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6 Comments

Getting to 500 users

This week the 500th user joined Pod Hunt to submit, vote and comment on podcasts.

Although I’ve had projects that received a lot more visitors this early (5 weeks since soft launch), Pod Hunt is the quickest to get to 500 users.

Pod Hunt uses Twitter for login, this is both good and bad.

Good because login/signup is very quick and easy for users, just a couple of clicks and they are done. No complicated forms to fill out or email address to verify before they are able to fully interact with the website.

It can also be bad because people worry about giving access to their account to other people. To help mitigate that worry, I made sure to only request the minimum read only access Twitter offers. Pod Hunt can't access any private information, and can't post anything on users behalf. Since I never intended to do those things it seemed like the obvious thing todo.

It is tempting to ask for more permissions than you need now because you may need them later, but I prefer to optimize for right now, unless I'm 100% sure I will need that in the future. In that case you also need to be clear with users why you are requesting permissions you don't appear to need based for the features you have.

Also, in the past I've tried to follow the practice of hiding features that visitors can't access, but not here.

For example, you need to be a logged in, authorized user to submit an episode. In the past I would have hidden the "Submit episode" button, because why show a visitor something they can't do.

However, how does a user know they can submit an episode if there isn't a button? 🔎 Yes you could replace the button with a signup call to action, but the call to action to submit an episode is so much stronger, that I think that encouraged more people to signup.

It's also very tempting to do things for your users early on. When people reached out about submitting their episodes, in the past I would have been tempted (I still was) to submit the episode for them.

I wanted to get content on the site, I wanted the first user interaction with Pod Hunt to be positive, but since login/signup was so easy here I encouraged people to submit the episodes themselves.

I see submitting episodes a core feature of Pod Hunt, and wanted as many people as possible to go thru the process to give me feedback. What was easy, what was hard, and what needed to be make clearer (thanks for the feedback everyone!)

Very happy to get to 500 users, and looking forward to getting the next 500.

Update on all the stats I've been tracking:

📄 Pageviews 31,926

🏠 Visitors 7,926

🙍‍♀️ Users 502

🐦 Followers 366

📼 Episodes 416

✉️ Subscribers 274

💵 Revenue (supporters) $345

If you haven't signed up, now is a great time...get me to 1000 users even quicker! 😀

https://podhunt.app

  1. 2

    Awesome. Great milestone to hit.

    What’s next steps for growth?

    1. 1

      I'd like to focus on engagement for the immediate future, having users is great, but having them actually using the site, submitting, voting, commenting etc is going to be best signal for Pod Hunt.

      Not exactly sure how I measure/track that, but will figure it out 😀

  2. 2

    Congrats!!!
    How many of the 500 come back daily?

    1. 2

      Haven't broken that down yet, but I'm guessing most comeback on a weekly basis.

      But doing about 200 visitors a day on average at the moment.

  3. 1

    Hi Mubashar!
    🎉Congrats with first 500 users. Really nice achievement.

    I'm following for your progress with podhunt from totally beginnings. I want to share with you some friendly opinion, maybe it could be helpful for you:
    Don't use Subscribe button. Name it something else:
    https://makermag.com/2019/08/30/alternatives-subscribe-button-cta/

    This advice worked for me so maybe it will work for you also.😉

    Take care and good luck with your growth.🙌

    1. 1

      Thanks, will give it a try!

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