huwshimi

We're going to be doing 50% off all plans on Friday for https://flockmetrics.com/ using the code FRIDAY16.

https://flockmetrics.com/

User signup/acquisition analytics for SaaS startups. Always open to entertaining offers from someone excited about the user lifecycle space.

Yeah, that's interesting. As you say, the pricing was based on looking at the numbers of signups per month for SaaS startups.

How to make that work for non SaaS startups, I'm not yet sure.

The pricing is based on the number of signups per month, so that's 1000 new users per month. Do you feel like that pricing wouldn't work for your situation?

I have been in exactly the same position a number of times over the years. One day I realised that the reason I gave up promoting them is that I never really knew how my marketing efforts were doing so it always felt a bit futile.

This actually inspired my current project, which is all about measuring the results of your marketing (http://flockmetrics.com).

I think several things are helpful here. Understanding the key benefits of your product and figuring out who will most benefit from those features.

Once you know that you need to figure out how to explain your product in a way that those people can understand how it helps them and then you need to find those people.

I personally have found once I've been through that process and can see that I have a product that will make peoples lives easier it motives me to want to get the product to those people.

When I was doing the beta testing for http://flockmetrics.com I was looking for people with SaaS startups and I ended up using a few different approaches.

I contacted people I knew personally that were involved in startups.

I asked a friend who was involved in a startup incubator to email the incubator's founders mailing list asking for beta testers.

I posted on the @flockmetrics Twitter feed and my own personal one.

I posted the site on http://betalist.com.

I cold contacted some people I thought would especially find it useful.

In the end I found it much easier to get feedback from those I had up front personal contact with.

I know someone building a tool with https://api.ai/ integrating with Facebook chat and other APIs. It's been working well from what I hear. I just noticed it's now owned by Google.

Edit: he also just suggested https://wit.ai/ which is now owned by Facebook.

It might also be worth checking out http://sourced.tech/ as they seem to be doing something similar.

I know of sourced.tech as they contacted me about a position recently, but the job they contacted me about wasn't relevant enough to my skills and experience.

Your competitive advantage will probably be in the quality of the target lists you create. If you can nail that on a broad scale you'll have something with a lot of potential (this is probably also the hardest problem).

I'd consider starting by running some experiments for how to create relevant target lists.

I've been working on this for a little while. Flockmetrics provides signup analytics, the idea being that if you can measure how people are signing up you can begin to understand why and focus your time and energy on areas that will result in more users.

Feedback welcome!

You should check out this Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/753230753/packed-pixels...

They're making a portable high res multi-monitor setup that looks like it might suit you.

The home page has lost a lot of noise. I think they've done a good job of identifying the main reasons people would ever end up at the home page: sign in, sign up or search. The sign up and sign in forms used to be a click away.

I think the new homepage has lost a bit of the personality that Twitter once had and I think they'll find that people have trouble understanding what exactly the bar of user avatars is all about.

One of the great things about HN is how organic it is in nature. HN is loosely about startups and hacking, but really it's about what people in the startup/hacking world find interesting.

HN is self moderating (or rather community moderated). If people don't like certain posts they won't vote for them. If HN starts banning websites because some people don't like them then it takes the power away from the community and then you are on a slippery slope of moderated content and a world of approval conflicts and power struggles.

You or I might not agree with every post on HN but we have the power to not vote, or if you've contributed enough to downvote.

Of course there are always exceptions. Spam and illegal content are examples of this. But then we have the ability to flag those posts.

A moderated HN is one I would not use.

I've find this correlation is even higher for designers.

Inkscape (http://inkscape.org/) is a very complete open source vector graphics editor (similar to Illustrator).

It has probably the best set of node editing tools of any vector editor I've used. I now use it exclusively for illustration, web design etc.

There will always be a free version. There will at some point be a paid version with more upload space etc. (more info here: http://reverbapp.com/help/#how-much-does-it-cost).

I run a little app called Reverb (http://reverbapp.com) if you're interested.

I believe it is included in the arc source package. You can get it from: http://arclanguage.org/install (there's a file in the .tar called news.arc). I do not know what licence it is released under however.

