5 ms·
Traffic spikes are bad for your product
- dogma1138 2y ago“My product went viral but it may not be offering the value I think it does so I blame the users for it”
- esafak 2y agoYou don't know that. There is such a thing as an unqualified lead.
- PaulHoule 2y agoAlso the phenomenon that the first people who get on board are better (smarter, whatever) than the later people who get on board. See also: Product Hunt
- JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y agoWe would know if we had a link. Otherwise it’s fiction and I believe it’s yet another lame web site created by an ideas guy.
- layer8 2y agoThat’s not what the article says.
- Y444 2y agoI believe it does: "Turns out your product wasn’t ready for all the international users. Or the power users. Or the teens. They want to use your product in all the wrong ways, posting bad and weird things." It is basically in line with the infamous "You're holding it wrong".
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- layer8 2y agoThe article’s conclusion is that businesses shouldn’t chase big app launches or “going viral”, because that tends to not be valuable for the business, and that instead they should go for gradual, slow growth. In other words, the article doesn’t blame the users, it blames businesses using the wrong strategy.
- Y444 2y agoFor me personally this conclusion doesn't mean much, as the author bases it on his single experience with his app that by his own wasn't really ready for real world.
- layer8 2y agoI don’t necessarily agree with the article’s conclusion. I’m saying that the article’s point isn’t to blame users, it’s to give advice to businesses about how to avoid that failure mode.
- dogma1138 2y agoThat’s not the articles conclusion, it’s the excuse. Yes slow steady growth is a generic “good advice” but overall if the product was ready and provided value to the users they would have used the product. A conclusion would be don’t ship a half baked product… And definitely don’t blame users for not liking your product, not understanding it, not being open to it at the time etc… The users are always right and even if they are technically wrong it is still the fault of the product designer for not accounting for that in the first place. “We do not blame users, ever.” is about as close to a prime directive as you can get regardless of what product or service you deliver.
- Pooge 2y agoTiming is one of the most important part of the market. You could make a truly great product far too early and nobody would use it and you would get bankrupt. Then someone else would come with something, perhaps even worse, at the right time and cash out.
- mtlynch 2y agoClickbait title. This isn't a story about something that personally happened to the author but a general argument against big launches. They don't offer any concrete examples like the title would imply. The article itself is pretty thin and quickly devolves into a bunch of analytics jargon word soup like "Metrics: D1/7/30, consistent weekly growth (5-10% WoW), NPS (and qualitative feedback), DAU/MAU." Edit: The original title as submitted to HN was "My product went viral on social media but all I got were these shitty users." It looks like the mods have since changed it to a less misleading title.
- sksrbWgbfK 2y ago> you launch an app "Free ReactJS web site filled with A/B testing and analytics, and a billion NPM modules" I guess.
- incognito124 2y agoThere's something icky in calling users high-quality and low-quality
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- duxup 2y agoMight be better to say high / low quality SALES opportunity.
- caseyohara 2y ago“High-quality leads” and “low-quality leads” have been sales terminology forever. Put your pitchfork away.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dhosek 2y agoI always think of Glengarry Glen Ross when I think about high and low quality leads. The leads are weak? You’re weak!
- genewitch 2y agoThey could sell ketchup popsicles at a white glove event? I suppose getting people to do things against their better interest is a very people thing to do. Isn't that the movie where it at least smells like fraud?
- hackernewds 2y agoSo has whitelist and blacklist. Carry your pitchforka
- genewitch 2y agoA cursory scan doesn't turn up anything derogatory about that term, it came about 20 years after "black book". Whitelist doesn't appear worthy of an etymology, but my amateur supposition is it's merely the opposite of the phrase "blacklist" Sometimes a spade is just a spade.
- AdmiralAsshat 2y ago> (I learned this phrase a long time ago from a friend who used to sell cars!). When your product goes viral, yes, you do a big spike in users. But what you’re really getting is an Invasion of Looky-Loos, low quality users who come in, check things out, but don’t stick. I find it strange that we generally frown upon the "Buy something or get out" mentality in brick-and-mortar stores, yet we seem to be cheering on this mentality if it's an online service. It seems like castigating your potential customers because they didn't give you money immediately or give you as much money as you wanted is a shitty business practice.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tomhoward 2y agoIt's not "castigating" or criticising potential users. It's advising founders not to waste resources attracting large numbers of visitors who are unlikely to be potential users, and instead do the hard work to attract and retain users who will actually value your product. I made this mistake multiple times back in early 2010s "virality hacking" days, and man it was a painful and costly learning experience.
