4 ms·

Why so negative? First off thanks for taking the time to share it with us. I read the whole post. Good to see your incremental progress. Which brings me to the

by apsurd 17y ago

Why so negative? First off thanks for taking the time to share it with us. I read the whole post. Good to see your incremental progress. Which brings me to the header of my comment. I don't see in any way how your launch was a "failure". You have "fail" and "sucked" peppered throughout your post. Why! I wasn’t too surprised or worried by the results, since that was more or less what I expected. 2 problems here: Why expect failure? And secondly, can't call it a waste of time then since you knew beforehand what you were getting into - your choice. Not trying to shoot you down more - quite the opposite! I don't see how your launch was a failure at all. You have more data than 100% of people with "ideas" and 100% of people in "stealth mode". And how is you gaining traffic an epic fail? Even if its one user! I see a positive slope in that graph damnit! Personally I have erased the concept of "failing" from existence. Simply because if all things are trials, then you benefit from data received back. It doesn't matter whether that data is "good" or "bad", data is data. And one does trials so one can get better at doing those trials! So you fail when you die, till then don't recognize its existence. Be happy man. My graphs have a scale of 1-10 (yes im serious). so when i start to see the 1-100 (like yours) I will be ass-happy. =) Congratulations!

vaksel 17y ago
hehe too negative? I guess I was trying to show a different side of the coin compared to Paul's post. If it was a standalone post, I'd probably make it more optimistic. "on launch day we hit an unprecedented 500 users in a single day". But yeah overall it's been a very good month. Thanks :) I agree on the failure part, I think the key concept to take away, is that this is a marathon, not a sprint. Don't expect instant gratification
- ccamrobertson 17y ago
  I think that you have taken the recent atmosphere of "failing fast" a little too far. A "launch" really can't be considered a good metric for failure or success. Pegging your product on one massive launch is a flawed idea - it seems to operate under the assumption that massive, immediate reach is what you need to attract users as opposed to leveraging/exploiting other mechanisms. Having product "out" at all stages in order to gain feedback and iterate helps. In fact, it is far better that you had a "failed" launch now so that users can give you feedback as opposed to trying to remain stealth to build up to a bigger launch. I think that Skribit's "successful" launch can be more attributed to how Paul handled the pro upgrade screw up. But the TC article isn't what will make or break the success of Skribit.
  - vaksel 17y ago
    To me failing fast, just means that you realize that the idea sucks and you close down shop and move on. And yeah if you have a crappy launch, you shouldn't use that to discount your idea. You only need to hit a certain niche of users to make your idea work. To tell the truth, we really haven't gotten that much feedback after we came out of private beta. In private beta we got hundreds of tips, feature requests etc, and now in public beta, nada. Not a single feature request last week. Yeah an article on TC won't make or break a startup, but it sure does help. a) better response to your other coverage requests b) a small bump to your page rank c) a flood of potential new users to help jump start the site. If I had to give it a numerical value, I'd say major launch coverage, can help you save 1-2 years of building your traffic the old fashioned way...1 person at a time
sailormoon 17y ago
Dude, I want you to succeed and reach your potential, and I don't like saying things like this, but .. you count your uniques in 1 digits? Dude. I have users who do nothing but post every few weeks about how much they hate their teacher and they are kicking your ass by orders of magnitude. I had kind of come to believe 100 or so hits a day, uniques that is, was the new baseline for any kind of non-copypasta content. Even 10k hits a day is sort of ... meh? Great proof of concept if the trend is heading upwards but useless in and of itself? What I'm trying to say here my friend is .. you can do a lot, LOT better than <10 uniques. Seriously, any blog at all can do better than that. You absolutely need to start a company blog ASAP and just write about ANYTHING. Mention anything you learnt in any aspect of development, you will have 100 uniques/day in a week and maybe more. I guess what I'm trying to say is .. I like your attitude but geeze, you need to recalibrate your scale a bit. Sub 10 uniques a day is pitifully low and almost below just random; I'd almost advise you to check your DNS etc. Any kind of useful company blog whatsoever will put you orders of magnitude about that. Yes, erase the concept of "failing" from existence. But don't erase "improvement" as well....
- apsurd 17y ago
  Thanks for your advice. To be clear I do not have any type of blog, company or otherwise. The problem is very simply that I am a programmer. I spend time programming; not marketing. I don't have an (active) twitter, facebook, myspace, linkedin, blog, etc. Yes yes I know how important it is to have them! - but the point is I don't. So I always just build out things because I'm a semi-noob programmer. I've learned from experience, that its all about customer development, so that's what I will do now. But it is indeed factual that I have about 8 visits a day =). Lastly, I am a 37 signals guy. I measure (company) success in profit. So it is nice to measure the importance of how many uniques you get, only so much as it contributes to the bottom line. I.e. A blog might need 50trillion uniques to make $x. A paid app, eh probably not so much.

