Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users

[chaddeshon]

There are many stories on HN about great product launches that get money from tons of people on the first day. If we hear about slow launches, the store comes years later, after the product is a success. I'm writing this so that we'll have another perspective. I'm ten days into a slow, frustrating launch, but I am hopeful and excited.

Thirteen users have signedup for my hosted PhantomJS web service (BromBone.com). That's a lie. Four of those 13 accounts are test accounts I created. Why I am so excited about these nine accounts? I have nine people who have decided to take my service for a test drive! The great thing about that is that nine is only one less than ten. Ten doubled is 20. Find another 20 and I'm up 40. That's almost half way to 100, then 200, 300, and 400. Soon I'll have a 1000.

That may be a little optimistic. I've read so much about gathering interest before launch and talking to customers. But it din't go as smoothly as I would hope. Posts to mailing lists take me longer to craft than I would like. The discussion is positive and generates some traffic. But honestly it is a trickle compared to what I need. I posted twice to HN, but no one clicked the upvote button.

Why then am I so positive? I got two sigups overnight. And I hadn't done any new marketing the day before. My traffic is tiny. But every time I do a little piece of marketing, I see a spike. The spike goes away, but it leaves behind a residual traffic increase. Additionally, the nine users I have are actually playing around with the service. They're using something I crated! I think if I keep my efforts going, traffic and users will increase.

If anyone else out there is excited about getting just a handful of signups, you're not alone. I'm sure we won't all make it big, but I think there's reason to be excited. Just because my "launch" didn't bring in a flood of users doesn't mean that I can't grow the trickle into a stream, and then a river. Or maybe this is denial. Time will tell.

[joelg87]

In the whole first month of Buffer, we had less than 100 signups. For comparison, we now have 560,000 users (2.5 years later). We now sign up 100 people within a couple hours. It amazes me to think about it.

I had a previous startup that also started slow, but never really changed. The key difference between the two, was retention. So I would highly recommend anyone who's getting started to closely watch retention. Does anyone keep using the product into their second week after sign up? That's the first thing I'd focus on with what I know now.

[shortformblog]

I think what really helped you guys is that you've always been earnest and have done a good job becoming thought leaders as bloggers. People could learn a lot from the way the Buffer team grew out its product.

You guys created a really good template for slow-growth. Props.

[adambenayoun]

Hey Joel, I'm interested to know if the first 100 users stuck with your product over time or you had to figure out how to do retention over time.

[switz]

I recently hacked together a product that aligns with buffer's philosophy, but is inherently different. I have about 70 users, but zero paid users and not much activity. I've been ignoring it from a development standpoint in favor of other projects. Meanwhile I still use the site daily. I hope I can put some more time into it, but for now I'm just letting it scratch a personal itch. If anyone is interested: https://tweezer.io

[chaddeshon]

Thanks for this helpful and encouraging post.

As I was right this the main question I had was how do I know the difference between "Nobody wants what your selling" and "You need to do a better job marketing"? Retention is a great answer to the question.

[rayhano]

Retention vs sign ups. Interesting.

Are we talking LinkedIn style link-bait and endless 'notification' emails?

Or Dropbox/Mailbox style gamification to get more free by being 'part of the club'?

[mixmax]

Oh, I can outdo you!

Many years ago I did an upstart that was a combination of delicious and facebook, using bayesian filtering to locate links and people you might be interested in from what you posted yourself. Incredibly clever product. Before Google had even thought of pagerank. We got funding, we had great engineers, and I was the CEO.

But you know what? We never launched. We ran out of money before we got that far.

You launched - I didn't.

Congratulations! You've made it further than most.

[ChrisNorstrom]

Pffffft. Oh Please... You got funding. That means you at least convinced someone to trust you with money. I sold 250 calendars (147 on Fab.com, 103 on http://DayOnePP.com) and didn't make a single penny of profit. In fact I LOST $300+ dollars somehow. That's how bad I am at sales (and account management apparently). Ya'll got further than I did. I think I belong in Product Design & Development and away from money.

Chaddeshon your landing page doesn't have a call to action above the fold. You're missing out on a lot of signups like that. (I can design but I couldn't sell ice water to people in hell)

[shelf]

MixMax, as in the cakes? You wonderful human being. Those cakes rock my world.

[philjackson]

Can we hear more?

[maxk42]

You still got the source?

