Very Successful Launch on Hacker News then... nothing
Hey guys, almost two months ago I published my project MockMechanics on Show Hacker News and it was very well received. It's a way to create mechanical devices and interact with them. It's very intuitive and easy to build things and all with no code. You can literally create tetris with no code in half an hour. I've used it to create games, musical instruments that you can actually play, machines that implement sorting algorithms and people really seem to like it. And I created a YouTube channel to demonstrate/promote it. I got 700+ points on HN and I was the top post there for quite a while. In a couple of days I got almost 200 subscribers on my youtube channel and 7k+ views, thousands of downloads, and every single person tells me it's a great program. The words "the next minecraft" and "minecraft killer" have been thrown around a few times. I mean they were probably exagerating but still. For a while I got quite a big head, strutting around like I was 10 feet tall.
But.
Now the interest has dried up as far as I can tell. I barely get 100 views on my videos and I don't see people actually using the program. Am I doing something wrong? I'm a decent hacker but I have very little experience with promotion/marketing. I knew it wouldn't be overnight success but I figured if people were that interested they would keep following up on what I'm doing. Am I being naive? Is this just the way it is? Is pushing on the YouTube strategy the right way to go, maybe YouTube is just the wrong channel to promote my program? I'm thinking in making it multiplayer when I've implemented avatar mode (please watch the video on the website) and publish it on Steam. Should I aim for a product hunt release? Maybe this is perfectly normal and I'm just some whiny guy that wants success right now, without putting the work in first? Any books or courses I should look up? Try every channel I can think of and be patient? Any light you can shed on this would be much appreciated.
It's a cool idea, but who is it for? Who's your target user? I can't work that out from the website, and marketing will always be an uphill struggle if you don't know who your target users are.
A very good point. I have two kinds of possible users in mind, one is the people who like to build beautiful/interesting things to show others, I'm thinking of something like art sites where people try to outdo each other and get on the top of the lists by posting what they have created. The other is a player of an open ended game, where people build the levels and challenges themselves for others to play and improve. For the first I'm thinking of creating a public gallery/forum on my website and the second a Steam game release. If I could merge the two, a game where people build what they want, create levels etc to impress others and get noticed and that location in the 3d shared world shows some ads, I could capitalize on that, not to mention that some "neighborhoods" would become hotter than others so there's the possibility of creating a market for virtual real state and I would make a percentage on that. But I get your point, I envision my program being used for all sorts of things, but for starters I should narrow the exact user I want and target them with features and marketing. Is that right?
Yes that’s the idea. For your first point about creating ranking boards, I think that would be valuable but only once you’ve got an established user base. Because in and of itself, it wouldn’t attract people if they didn’t like the product. Building that feature should not come ahead of work to acquire/retain users.
Questions you could ask ago work towards figuring out your target user: how old are they? How often do they play games? What genre of games do they play? On what platforms? Where do they congregate online?
I think a game like this could do well by sharing some wacky memey content (Untitled Goose Game did a great job of this).
On a separate note, this doesn’t really sound like it’s in the vision of where you want to take your product but there’s a huge market for educational games. Branding this as a game to teach children about mechanics/engineering through engaging play could be a big opportunity if you target parents.
"On a separate note, this doesn’t really sound like it’s in the vision of where you want to take your product but there’s a huge market for educational games."
Well, it's not the main thrust but I'm open to it, in fact I could pitch it as a easy introduction to programming which should be in even more demand than mechanics. I know it doesn't sound like it but using the program is a lot like programming, coming up with submachines to solve subproblems then combining them to solve the bigger problem, debugging when things don't go right and so on. It's just entirely visual/physical programming. If you like, watch my latest video where I create the bubble sort algorithm with MM and you'll see what I mean.
Felipe, entra no nosso telegram para brasileiros que talvez alguém possa dar dicas uteis: https://t.me/joinchat/BK3yHk468gSq1OuvJTRh9w
Pronto, valeu pelo invite, devo dizer um oi e falar o que que eu fiz?
sim fica à vontade, se apresenta la!
You commented on my "Things That Didn't Kill My App" post, so let me remind you that one of the things in that post was a Product Hunt launch 😊
Remember that it's overwhelmingly unlikely for one event to make or break your business. What gets you there is consistent effort to make it better and get it in front of people.
You're right, in part that's what I'm doing here, I asked this post to get ideas of what to try next, not because I'm throwing in the towel! If it takes years for me to succeed so be it, but I'll bitch and moan the whole time :D
Hey - I was in a similar boat. My project linkdrop.co launched on hacker news and sat at #2 for about half the day.
It was super exciting and got about 450 signups (I had posted it on a whim and hadn't set up GA yet so I don't know actual page views) + tons of emails of support and interest.
For about 12 hours I felt like I was on my way to being famous. Another 12 hours in I ended up with roughly 5 MAUs of that initial 350 signups. About a month later that dropped to around 2 before those users also tapered off.
This is all to say that being high on HackerNews is a fun notch in your belt, but the audience you reach is incredibly broad so you end up with 1000s of worthless impressions and signups of people who are just window shopping.
Don't try every channel you can think of. Take some time to figure out who your target audience is and figure out how to reach them. Decide what a "conversion" means for your product (for me it's when a user pays for the service), then keep track of conversion rates from each channel and use that to make adjustments to your marketing strategy.
For me, my target audience kinda fell in my lap. I got featured in a handful of productivity newsletters over the course of the next year. The users from these newsletters turned into regular users at a much higher rate than hacker news users, and a handful of them ended up being my first paid customers.
