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Getting the first hundred users in itself is not hard, post to forums where your users hang out and you'll be at 100 users fairly quickly. The hard part is gett

Getting the first hundred users in itself is not hard, post to forums where your users hang out and you'll be at 100 users fairly quickly. The hard part is getting users to keep coming back to your site aka engagement. The best advice I have come across to get your initial users : do things that don't scale [0]. Yeah, everyone read that post by PG but a surprisingly small number of people actually apply it to their own projects/startups. Practical example : I am building a community for programmers [1], so to get some initial feedback I posted to a Python subreddit and got the first 50 users. I got a lot of valuable feedback, but users hardly came back to my site after a couple of days. So I decided to follow up individually with users who had signed up and started a conversation about my site. I explained to each user what the site is about, how to use it and asked for feedback. I also asked them what their first impressions of the site were and how it can be improved. I learnt that people did not even understand what my site was about, and I knew that I need to focus on conveying the essence of the site to new users. (Still working on it) You gain a lot of insight about users by having conversations with individual users. I managed to help 3 people with their Python related problems so far, in the chat room https://www.metalmanac.com/topics/python/chat/ https://www.metalmanac.com/topics/python/chat/ Once you get a small number of users who are passionate about your project, continue talking to individual users and ask them to share it with their friends and offer to guide each user individually, it works very well. This is obviously not scalable beyond a few hundred users, but getting those passionate users initially is critical. I am currently at this stage. Once you have a group of 100 or so passionate users, you can share it with a wider community of users (eg- PH, HN for tech projects) and continue focusing on having conversations with individual users. [0] http://paulgraham.com/ds.html http://paulgraham.com/ds.html [1] https://www.metalmanac.com/ https://www.metalmanac.com/

_fizz_buzz_ 9y ago
Ok, I bite. I went to your site and then clicked to learn javascript. There is a short description about javascript and then a couple of links to javascript tutorials. What now?
- breeze_em_out 9y ago
  Well, your browser info and metadata have now been sold to third parties for a few pennies, so I'd say mission successful for site owner. Are people actually still this naive? Reading HN users makes me feel like I'm trapped in the 80s where the internet was a magical mystery that nobody really understood. It's about 40 years too late to just assume the average trash website is actually a meaningful statement about something, or a viable product of some sort. 99.9999999% are just junk. The big ones, you already know about.
  - dotancohen 9y ago
    > 99.9999999% are just junk. And that, my friends, is how the mystical nine nines was finally achieved!
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- metalmanac 9y ago
  This is exactly the problem users are having. Since the purpose of the site and how it works is buried in the About page, people are clueless about what to do next. I am redoing the front page to only focus on explaining what the site is about. The idea is this : * provide a community reviewed wiki explaining what X is about and how to go about learning it. The aim is to answer the questions how to learn X programming language/framework/platform and what are the best resources to use. * provide a Stackoverflow like QA section for users to ask and answer questions. * provide a forum to submit and discuss learning resources (like HN) * provide a chatroom to replicate the IRC experience As you can see this I have completely failed to convey this. So that's what I am working on now : to convey the purpose of the site and improve the UX and UI. Reason for completely failing at this : I focus too much on the tech, the backend, unnecessary optimizations and time wasters like load testing.
  - type0 9y ago
    It sound like you are trying to compete with codementor.io the problem is that Metal Manac doesn't say anything meaningful and it looks kinda boring with just the bootstrap and no theme. You need to work on the integration between the features and UX, make it memorable! There was a HN tread recently that even bad web design can bring you more visitors/users as long as it's memorable and stands out from the croud.
Jillboy 9y ago
Well, what IS the site about? I read your post and went to the website and spent a good 15 seconds trying to figure out what it's about. Easy fix is just take what's on the About page, strip it down to its bare essence and slap it on the landing page, on top of the search bar but in a way that it stands out (i.e. it should be the first thing users will read).
- metalmanac 9y ago
  That's what I am currently working on. The home page will primarily focus on explaining what the site is about. I am thinking about using gif+text to explain how the site works.

_fizz_buzz_ 9y ago

Ok, I bite. I went to your site and then clicked to learn javascript. There is a short description about javascript and then a couple of links to javascript tutorials. What now?

breeze_em_out 9y ago
Well, your browser info and metadata have now been sold to third parties for a few pennies, so I'd say mission successful for site owner. Are people actually still this naive? Reading HN users makes me feel like I'm trapped in the 80s where the internet was a magical mystery that nobody really understood. It's about 40 years too late to just assume the average trash website is actually a meaningful statement about something, or a viable product of some sort. 99.9999999% are just junk. The big ones, you already know about.
- dotancohen 9y ago
  > 99.9999999% are just junk. And that, my friends, is how the mystical nine nines was finally achieved!
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
metalmanac 9y ago
This is exactly the problem users are having. Since the purpose of the site and how it works is buried in the About page, people are clueless about what to do next. I am redoing the front page to only focus on explaining what the site is about. The idea is this : * provide a community reviewed wiki explaining what X is about and how to go about learning it. The aim is to answer the questions how to learn X programming language/framework/platform and what are the best resources to use. * provide a Stackoverflow like QA section for users to ask and answer questions. * provide a forum to submit and discuss learning resources (like HN) * provide a chatroom to replicate the IRC experience As you can see this I have completely failed to convey this. So that's what I am working on now : to convey the purpose of the site and improve the UX and UI. Reason for completely failing at this : I focus too much on the tech, the backend, unnecessary optimizations and time wasters like load testing.
- type0 9y ago
  It sound like you are trying to compete with codementor.io the problem is that Metal Manac doesn't say anything meaningful and it looks kinda boring with just the bootstrap and no theme. You need to work on the integration between the features and UX, make it memorable! There was a HN tread recently that even bad web design can bring you more visitors/users as long as it's memorable and stands out from the croud.

Jillboy 9y ago

Well, what IS the site about? I read your post and went to the website and spent a good 15 seconds trying to figure out what it's about. Easy fix is just take what's on the About page, strip it down to its bare essence and slap it on the landing page, on top of the search bar but in a way that it stands out (i.e. it should be the first thing users will read).

metalmanac 9y ago
That's what I am currently working on. The home page will primarily focus on explaining what the site is about. I am thinking about using gif+text to explain how the site works.