[jf22]

In running we say it doesn't matter how fast you went or how far you ran.

You still lapped everybody on the couch.

[tg3]

My advice: stop advertising PhantomJS and let me sign up for your service. Why did I have to scroll down 80% of the page to get to a sign up button? And nothing on your page convinced me that I should.

I am in your target market - I build websites for a living, and I hate testing in multiple browsers. Convince me, in one sentence, why this is a good idea, and give me the option of doing something about it.

Good luck.

[vellum]

This. It's a wall of text. I guarantee you, 90+% of people who go to your page are going to hit the back button long before they finish getting to the “sign up” button.

-Condense the value proposition into a few sentences, or better yet, one.

-Use pictures, include screenshots or drawings of what it does. People don’t like reading a wall of text.

-Use multiple sign up buttons. Top, bottom, and between the text. See how http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/ does it.

[fosk]

I was to lazy to scroll the entire page, so thank you for mentioning that there is a Sign up button at the end. To the op, please remove that block of text that definitely kills conversion, show an example instead and let me play with it.

[ahi]

Definitely too much copy before the sell, though long form can work in some cases. Probably too many price points with meaningless (to me) names. Maybe 3 with a lower priced entry? But a/b a/b a/b if you have the traffic. Cross browser issues is probably a topic ripe for blog posts. Charge for the testing service, give advice on identifying and mitigating problems for free.

[gingerlime]

The thing I missed the most is knowing which browsers / OS combinations are supported.

Can you specify using the API that you want a screenshot in IE9 or evaluate javascript with Firefox version 18 on Mac?

[nate]

I know how hard this can be. I've been doing startup stuff for 7 years. And it's still awfully painful. I'd encourage teaching to find an audience.

I've been blogging and blogging and blogging. I ended up giving that up at one point. I thought I had more important things to do. I thought it wasn't growing enough. But that was foolish.

The biggest thing that's changed a lot of things for me in the last year is simply sticking to a schedule of writing once per week. It all eventually adds up. It eventually opens up new doors.

It doesn't happen over night either. But the audience that finds you tends to stick with you. And tends to help market all the new projects.

What about creating BromBone.com was hard that you figured out? Any hosting problems that you solved? Any bugs in PhantomJS? Anything you can open source? Did you learn anything about what kind of mailing list post gets more traffic than others? Learn anything about making collecting signups easier?

I continue to collect tons and tons of ideas as I go through life that I feel were hard and I figured out or were interesting. A bunch of people just pass on when I write about them. Meh. But then every now and then, something spreads like crazy. An open source project here. A motivating post here. And years later you find, a lot of awesome stuff has built up. People following you. People wanting to see your next project and spread it.

Doing what we're doing is a career. It isn't a lottery. It isn't going to happen in one launch. It's something that we should expect to get better and better at. Forever.

> If you launch and no one notices, launch again. We launched 3 times. - Brian Chesky, Founder of AirBnB https://twitter.com/bchesky/status/312438036929576962

[pd_drawexpress]

Seven years is a long time. I am pretty on the same timeframe as well. I took a chance to redo everything over and this time with 5 months I have already launched my new product. My HN launch is kinda depressing as it just gave me 6 visits LOL. That traffic graph is my new motivation factor. I love to improve my writing to write blog like you but for now I am sticking to similar goal and that is to release an upgrade to my product every week.

[iamwil]

Do you think it's better to blog on your own personal blog, or to blog on the product's blog page?

I figured you'd want SEO on the product's blog page, but on the other hand, if it tanks, or you end up doing something else, you'd want the SEO on your own blog, right?

[TallboyOne]

Right off the bat.

I'm kind of buzzed so take my advice as twice as important related to usability

No pictures = not interested (for 'scripts' this is okay.. but if its something that you expect users to sign up to it must have imagery).

If its a script that you put into your own app, then make a video to show how it works.

You need a much better summary at the top of exactly what it does and why i should sign up.

You use ALL your prime real estate explaining what a headless browser is. I already know what it is, and lose interest immediately.

just my .02, now I will go back for real and look a second time in detail but I wanted to give you my raw first impressions.

===

At second glance, your call to actions are terrible (raw but honest, I want you to succeed).

