HUMANS
The biggest personal website repository in the world
The next version of HUMANS will be completely self service.
You will be able to submit your site, have it reviewed by the community, receive feedbacks, update your site listings and more.
Again, this requires quite a major code rewrite and we are on it.
I hope to update soon with how we progress as it will probably take a while.
One of the major traffic sources for HUMANS is Twitter.
Every day I select the personal site of the day. It's not necessarily the most beautiful site, but it needs to show something interesting - it can be the content, structure, platform, anything really.
I showcase the site of the day in a prominent position on HUMANS, but also on Twitter and other social media. It brings a lot of traffic and many positive responses.
I think it's one of the things that make HUMANS special and make it a user favorite.
Surprising as it may sound one of the features that made HUMANS v.1. fun in the first place was the option to filter sites according to... people who had beards.
This was a user favorite but it also received quite a lot of negative feedback.
As HUMANS matured I felt like there comes a time one needs to let go of the gimmicks and focus on value. Bye, bye beards.
This came really out of the blue. I knew the product is really loved by many users, but I didn't expect this nomination.
I was all hard at work on some new features for HUMANS when I got the email that HUMANS is nominated on the side project category. While not really a side project any more but a functioning business it was a big honor.
HUMANS didn't end up winning the prize, but more positive press and more users were exposed to the site.
I completely re-wrote the codebase in ReactJS.
The site was about 2.5 times faster now (first meaningful byte) and looked much better.
Avg. time on site improved from 2.5 minutes to almost 8 minutes, and number of pageviews/user increased from 12 to ~18.
I also added options for users with sites on the platform to "claim" their personal websites (by embedding a snippet of code on their domains) and manage certain aspects of their websites' visibility on HUMANS.
It's never fun to read something that criticizes what you do. Especially if you hurt someone.
Here's the story:
I use all kinds of filter to help people zero in on personal sites that may match their taste or profiles. One of the filtering options was gender, and I only had two options.
I made a mistake by categorizing someone in a way that wasn't correct. They go by the pronoun "they" and I referred to them differently.
I apologized, and that led to a big discussion about gender options on HUMANS.
I had a couple of options, and I decided to remove the gender filter. Today I think it's not a good way or relevant way to filter personal sites.
Being featured on Fast Company helped a lot.
It drove about 5,000 new users to the site, and about 1,000 new submissions to be included.
Working to answer the journalist's questions also helped me clarify what is the value that HUMANS bring to the table and what are the site's strongest points.
While not picking up the product of the day on the day before, being featured on the newsletter actually brought a lot more traffic and initiated a wave of press requests for interviews and more exposure.
This was really fun and the newsletter was really positive and helpful.
It was a here goes nothing moment.
Before launching I made sure to pre-include quite a lot of profiles of prominent Product Hunt users on HUMANS.
The launch went rather well. HUMANS received about 450 upvotes and ended up 3rd for the day.
In total, there were more than 2500 visitors that day, out of which ~250 requested to add their site to the platform.
Well, it doesn't sound like a lot, but this was with almost 0 marketing. I told a couple of friends about this initiative and announced the launch on my rather small twitter account.
Some users got to the websites after seeing the name appear on their analytics account, as I (or someone else) got to their own personal website from there.
I personally emailed any user that registered (about 8 of them) and asked for feedback. 4 answered back with meaningful words. Everything was implemented.
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