<story><title>Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users</title><text>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&apos;m writing this so that we&apos;ll have another perspective. I&apos;m ten days into a slow, frustrating launch, but I am hopeful and excited.&lt;p&gt;Thirteen users have signedup for my hosted PhantomJS web service (BromBone.com). That&apos;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&apos;m up 40. That&apos;s almost half way to 100, then 200, 300, and 400. Soon I&apos;ll have a 1000.&lt;p&gt;That may be a little optimistic. I&apos;ve read so much about gathering interest before launch and talking to customers. But it din&apos;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.&lt;p&gt;Why then am I so positive? I got two sigups overnight. And I hadn&apos;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&apos;re using something I crated! I think if I keep my efforts going, traffic and users will increase.&lt;p&gt;If anyone else out there is excited about getting just a handful of signups, you&apos;re not alone. I&apos;m sure we won&apos;t all make it big, but I think there&apos;s reason to be excited. Just because my &quot;launch&quot; didn&apos;t bring in a flood of users doesn&apos;t mean that I can&apos;t grow the trickle into a stream, and then a river. Or maybe this is denial. Time will tell.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>mixmax</author><text>Oh, I can outdo you!&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;But you know what? We never launched. We ran out of money before we got that far.&lt;p&gt;You launched - I didn&apos;t.&lt;p&gt;Congratulations! You&apos;ve made it further than most.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ChrisNorstrom</author><text>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 &lt;a href=&quot;http://DayOnePP.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://DayOnePP.com&lt;/a&gt;) and didn&apos;t make a single penny of profit. In fact I LOST $300+ dollars somehow. That&apos;s how bad I am at sales (and account management apparently). Ya&apos;ll got further than I did. I think I belong in Product Design &amp;#38; Development and away from money.&lt;p&gt;Chaddeshon your landing page doesn&apos;t have a call to action above the fold. You&apos;re missing out on a lot of signups like that. (I can design but I couldn&apos;t sell ice water to people in hell)</text></comment>
<story><title>Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users</title><text>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&apos;m writing this so that we&apos;ll have another perspective. I&apos;m ten days into a slow, frustrating launch, but I am hopeful and excited.&lt;p&gt;Thirteen users have signedup for my hosted PhantomJS web service (BromBone.com). That&apos;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&apos;m up 40. That&apos;s almost half way to 100, then 200, 300, and 400. Soon I&apos;ll have a 1000.&lt;p&gt;That may be a little optimistic. I&apos;ve read so much about gathering interest before launch and talking to customers. But it din&apos;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.&lt;p&gt;Why then am I so positive? I got two sigups overnight. And I hadn&apos;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&apos;re using something I crated! I think if I keep my efforts going, traffic and users will increase.&lt;p&gt;If anyone else out there is excited about getting just a handful of signups, you&apos;re not alone. I&apos;m sure we won&apos;t all make it big, but I think there&apos;s reason to be excited. Just because my &quot;launch&quot; didn&apos;t bring in a flood of users doesn&apos;t mean that I can&apos;t grow the trickle into a stream, and then a river. Or maybe this is denial. Time will tell.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>mixmax</author><text>Oh, I can outdo you!&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;But you know what? We never launched. We ran out of money before we got that far.&lt;p&gt;You launched - I didn&apos;t.&lt;p&gt;Congratulations! You&apos;ve made it further than most.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>philjackson</author><text>Can we hear more?</text></comment>