5 ms·

Ask HN: I have some loyal users. How do I get more of them?

• anthony_franco 15y ago
  What's your current viral coefficient? http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/lessons-learnt-viral-marketing/ http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/lessons-learnt-viral-marketi...
  • stollercyrus 15y ago
    Hard to say. I've only really sent out 14 invites on their facebook walls to close friends and posted it here on Hacker News and posted a couple of videos on Reddit.
• xer0 15y ago
  Are your users referring you to their friends? Are they not? Do you know the answer to that? Can you think of a way to encourage your users to send your site links to their friends? I see the share buttons over on the left, but I think the button owners' networks benefit more than you do. I watched a few videos and clicked the three buttons at the bottom. At this point I haven't signed up, and it looks like I can do everything possible without signing up, which is really cool but why should I sign up? Now I've signed up ... and I don't see anything different. In fact, my video history that you were keeping track of before I signed up (via a cookie I assume) did not carry over into my account, and everything is set to zero. A minor complaint, but a nice touch if you pull it off. In your orange "+" chiclet you list a lot of ways to share. Not everyone has a facebook or gmail account, but everyone has email, so maybe a mailto: link should be at the top of that popup? I see that email is buried down in the list of share methods, arranged alphabetically. Maybe bring that link up to the top of the initial popup, or even out into your list of four main chiclets. Or do some AB testing on that and similar design choices. I tested you reset password link, and got the reset email quickly, so points for that IMO. But, the fundamental question is why should I use your site? It's an attractive, minimal site, but I don't see anything that it does (and it only does one thing) that isn't done at least as good by more well known sites like reddit, stumbleupon or even youtube itself. I really don't mean to be mean here, but I doubt if I'll come back after this. Have you thought of what you can do to make your site unique enough that people will come to your video sharing site instead of someone else's? Maybe you can let people share a public list of select videos, so their friends can follow them. Let people write reviews and comments. Let people engage in some way. Categories or tags on videos, and a way to search those, I really don't want to sit there and click skip skip skip until i see a video I like. Maybe I missed that? EDIT: I forgot to add, I don't know how to pronounce Cyro. I don't think it's a common English word or name. Speaking for myself, I don't like to say words to my friends if I don't know how to pronounce them, fearing embarrassment. If this is true for other people, you might want to say how to pronounce Cyro, maybe on your About page. Try to reduce every bit of friction in front of your users sharing your site.
  • stollercyrus 15y ago
    Thanks for the helpful feedback. I really appreciate it. I think you're right that I need to think about things that you would be able to do uniquely on this site that you can't do other places. This was originally a side project so that I could have something fun to do with family after Thanksgiving dinner. It's already done way more than I expected. I agree with you that I need to come up with something to make it different, if I'm going to keep working on this. The frustrations that I've had with reddit/stumbleupon/youtube is that there are a lot of distractions. So I just tried to make things as minimalist as possible. Stumbling for videos on StumbleUpon hasn't always worked well for me either - I often get thrown back into a "normal" website after more than a few stumbles and the ratio of videos that I actually like is kinda low. I like your idea of sharing lists of videos. I'm all ears to other ideas. I understand the rationale for why you wouldn't come back. Honestly, I was kinda surprised to see so many people return. I'd say 20 unique people (those 20 people are different each day) are coming back to the site on any given day. I've emailed them to ask what they like and what'd they'd like to see me make. The main critique I got was the one about carrying over the session data after you create an account. I'll work on doing that. I've just been storing that in the session, which gets reset after you sign up. Good advice. I like your idea about adding reviews/comments. It also gives people a reason to sign up. I'll be sure to add a pronunciation guide in the about page. These are all great suggestions about how to keep people on my site. I'm also curious about how to get more people to visit in the first place.
• corkill 15y ago
  Try $100 of reddit ads.
  • shiftpgdn 15y ago
    Have you actually had any luck with that? I did $100 of reddit ads a few times with a super high CPC and a very, very low click through rate.