Ask HN: Need advice on growing my 2 month startup

[coryl]

Hello friends,

I've always received good feedback from this board, so I'd like to ask for your help! My partner and I are a couple months full time into our startup, Howl.com. Its a social bookmarking/linkblogging service. Growth has been slow and steady, we have a few hundred users.

We've made some improvements to increase retention a bit, such as adding "reputation score" (basically game mechanics), a leaderboard, email notifications for comments/reblogs/subscriptions, and lots of little things.

However, we aren't getting much exposure to new people. I don't think our idea is "novel" enough to get blogger attention. We think moving into more of a game type of site may help with that. But otherwise, we need to increase traffic and signups, but its hard to do on zero budget.

Particularly hard is getting some sort of viral loop going on. Right now, we prompt them to share their new page with friends immediately after signup. We also allow them to cross post to facebook/twitter whenever they post on our service, linking back to our site. I'm not sure this is enough. Where else could we become more viral and get people to show off their accounts?

Getting fresh exposure to new source is difficult. Occasionally we get a nice blog post, which is really helpful for driving signups. I'd like to get more blog coverage, but again, I don't think we're buzzworthy enough yet to get attention. Should we implement more game-like features in order to differentiate, as well as make ourselves more attention worthy for bloggers?

Thanks a ton for your help, any tips/advice/comments are appreciated!

[asimjalis]

It seems to be a lot more focused on publishing than on reading. Maybe the main howl.com page could list the most popular links or something else that the casual reader would be interested in.

The jump from non-participant to publisher seems too big. I went to the site. Poked around and just walked away. Instead if there was a way to turn from non-participant to consumer, and then to publisher/producer, that would make it easier to get engaged.

So, make browsing easier.

If you consider sites like HN, or Reddit, Twitter, they make it easy to just consume for a while without contributing.

Another question: Do you have an account on howl? What's the URL for your link-blogging page?

Another feature to enable browsing: a way to search for people. So suppose I visit the site. I want to see if people are publishing links related to Python or astronomy, if there was a way to search for these keywords and find the link publisher that would lead to more people staying.

[coryl]

Good points. You are right about being able to consume before registering. We added some popular users on the homepage to help out with that, we'll add a feed for popular/latest posts as well.

I have an account on Howl, its http://www.howl.com/cory

There is a search actually, but you currently need to be logged in to use it. I think we can port that to our homepage as well, along with the leaderboard so its accessible to everyone. Thanks for the tips!

[zachwaugh]

I like the idea, but I think the main issue is design. It's pretty hard to figure out what's going on, and the interface is inconsistent. Example, on a user's page, each link they posted isn't in the same position, they're staggered down the page. That makes it difficult to scan someone's posts to find something interesting. I would say if the posts are going to have images, make sure they're all the same size, or maybe have them float right so all the link titles are aligned left. In the same vein, each user has a different size/shape avatar, they should all be, say 48x48 square for example. There's a lot of those little details throughout the site that doesn't make for a great user experience.

Also, I think you need to switch the focus to reading, as others mentioned. Interesting content is what's going to get people coming back. So the front page should show the most popular links instead of people. I actually think this page (http://www.howl.com/explore/all) should be the home page. I think that would make a much more compelling first experience, and you should be able to get there without needing to sign up. It's simple and you instantly get a feeling for what the site is.

[AmberShah]

1) My first reaction to the site was text overload. It feels really cluttered. I'm not a designer so I probably don't have the most specific suggestions, but I would say that there's too many colors and font sizes. The clutter also sharply contrasts with the "clean" white background and styling.

2) If I wanted to microblog or share links, I'm not sure why I should use this rather than Twitter, Tumblr or Posterous?

[andyhin]

Hi, Amber. Thanks for the comment.

1) I tend to agree with you. There is a lot of text, especially on the homepage. We'll work on cleaning that up.

2) Howl is focused on sharing links. I use the services you mentioned, as well as Facebook. And although I can share links on these services, Howl is quite a different experience. Perhaps this is a sign that we need to describe ourselves better.

[acid_bath]

> we prompt them to share their new page with friends immediately after signup

Does this actually work? I've seen a few places that do this but I've always assumed it's probably a poor performer (and makes your site looks spammy) because people haven't had a chance to evaluate if they want to tell their friends about your site.

[andyhin]

Yeah, there was actually an article on this - I'll see if I can dig it up later.

It evaluated the performance between asking them to refer right after sign-up vs. after they have tried the product for a while.

The message we currently use is something along the lines of "Now that you have a brand new link blog, it's time to get an audience", or something like that.

[coryl]

Clickable: http://www.howl.com

Examples of real users and how they use it:

http://www.howl.com/EduNut

http://www.howl.com/phil-schaillee

[coryl]

Thanks for the suggestions, they are spot on. Keep them coming!

However, a lot of them are UX/design related. Does anyone have suggestions on how to generate more exposure / traffic with regards to what we do? Thanks

[vinalk]

How about creating a ff/Chrome plugin to share a link with a quick write-up of 50 words.