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Ask HN: How do I know if I'm ready to launch?

• Skywing 15y ago
  Are you ready to launch? Then launch. You could spend years wondering if you're going to be good or bad (but can improve) at doing the items you listed, but you won't ever know until you just launch it.
  • foxhop 15y ago
    Thank you for the advice. Also I just joined up crowdwoo twitter lotto http://twitter.com/#!/RussellBal http://twitter.com/#!/RussellBal
• deleted 15y ago
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• damoncali 15y ago
  It's going to suck. It's going to break. People will not sign up. Get over it. You cannot change that until you launch it.
  • foxhop 15y ago
    Thank you for the advice I will try to put it into practice. Over analyzing the what ifs isn't helping my goals. Fear is a funny thing.
  • dholowiski 15y ago
    Absolutely true - when you launch and it breaks, you will fix it. When nobody comes you'll have to figure out what you did wrong and fix it and when it sucks you'll make it better. You can't do these things in a vacuum and without real, live people using the service.
• nfm 15y ago
  In some sense, you launched when you posted this Ask HN! I think this is a good way to do it as well, as you're likely to get some helpful feedback and tyre kicking from HNers.
  • foxhop 15y ago
    Haha, you are correct. Looks like I might have walked off the cliff without knowing it.
• md1515 15y ago
  Hey foxhop, I understand your fear (we all do to an extent). Most people advocate a MVP approach (minimum viable product) for many reasons. First, you can do less work before releasing. Second, it allows your ideal users to help you develop the product further. The few users you have (heck even if it is only 5) will be able to tell you what they like, how it is useful etc. You may not know all the uses for your product and a group of people might find that it is useful for X. Then you can market it as the "perfect solution for X" Your initial users will most likely be HN members. Most of us know how hard it is to do all of those things so we're not going to worry if you don't scale in a timely manner etc. If your site crashes, we'll calmly inform you, if you take a while to respond to feedback, we will understand. I'll send you an email and I'll see if I can help you..
  • foxhop 15y ago
    I would love to have feedback and running this service alone might not be the smartest move. Please contact me via email anytime.
• polyfractal 15y ago
  Prepare your expectations accordingly. Have you been collecting emails from a landing page while you were developing? Do you have organic search traffic coming to your site? Do people know about your app? Have you validated the market for your application? If you answered no to those questions, expect zero people to know or care about your app. Launching and running a successful web app is 10% development and 90% marketing. I'm telling not trying to discourage you, the opposite actually. Just because no one signs up when you launch doesn't mean your app sucks. It means no one knows about it. Start marketing, start blogging, start SEO, start guest-posting, start doing everything you can to get the word out. As an aside, you should probably have a way to monetize the app in mind and put it in place before launching. Very few apps can get away with ads or freemium effectively, especially if it is a small micropreneurial endeavor. Edit: Looks like you have an email list. That will help you convert well on the first few days and give you a morale boost. Don't worry about the rest, tackle it as it comes. You'll never be ready enough, so just go for it when you have a working product :)
  • foxhop 15y ago
    Wow thanks for the insight! I think I need to work on my marketing skills at this point. Do you have organic search traffic coming to your site? (no) Do people know about your app? (no) Have you validated the market for your application? (not really) As for monetizing I plan to eventually allow subscribers to choose bounding box sizes or access to the raw (and large) screen shot. My competition in the market charges lots for this service but I have no idea what a fair price would be. I was thinking monthly subscription based on usage: 1gb $9.99, 5gb $19.99 and unlimited plan for heavy hitters. Is that a fair price, I have no idea. Thank you agian
    • polyfractal 15y ago
      A trick you can do is A/B pricing schemes to see which gets you more purchases. You can even do this before your product is ready. Make two pages with different prices, A/B test them and track conversions on the "Buy" button. Since your product isn't ready yet, just show a "Thanks for your interest, but we aren't done yet!" page. Collect email addresses too. This gives you an idea how many people will buy at what price-point, and help provide more email signups. The caveat is that it requires some level of traffic coming to your site first
• Lukeas14 15y ago
  I'm a potential customer who has been researching the available options for web screenshots. I need to be able to download 1024x1000 screenshots of websites in real time available through an API similar to what you have. I'm sure there are a number of potential customers just like me who have their own unique requirements. But you'll never know if what you're building is in line with what your customers need until you launch. Good luck.
  • foxhop 15y ago
    Thanks for the suggestions, I hope to make http://LinkPeek.com http://LinkPeek.com useful and fair for the majority. You are correct, to do this I'm going to need to communicate a lot more with potential customers and fellow developers.
• petervandijck 15y ago
  Launch isn't the bad part, do a search for the trough of sorrow :)
• happyfeet 15y ago
  As most people say, you can launch a half-feature not a half-assed one. If you think you have the minimum features necessary to make your app 'useful' for your initial customers you should just launch. I do not see a blog link on your webpage. If not, start doing it soon. Start talking about your app, use cases, problems and how you are solving them. Anything that you think is relevant for your broader audience. And iterate based on feedback from your initial customer base. Don't worry right now about scaling. If you have that many hits on your app that is a good problem to have. The worst is indifference. Good luck with you app and I am sure you'll do well.
• davidhansen 15y ago
  In direct answer to your question: just launch. In response to your app itself: I would suggest offering arbitrary thumbnail sizes( not just 72px ), up to and including full-screen resolution. In addition, I would suggest a snapshot scheduling service, such that regular images are captured for given urls on a regular schedule. A company like us, for instance would probably pay for a service that allows us to build a design history of our web properties automatically, instead of adding "screenshot the existing live site before deployment" to the design or technical workflow, or relying on the Wayback Machine to do so.