Getting to the top of hacker news is still an accomplishment (although I admit I'm super biased on that), but yes it takes a lot of patience to get things rolling.
Best of luck!
Thanks, I love your point about keeping track of conversions from each channel and making adjustments. I just started reading Great by Choice yesterday, and one thing that really stuck for me (from the 10% I read so far anyway) is this scientific approach, measure, make decisions based on data, this really appeals to me. Yeah, I'll keep trying what you guys are saying and be patient. It's just the project itself took 2.5 years, so you can understand how I thought I had made it, but it's probably going to be a couple more years to get the promotion right. I do think it will work eventually, I am offering value, I use it myself and think it's super fun, so others might too.
If I were you I would:
For your website - it felt a bit cramped with all the bold text on the homepage, try to add more breathing space and list/showcase the killer features, when someone lands on your homepage think of it as your pitch time, and you only have maybe a few seconds of attention before they move on, think what message you want to get across most. Only use bold to highlight where you want to guide your visitors attention to.
Use bootstrap or tailwindCSS to make it lean, clean and mobile responsive.
Don’t be put off by the fact that it’s all quieted down now, remember PH / YC brings mostly individuals like you together who want to showcase their creations, so not necessarily the ultimate audience you’re looking for, be persistent and keep going!
Thanks, some very good ideas. I especially liked what you mentioned about integration with unity. It reminded me of an idea I had a while ago but didn't pursue. I could offer the option for people to create vehicles, interactive buildings, weapons and so on in MM and then import them to unity as assets. I could have MM free, but to use the devices in commercial games you pay a fee, and there's already a large unity community so if I make a tutorial video on how to use it I know exactly who to pitch. About the website, people already mentioned it could be simpler, use less javascript to be faster etc, I'll do that when I can. Thanks for the tips!
Np. For inspiration: https://startbootstrap.com/ or https://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.0/examples/, good luck and keep us posted!
Hey Felipe, this is just the nature of being "Featured" it dies out quickly. What I have seen people do is finding the easiest way to provide value outside your product to keep people engaged. Like YC did with startup school, Indie Hackers with Growth Bite, Airbnb with Craigslist integration, Zumper with cross platform posting tool...etc
I think understanding how to attract the very early customers is sort of a life mission of mine ( i write about how companies got their first 1000 customers at https://first1000.substack.com)....reach out to me..happy to connect and go through this
Yeah, I was just telling someone maybe I should start by being a way to create assets for Unity since there's already a lot of people that use it and grow from there. Or something like that. Also, just added my email to your newsletter, looks like an interesting read, I'll go through it carefully tomorrow.
Those sites are good seeds for seo backlinks, but you probably need more content. And a lot of patience.
The thing is the content I do have - the YouTube videos of me actually using the thing - people are not too keen to consume and I'm not sure why, for instance engagement is kinda low (percentage watched). Is it because I'm not making videos about what they care about? Maybe I need to work on my presentation? I'm experimenting but it takes time, as you say, it takes a lot of patience.
Would it be possible to make text content that could get you seo traffic?
Maybe. One thing that I read here on IH today actually and I thought was a pretty good idea is to build things then talk about it in a blog post, build in public as you guys say here. For instance at the moment I'm creating a display part for MM (7 segment display, dot matrix display and so on) and I could talk about my process of implementing it. But that would attract people interested in regular programming instead of people interested in using my program wouldn't it? Talking about using MM with text and pictures would be hard, it's a very visual program, I have to think about how I could do that.
As others mentioned, most of the actual hits from Hacker News are people who are just casually browsing. They want to see what's popular, but don't have any serious interest in your product.
If you have Google Analytics or something similar on your site, you should check out the top referrals. The real benefit of being on the front page of Hacker News isn't the number of visits (unless you display ads). It is that now your site is probably linked from a podcast or blog post. You can see what people are saying about your product and reach out to them to find out more. Engage their community. Find more interested users and customers. There may even be some decent discussions about you on Twitter (though 95% of the posts are bots that post the first page results on HN).
Yeah, to be fair I did that already, I'm part of the future of coding slack community and I found them through the hn publicity. That's where my 100 views per video are coming from, probably. And yeah, the 700+ points were probably useless as a metric, but the 150 comments I got there were very helpful. As I say my followers haven't dwindled to nothing, they are just not growing as I expected. I did just do a search on twitter, never occurred to me to do that! A lot of tweets I hadn't seen, mostly in Japanese of all things. Kinda cool.
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Thanks, I never streamed a game before, but I'll look into that when I've implemented the features I talked about, avatar mode, open world etc.
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Makers shouldn't launch on HN and PH unless their target users are product makers, founders and developers.
We launched @Frontendor there and got good traction and some $$$.
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Fair enough. Perhaps this project just isn't a business and I should keep working on it just as a passion project (which it very much is, I love working on it) and try to make money with a project that is more focused on business. @FrancisH pointed out above that I don't have a well defined user, which is fair, but I do have other ideas in various stages of completion that solve very specific problems so the user is clear. One thing I'm starting to notice by lurking here on IH for the last few weeks is that people that provide clear value, even if it's simple, tend to do well. And if some day, as I keep working on MM, it takes off then all the better.
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Yeah, I know, I was just spitballing really, maybe managing my expectations/venting my frustration. Even if didn't try to pursue it as a business, I still want people to use it, share it, create a community around it so I run into the same issues, find the right audience, be patient and so on.