- SunkBellySamuel 2y agoVery concise, as someone who doesn't run an online business, my intuition would absolutely be "More traffic, more money"
- nine_k 2y ago"More money" as in "a larger AWS bill"? Quite probably. "More money" as in "more sales"? Maybe, if you're lucky and there's enough audience for your product among the incoming crowd. "More money" as in "more ads shown"? Well, this is why we can't have nice things :-|
- AdmiralAsshat 2y agoI don't read it that way. The hypothetical author here didn't "waste" any resources to make a viral video--it happened by chance. He got an influx of users from someone else's viral video, but he decided those people are "shitty" users because they didn't stick around and buy his product. That doesn't strike me as maximizing long-term users; that strikes me as getting free publicity and being pissed off that it didn't attract the kind of customers you wanted.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoThat's one reason that we personally vet every signup request for the app I run. One of the services that we offer, is users being able to (anonymously) reach out to each other for help. If we have "looky-loos," or even scammers, it's not particularly good. Scammers usually have no use for our app. It's really too anonymous and locked-down, and our users tend to be fairly poor (and scammer-wise -some are even reformed scammers). Faecesbook is a much richer hunting ground. They may sign in once (if they were able to get us to admit them, which takes a bit of work), and then never come back. Some of them never log in, because they don't actually look at their emails. If they never log in, then we delete the account after 30 days. Looky-loos, on the other hand, are a pain in the ass, because they will log in once, peer around, realize the app has nothing for them, and never come back. We need to wait a year to delete their account. We absolutely don't care about scale. We may never have more than a few thousand users. We haven't even reached 1,000, and it's been a year. I tested the app with 12,000 fake users, so it can handle that.
- jprete 2y agoYour comment about looky-loos got me thinking about real-world socialization. People who hang around the edge of a group in the real world, looking like they're trying not to be noticed, get pegged as creepy - it looks like predator behavior in the wild! The group then has a reason to either invite them to participate or keep them out - otherwise they're making the space feel unsafe. The edge-hangers have two good choices: They can be very visibly present and then join the conversation when an opportunity presents itself, or they can leave. Social-media edge-hangers don't have to do anything, they can just hang there forever without clearly joining or leaving the group.
- PaulHoule 2y agoIn in activist group there is always a concern, founded or not, that law enforcement, opposition groups, or opposed individuals will try to infilitrate the group. People who are in this situation [1] in regards to romantic attraction also are creepy as hell. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approach-avoidance_conflict https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approach-avoidance_conflict
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jmuguy 2y agoIMO you see the same issues when you have Google start optimizing ads for user signup. We've had a huge amount of user growth from ad spend. But not really the users we want, for the most part.
- erikpukinskis 2y agoWhat’s wrong with the users?
- michaelt 2y agoImagine my new food delivery startup delivers ultra-premium, Michelin-star-quality, $100-a-head food and wine anywhere in the five boroughs of New York. Any marketing to people who aren't in New York, or people who aren't rich enough to spend $100 a head on a meal, is largely wasted. Worldwide viral coverage on Reddit and Twitter? Youtubers and podcasters singing my praises? Meh. But sponsoring the New York City Ballet? I'll get far fewer hits, but the hits I do get will convert at a much higher rate.
- jmuguy 2y agoExactly
- hackernewds 2y agoThey're Google bots
- jmuguy 2y agoIn our case they're more "top of funnel". We make money generating leads. When optimizing purely for signups, we get a lot, but they're not the type of users that become leads. Its really just a google ads problem - we can tell google ads to focus on traffic that converts to leads, but there's not as much of that.
- lmeyerov 2y agoMy favorite here was we found Google's assigned ads consultant, when we dug into their glowing numbers, got us a big traffic spike in school kids using google's search bar as a graphing calculator. We are a b2b graph analytics company.
- philipwhiuk 2y agoThis is true in every field - a stratospheric number 1 kills an artist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LZEZ5QuyzM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LZEZ5QuyzM
- jaimsam 2y agoThat most "people" on social media are flakes, or looky-loos, NPCs, or just bots shouldn't be news to anyone.
- analog31 2y agoThe thing that didn't seem obvious from the article is that "looking" means signing up. If this is the case, it's a conscious choice of the vendor. On the other hand, I do know that it's a widespread feeling among salespeople, that a person who interacts with them, without buying anything, is stealing from them. And wasting someone's time in order to make them feel like they owe you something is a familiar bargaining tactic.
- spankalee 2y agoI don't think "looking" means signing up specifically. The advice is pretty generic, and it could be just users using the site/app/product. I think it just happens that a lot of products are going to have a sign up component if they're not just content for consumption.
- dingnuts 2y ago>a person who interacts with them, without buying anything, is stealing from them This is so asinine. This would be like Target locking you in until you make a purchase, because you entered the store, and are thus wasting their resources. You owe them for being bathed in their fluorescent lights and breathing their climate controlled air, I guess. I swear: sales people must exist in their own bubble. Don't they know that Solutions hates them because Sales sets them up to fail? Don't they know that their customers hate them because the customer knows Sales will lie to get their commission? Don't they know Engineering hates them because they sell things that are impossible, on timelines that nobody can meet, in order to enrich only themselves? If Sales has a chip on their shoulder about anything they can get fucking bent
- lupusreal 2y agoSales is thinking "none of these other people would have jobs if not for us, they owe their existence to us." One might naively think that sales would have the humility to realize they wouldn't have anything to sell if not for everybody else, but actually sales is perfectly happy to sell things which don't actually exist.