Works fine for me (http://twitter.com/#!/places/247f43d441defc03)

You need to figure out what is important to you right now. How much does the money mean to you? Do you need to have higher, more stable income? Can you live with a slightly lower income for a couple of years? Are the benefits a deal-breaker? Obviously getting experience is your priority and it sounds like both will give you that (though it sounds like company 1 will give you more of the experience you are after).

One thing you didn't mention with the two companies is possibility for promotion. If you don't know I'd recommend talking to each company about room for growth and opportunities to take on different roles.

There was a thread about this a while ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1287909

The blog post that thread links to is worth a read.

I personally do some Django development on a netbook and have found it excellent, especially while commuting. I have not had a problem with being under powered (I don't know how Android development would compare) and the only downside has been the lack of screen realestate. Thankfully I bought a netbook with a reasonable keyboard size (Asus Eee PC S101).

I believe you can just leave out the http:// altogether and Twitter will still pick up the link.

I imagine (with my limited knowledge of such things) that there was some kind of DNS transfer which means that it might take a little longer for it to work for some people.

According to their blog the migration is complete and it has just started working for me now too.

I've been redesigning the homepage (one of the many new things that need to be deployed). As monitor resolutions get higher I think font sizes will go up (there's certainly a trend that way). I'll have a bit more of a think about what's acceptable. Thanks for bringing that up.

Trying to get a bunch of features released for http://verbapp.com/. Just launched http://hellohype.com/ and need to start getting the word out about it. Also need to release an iPhone app I made. Rebuilding my blog (using HTML5 and a whole bunch of fun new things). Getting the plans together with a co-founder for a secret new startup. Designing a whole new brand/site design for a current startup (and sorting out some founder issues with it). Oh and my day job (UI/UX designer). I think that's about it (apart from a bunch of tiny projects, like a font I'm halfway through creating).

>what do you mean "tightly coupled with the app itself"?

I mean that the developer needs to set up rules for what gets displayed for the A/B test and then track the results. I guess you could create some kind of API they could hook into for this.

I may not notice replies here, so feel free to email me about this (email in profile).

> I'm happy to learn a new language but want to learn the "right one" and also have reservations about starting a project while still being new to a language.

There really is no such thing as the right language, but you can find a language (and framework) that suits you well.

For me the language and framework that I work the best with is Python and Django (with jQuery for frontend).

I would recommend picking a couple of languages and frameworks and try building a small project (or even a prototype of your app) in each one. That way you'll probably figure out what works for you and if the framework is going to meet your needs.

You seem hesitant to just pick something and go for it, so this way at least you can try a few thing out before you launch into it and find out halfway through that you don't like the way things work. It might seem like it will take a bit longer this way, but buy jumping in with one language and framework it'll only be quicker if you fluke it and happen to pick something you really like.

At appears this may have been resolved (at least for me). Thanks for getting in touch with them.

Here are my thoughts on registration forms:

You should always have absolute minimum number of fields required to start using the service.

Don't have any optional fields (there are plenty of better places to ask for that information).

If there is information required to use certain parts of the service then ask for it when they want to use that part.

http://tumblr.com and http://posterous.com examples of this. I'm actually a fan of the single password input too... I implemented a similar form recently: http://hellohype.com/accounts/register, only with a username field instead of a url field.

I'm not a big fan of going to the extreme of Instapaper though. They don't require a password at all, so a malicious user can access and modify another user's account.

What do you want to do exactly? Do you want to build an app to help people do A/B testing?

It might be worth trying to get in touch with someone like Patrick McKenzie. His username here is patio11 and his blog is http://www.kalzumeus.com. He's done a lot of writing about A/B testing and has even released a testing framework: http://www.bingocardcreator.com/abingo. I'm sure he has a lot of thoughts that would be very beneficial (I'm sure there are other people around here that could impart their knowledge too).

The nature of A/B testing often requires things to be pretty tightly coupled with the app itself. If you're providing a service for this it'd be interesting to see how you overcome that.