fix. I've been programming Rails for the past few months instead of PHP. Damn semicolons.

simon_kun• 18 years ago

Take the caps out of the URL and look again...

eznet• 18 years ago

Ladies and gentlemen, even though the penis was fake, I kept expecting a second plot twist where we found out that Hillary Swank actually was a boy...

speek• 18 years ago

What about abstracting out the personal details so you can have something like "KellyClarkson.hotornot.com"

That way you can use one domain for all your polling.

tlrobinson2• 18 years ago

How do I see the results? Am I missing something?

jasonlbaptiste7• 18 years ago

it should show you after you vote. have you voted already though?

tlrobinson2• 18 years ago

It just shows me a blank page.

jwesley2• 18 years ago

I think calling this a Web App is a bit generous. It's a poll with 2 options. Have you gotten even a single sign up for the service you are trying to promote? Getting a few thousand people to visit a web page and click a button does not equal business value.

This is a good example of creative thinking, but you should have waited until the experiment ran its course and reported on the results. I'm guessing that the number of sign ups won't be worth the 1 hour spent coding the app. You'd be better off working on something worthwhile and buying some traffic through Adwords.

jasonlbaptiste7• 18 years ago

You're arguing semantics. Call it a novelty, a web app, website, or just a promotional tool. Even in the post, I say that it's a stupid, silly, and catchy pop culture thing. We're not trying to take on the world with ishilaryswankhot.com. Just creating a little bit of buzz, and most importantly enjoying ourselves. Mark enjoyed coding the app. I'm enjoying doing some of the promoting (we just had film.com write it up). You can't put a "per hour" price on that enjoyment. For the love of the game fellas, never forget that.

jamesbritt2• 18 years ago

"You're arguing semantics."

Not really. It helps a discussion of people have a common understanding of terms.

ieatpaste• 18 years ago

Promotion needs to be supportive of the product or at least related - a hot-or-not site isn't appropriate for a site who's target market is family.

jwesley2• 18 years ago

You'll probably get down modded for not telling their cute little "app" is awesome.

jasonlbaptiste7• 18 years ago

I think that's the one negative thing we found. We found it better to take the shot, than not take it though. It's also a pretty fun exercise in app building + PR / buzz.

ninguem2• 18 years ago

Disabling the back button is not cool.

dhouston• 18 years ago

nice job mark & jason -- clever & well executed.

that said, it's the marketing equivalent of a lottery ticket; stunts can be huge (for example, our critical mass at dropbox came from one carefully-crafted digg post) but only if they're aligned with the target audience (which probably isn't the case with hilary swank & family social networking)

jasonlbaptiste7• 18 years ago

thanks drew! It was something that came to us randomly, and we just wanted to build it for fun, while promoting Ramamia at the same time. When we actually do our full launch in February, we're going to work on a stunt that's really relevant to our market.

btw, which digg article are you referring to?

fallentimes• 18 years ago

Hah I remember seeing that and thinking "these guys really know what they're doing".

Dropbox (GDrive Killer) finally launches, plus Linux+iPhone!

http://m.digg.com/software/Dropbox_GDrive_Killer_finally_lau...

And yes I dugg it.

abl• 18 years ago

could you please post the link to the digg article?

sam_in_nyc2• 18 years ago

It's great that you got it up and running so fast, and it's noteworthy the way your marketing it. I like the concept of a "microwebsite" ... they've been popping up all over the place recently ... but I don't like how they are inextricably linked to a blog post about how "this is the way to do it" and "simplicity is key" and all of this other stuff, as if the OP believes he is God's gift to the internet.

"Stop bloating your shit, and you'll be able to do shit fast" -- I'll keep that in mind next time I have an idea that requires two buttons on a webpage. Hopefully I'll manage.

Finally, there is really nothing new about this, other than how timely it was put out. Other than that, it's clearly a gimmick that I wouldn't be too proud of. Imagine if I created a site that said "click here to win a free 6-pack of beer" and then went on in a blog post about how "people like the idea of getting free stuff" and "what people like better, though, is getting free stuff with minimal effort." And then going on and on about it, as if I'm the expert.

I don't know why I'm being so harsh.. this is just what's coming to mind. It's nothing personal, I just don't like this gimmicky stuff, I guess :)

jasonlbaptiste7• 18 years ago

Ha, many thanks for the praises in the beginning. Yeah, ive probably read a bit too much hn + SvN lately. I've got a ton to learn. That's why I come here.

Yeah, it's hard to bloat a 2 button web app up. When I talk about not bloating shit, I mean your overall frame of mind. If youre all about making things complicated, too many features, and a bureaucracy, I doubt you'd be in the mindset to make a simple web app. It's not about capability, it's about clarity.

It's gimmicky, it's fun, and people enjoy it. We've already reaped some pretty damn cool benefits from it (users to ramamia, coverage on the site, and contacts). Like i said in a comment earlier, it's okay to make something out of enjoyment. I think that's my favorite part about the web, you can put something together in an hour for shits and giggles just because you want to.

paul7986• 18 years ago

You guys should spam a link on Hulu within comments for this Office episode. Keep the buzz going.

peregrine• 18 years ago

Could have sent this to a simple zipcode ad and prolly made some money....

jgilliam2• 18 years ago

It seems like the 1 hour to build the web app is sort of irrelevant compared to the hours and hours of emailing and promotion you have to do.

iamdave• 18 years ago

It's cool, it's gimmicky, I think she's hot but I think that blog post was a bit over the top.

sgibat• 18 years ago

I wonder if you could build a business around watching TV for potential fads and making one off sites like this as quickly as possible with adwords slapped on. Think it'd be lucrative?

symptic• 18 years ago

I make a pretty penny designing polls and other landing pages for my clients. Polls are mostly effective on the 'less educated' and 'younger' demographics because most people worth their weight in anything know that it's just a pre-sell on someone's service (usually a scamming affiliate deal for ring tones or acai berry diet pills--which still makes some people millionaires).

Sure, you can create a gimmick similar to this one, but eventually people will want to see the real meat that tells them you can be trusted. If you want sign-ups there are definitely better ways on a per-hour or per-dollar invested basis. But it can be fun every once in a while. Just be careful it won't cut some of your reputation as a worthwhile company away.

Building a Web App in 1 Hour For Promotional Purposes (IsHilarySwankHot.com)

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