by apsurd 17y ago

vaksel 17y ago

hehe too negative? I guess I was trying to show a different side of the coin compared to Paul's post. If it was a standalone post, I'd probably make it more optimistic. "on launch day we hit an unprecedented 500 users in a single day". But yeah overall it's been a very good month. Thanks :) I agree on the failure part, I think the key concept to take away, is that this is a marathon, not a sprint. Don't expect instant gratification

ccamrobertson 17y ago
I think that you have taken the recent atmosphere of "failing fast" a little too far. A "launch" really can't be considered a good metric for failure or success. Pegging your product on one massive launch is a flawed idea - it seems to operate under the assumption that massive, immediate reach is what you need to attract users as opposed to leveraging/exploiting other mechanisms. Having product "out" at all stages in order to gain feedback and iterate helps. In fact, it is far better that you had a "failed" launch now so that users can give you feedback as opposed to trying to remain stealth to build up to a bigger launch. I think that Skribit's "successful" launch can be more attributed to how Paul handled the pro upgrade screw up. But the TC article isn't what will make or break the success of Skribit.
- vaksel 17y ago
  To me failing fast, just means that you realize that the idea sucks and you close down shop and move on. And yeah if you have a crappy launch, you shouldn't use that to discount your idea. You only need to hit a certain niche of users to make your idea work. To tell the truth, we really haven't gotten that much feedback after we came out of private beta. In private beta we got hundreds of tips, feature requests etc, and now in public beta, nada. Not a single feature request last week. Yeah an article on TC won't make or break a startup, but it sure does help. a) better response to your other coverage requests b) a small bump to your page rank c) a flood of potential new users to help jump start the site. If I had to give it a numerical value, I'd say major launch coverage, can help you save 1-2 years of building your traffic the old fashioned way...1 person at a time

sailormoon 17y ago

Dude, I want you to succeed and reach your potential, and I don't like saying things like this, but .. you count your uniques in 1 digits? Dude. I have users who do nothing but post every few weeks about how much they hate their teacher and they are kicking your ass by orders of magnitude. I had kind of come to believe 100 or so hits a day, uniques that is, was the new baseline for any kind of non-copypasta content. Even 10k hits a day is sort of ... meh? Great proof of concept if the trend is heading upwards but useless in and of itself? What I'm trying to say here my friend is .. you can do a lot, LOT better than <10 uniques. Seriously, any blog at all can do better than that. You absolutely need to start a company blog ASAP and just write about ANYTHING. Mention anything you learnt in any aspect of development, you will have 100 uniques/day in a week and maybe more. I guess what I'm trying to say is .. I like your attitude but geeze, you need to recalibrate your scale a bit. Sub 10 uniques a day is pitifully low and almost below just random; I'd almost advise you to check your DNS etc. Any kind of useful company blog whatsoever will put you orders of magnitude about that. Yes, erase the concept of "failing" from existence. But don't erase "improvement" as well....

apsurd 17y ago
Thanks for your advice. To be clear I do not have any type of blog, company or otherwise. The problem is very simply that I am a programmer. I spend time programming; not marketing. I don't have an (active) twitter, facebook, myspace, linkedin, blog, etc. Yes yes I know how important it is to have them! - but the point is I don't. So I always just build out things because I'm a semi-noob programmer. I've learned from experience, that its all about customer development, so that's what I will do now. But it is indeed factual that I have about 8 visits a day =). Lastly, I am a 37 signals guy. I measure (company) success in profit. So it is nice to measure the importance of how many uniques you get, only so much as it contributes to the bottom line. I.e. A blog might need 50trillion uniques to make $x. A paid app, eh probably not so much.