My eyes move around the page like a dead rat rolling around in the wind.

look at examples of places that do it well:

https://stripe.com/

https://bundlescout.com/

http://www.discourse.org/

Your signup button is literally -100/10. I can't rate it worse. I looked around how to sign up (I actually tried and still couldnt see it)

[zenocon]

Disclaimer: I'm a hardcore phantomjs user. Add a service that scrapes results and I think you'll be overwhelmed with interest. Scraping is a pain. It takes a special niche talent -- but a ton of people want it. Let people submit what information they want off a page -- you write the script that does it for them. Pay as you go, etc. If it saves people time, they will pay for it. I do full-time consulting -- building out software systems for people, but I could just as easily keep myself 100% busy just building phantom/casper scrapers for people that have no clue how to do it -- and I'm not talking about stuff that falls into the "be evil" bucket. You're just building web services where there are none.

[kgen]

Just curious, but isn't this what ScraperWiki does?

[chaddeshon]

I'll be in touch.

[ryanio]

I find it odd that the hacker community likes to completely disregard non-technical people[1]. It's situations exactly like this where it would bring a huge amount of value to have someone dedicated to marketing/community outreach and evangelism for the product.

Even though it's a technical project, explained well and with patience even the most non-technical person could wrap their head around it and develop a plan to get it to market.

Being both a dev and a marketer, I've found there are two, entirely separate brainstorming mindsets: product design and development, and product marketing and execution. It is incredibly taxing and inefficient to frequently switch between these two mindsets, which is why I believe most developed companies evolve into having two distinct departments: product development and product marketing. I'm working on my own startup now in RoR doing exactly this (i.e. trying to switch between the two roles frequently) with much frustration. Luckily I have a great business partner that is entirely focused on strategy that can knock some sense into me when I become too bogged down in the development/coding thought pattern.

Going to a business school with essentially zero CS majors, I personally know a dozen people that would be interested in jumping in on a project like this, not even for the lucrative rewards of success but the experience of working on such a project and jumping into the tech world.

Just some thoughts...

[1]: Most recent example I've stumbled upon: "No marketers/MBAs/designers/unicorns/whatever." Source: http://hackerho.us/

[Kanbab]

The ultimate is when you get a marketer who understands what APIs are used for. For example, I can say that the OP should probably consider pasting his sample code higher up on the page in a more prominent position. Show the end user he can succeed easily with the product and he won't mind clicking the sign-up button. Marketers these days also need to know where you can find these users. They should have an account here, SO, SlashDot, r/programming, Quora and so on.

[chaddeshon]

I'd love to have someone dedicated to to marketing/community outreach and evangelism. If someone with those skills wants to join me on the journey, send me an email (in profile).

[L0j1k]

Yeah... You couldn't pay me the 1700/month to live in that house. Sounds like a bunch of poseurs and wannabes that need help paying the rent so they can play WoW all day. "No work from home" ... ? That's like, half the hackers out there. Whatever it is, that place is sketch city (capital of the united states of douche).

[c16]

I once read 'If you build it, they won't come'. I think this is the case for most people. Getting people to your website or service is the hard part, not the development. We're all in the same boat here. For a product such as yours, I can imagine going to events, posting on relevant forums etc... would be your best bet at getting more users. Best of luck with your product, what you currently have looks promising.

[t0]

They won't come. At least not automatically. It requires some effort on your part, even if it's a tiny bit.

I love that quote. Is this the original source? http://jasonlbaptiste.com/featured-articles/if-you-build-it-...

[downandout]

Good luck to you. Not getting a single upvote for new stories on HN seems to be the norm, at least for me, so I wouldn't worry about that very much.

What you should focus on right now is whether or not the users you have actually use and like the app. If they do, then you've created something that people like and you should focus on growth. If they are not really using it after registration, then you should focus on improving the product until the usage rate goes up to acceptable levels.

[vict]

My startup in 2008 spent 3 years in development limbo and never launched. My next one in 2011 launched with similar numbers to what you described here and we eventually scrapped it because we had no way to effectively promote it. We launched a new site in 2012 and we now have over 7 million unique visitors a month to our site and hundreds of partnerships with other services. The biggest change we made was focusing on building partnerships in the industry. We never went to any conferences or sales trips, everything was via email introductions. Try to find a way to make yourself useful to people who have distribution channels, at least that worked for our individual case anyhow.

[citruspi]

Hey, I'm going to be in the same position soon. :)

I haven't launched yet, and while I feel that there's a large audience for the service I plan to provide, I feel like the majority of my potential users are content with what they have right now.