- ekidd 2y ago
- dylan604 2y agoSince the beginning of time (of software released on the interweb), people have been burned by the software not doing what it says on the tin. Or that it sounds like it might do what you really need even if that need isn't advertised on the tin. The reality is that people have needs and look for solutions. Some needs never have an off the shelf solution and it might take multiple OTS options strung together with some glue code. You don't know what's possible until you get a better look at the software. Why someone would be amazed that their perfect little product is not actually, you know, perfect solution for everyone is the real tell.
- Oras 2y agoI agree with most points, however going viral has the benefit of strong backlinks for SEO. I had a website I shared here on HN, which made it to the front page and resulted in being mentioned in multiple newsletters and websites. The website site was on Google's 1st page when you search for the term, all due to the strong backlinks I gained.
- hartator 2y ago> these shitty users God. You’ll never be successful if you are that insulting to your users.
- spankalee 2y agoThis is just a saying format. "I jumped out of a perfectly good plane and all I got was this shitty t-shirt" kind of thing.
- hartator 2y ago> Looky-loos, low quality <users> I don’t think it stops here.
- solatic 2y agoThat's a nice excuse for pessimism. But the way you think about the world affects the way you interact with the world. If you think that people suck, you will eventually treat them that way. And you never know which person you pissed off ten years ago is the person you need for something tomorrow.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- toolz 2y agoTo play devil's advocate: That's quite the claim and a bit misleading. Successful businesses have been firing customers forever. I think they intend on insulting users they want to fire. I don't fully disagree with you, but I don't think it's correct to suggest you can't be successful with the attitude expressed in that article.
- lemonberry 2y agoThe last agency I worked at ridiculed their clients relentlessly. Every problem was blamed on the clients. A total lack of accountability from the owner down. It was a terrible place to work. My approach with my clients: if they don't understand or misunderstand something then I failed to explain things to them clearly. Not a big deal, I correct it so we're on the same page and move on. It's a great opportunity for both of us to learn and grow.
- YmiYugy 2y agoI did not find the article very compelling. The biggest problem is the lack of context. What kind of products is the author talking about? I got the impression that this is mostly about SaaS offerings, but who knows? Moreover, the arguments presented are insufficient with regards to it's thesis. The author claims that traffic spikes are actually harmful, but then just argues that they are mostly irrelevant. The only argument towards actual harmfulness presented is that disappointed users could spread negative sentiment. I don't find that very convincing. Something conspicuously absent from the article is a discussion of conversion cost. If you have a freemium offering how much do free users actually cost you? Especially for consumer facing software the cost can be really low. It's not like you have a sales team doing calls with each potential customer, people crowding your store. Might a surge of signups still be profitable, even if the conversion rate is much worse? But even if you accept that unmitigated spikes are harmful, aren't the remedies easy to apply. If you notice an unwanted spike you can easily increase friction by e.g. limiting new signups to referrals until the spike is over, temporarily restricting your free tier, etc. In conclusion, traffic spikes might not be that harmful and are easy enough mitigated as to not warrant taking action to prevent them.
- nfm 2y agoMy take is that they’re not necessarily harmful in and of themselves, but it’s absolutely harmful to think that this is the way to grow and get traction. It’s not a repeatable approach and it’s likely to pump some top of funnel metrics temporarily without having meaningful impact to the bottom line. This can be very distracting if you’re pursuing it intentionally and treating ‘going viral’ as a prerequisite to success.
- asdev 2y agoTLDR retention is more important than top of funnel
- TZubiri 2y agoNgmi
- davidee 2y ago"low quality users"? I think you mean folks trying to assess if it's a low quality product. I just couldn't finish this thing. Disdain mixed in with some wild understanding of the world. The fact that we so often care about DAU/MAU as a key metric for running a business continues to be one of the many issues some of us face when trying to build "quality" businesses of any size/scale. "here at wannabeMegaCorp our mission is numberGoUp" cool cool I'm out (even if I missed a later point). I'm all for reading a take I don't agree with, but this was something else entirely.
- cess11 2y agoFrom https://a16z.com/andrew-chen/ https://a16z.com/andrew-chen/ it seems this person failed at running a company that his rich friends had invested in and then they kept him around as some kind of consultant. I'm not so sure it's the kind of person I would turn to for advice on anything.
- AznHisoka 2y agoI feel he's the epitome of an armchair entrepreneur. He spouts a lot of advice on what not to do, how hard it is, how to beat the cold start problem, but never seems to get into the arena himself and show how successful implementing his principles could be. (Yes, I'm aware he worked at Uber, but he never was responsible for turning it into a zero-awareness brand to a household brand. Not taking any credit away from that tho, and I actually agree with a lot of his content.)
- cess11 2y agoI don't see Uber as a success. They used a big bag of cash to replace organised labour with cheaper, unorganised labour, much like how the mafia works but out in the open. It does not provide anything new, it's just cabs without licenses driven by people living in precarious conditions. In some places they've been forced to ditch this business model too.
- genewitch 2y agoI try to explain to my kids that some expensive things and experiences are expensive because they need a "war chest" in case of lawsuit or recall. These companies have usually been in business a while. Conversely, some things are cheap because the one who assumes all liability is oneself.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]