Either way, great job. I'm not sure if I could be so optimistic. Besides talking to potential users, have you tried advertising/promotions/etc?

Edit:

As justhw said, a demo or two and screen shot wouldn't be a terrible idea.

And while this may not make a great difference, add a favicon and change the title.

The title is currently set to "A headless browser as a service built on PhantomJS - BromBone"

So, in my sea of tabs, all I see is "A head" which isn't as helpful when trying to find the tab as "BromBone."

[rethaw]

First of all, congrats on actually shipping. You've already accomplished more than 99% of people.

Second of all, you're actually charging money for your product. That's awesome. When just one of those users converts to a paid plan you'll already be making more money than any of those hyped social startups with big launches that never turn a dollar profit.

Kudos.

[cubicle67]

Re Pricing - I'd be interested in being able to buy a number of "credits" for this service instead of paying a recurring monthly fee. Something like $20 for 500 requests that I can then use anytime over the next 12 months.

Your service looks interesting but also something I'm likely to use a lot for a few days then possibly not at all for a while so I'd be reluctant to pay a monthly fee for it. A "credit pack" or pay-per-use ability would be a great alternative

[ryanjm33]

agreed

[slig]

Clickable link: http://www.brombone.com/

[TheHippo]

It's down... :-(

[troymc]

I checked it out to see if it's something that interests me.

It took me a while to "get it" (i.e. understand what it does). The aha moment came with the sentence, "It doesn't display the page on a monitor."

If you can, try to get to the explanation sooner, using simple words. I think I'd seen the phrase "headless browser" before but I'd forgotten what it meant.

[adambenayoun]

You posted twice on HN and no one up voted you - posted this 'Tell HN' and this time you're on the front page, I'm sure that a bunch of interested hackers will visit your website now and register with your service. Keep telling the world about your service, find out what works better and do it again.

[csense]

> no one up voted you

This is a problem with HN. I've submitted 6 stories with this account, all of which seem like they're definitely interesting material highly relevant to HN's audience, and rather similar to stories that have made the front page.

But they've gotten at most 3 upvotes, as of this writing. Heck, I have single comments that get more upvotes than all of my submissions combined.

I don't want to think about having the success or failure of a product riding on HN's ability to find my submission and upvote it.

If you want to personally do something about this, next time you read through the front page and still want to procrastinate, look at the New feed, and upvote some stories that don't already have a big group of people looking at them!

[mkr-hn]

I passed it along to 0-7000 people, depending on how things play out in the noise of G+ and Twitter. It's not something I have a use for, but it looks interesting.

[chaddeshon]

Thank you.

[netvarun]

As a former PhantomJS user, I certainly would have used you guys. I went through a lot of shit trying to set it up (this is phantomjs v1.3 i am talking about - mainly xvfb - which kept sending shitty screenshots). I am pretty sure you have a good market out there.

My suggestions: 1. Change your name - since you are doing a hosted phantomjs browser as a service, try to have either the word phantom or browser in your name. 2. Change your design - Go with bootstrap-based template for SaaS apps. 3. Too much content on your page. Cut them down. 4. Spin off couple of specialized tasks as separate services - screenshot capture and web scraping. 5. Quite a bunch of phantomjs and casper.js user groups/mailing lists. Actively participate in them.

Good luck!

[djunod]

Application Error An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. Please try again in a few moments.

If you are the application owner, check your logs for details.

[calebgilbert]

I get the same thing when I go to BromBone.com - an error message...

[chaddeshon]

Oh no! Heading home to fix it now.

[Sgoettschkes]

I looked up your page (I'm a web developer, interested in testing, using zombiejs right now), and there are two things. First: Way to much text. Second: I don't care what you use as an underlying software stack. Tell me that you parse the whole page, executing js and everything, and get the result back to me. Thats your message. And then add some text somewhere to tell me that I can write phantom.js tests which are executed against the page.

What I really don't know is why I need a phantomjs web worker. I mean if I am that deep into testing, I have a CI which does this for me. No need to add another external service to the stack. I'm also worried that 1000 requests for $29 are a little much? I don't know about phantomjs, but zombiejs was installed in way under a minute (using npm). So while you are saving me a few minutes for installing phantom.js (doesn't look like rocket science to me), you are taking my time for integrating your API and you are charging me?

I think by refining your messages and thinking about what exactly it is you are selling you might have a decent service there.