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Why do a HN launch with "request an invite"? This seems like a common anti-pattern.
by nostromo 14y ago
Why do a HN launch with "request an invite"?
This seems like a common anti-pattern.
- emmett 14y agoHow is it an anti-pattern? That's how Dropbox launched, and it seemed to turn out OK for them. Generally speaking if you have a hard-to-scale service (Heap, Dropbox) doing an invite-base system makes sense.
- matm 14y agoOur thinking is that it's an efficient way to grow responsibly while still gathering user feedback early and often. We tried to include as much tangible product as is possible with an invite-only product.
- evolve2k 14y agoFeel free to launch with whatever you like, i just dont agree with calling an invite page 'Show HN' as it's misleading.
- nostromo 14y agoNo worries, it's a cool looking product and I'm sure you'll do well. :) My reaction anymore to consumer "sign-up required" sites or saas "request an invite" products is usually to close the tab, even if my interest is piqued. I do believe that this used to be a powerful design pattern (Gmail, and as pointed out elsewhere Dropbox) but its prevalence has also become its undoing for me personally. Start up founders often worry about becoming too popular too quickly -- when usually they should be worried about not becoming popular fast enough.
- lucaspiller 14y agoMy guess is that most products that do this aren't much further along than a weekend hack. It's pretty easy to throw up a marketing site, and it let's you quickly see if people are interested. Thing of it as a μMVP :D
- samstave 14y agoThey have a list of customers at the bottom of their splash - this looks like its more than a weekend hack... They may just not have the infrastructure to support a widely available service yet.
- goronbjorn 14y agoYou might notice that those are all YC companies also ;)
- samstave 14y agoHA! - No, I didn't notice that at all... Good point, thus those customers might be "load test" and "POC" and not necessarily paying...
- jessep 14y agoStripe launched and developed this way (yc first). Seems to work out pretty well.
- samstave 14y agoI didn't mean to imply it was a bad thing! Just that on my first post I saw "customers" thinking they may have been more traditional customers. But after being informed they were YC - it made sense they were more likely load-test and POC customers that help participate in the product evolution.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- spyder 14y agoEspecially when there are better and a little cheaper alternatives. For example I don't see mouse move and scroll events in their demo so it's not "capture everything". For example http://clicktale.com http://clicktale.com or http://mouseflow.com http://mouseflow.com can record mouse movements too and has better visualization using heatmaps instead just the list of elements clicked.
- matm 14y agoIt's quite different. Clicktale and Mouseflow capture a similarly large volume of user data, but they do it at the expense of flexibly quantifying that data. Most of their visualizations - while useful in their own right - are pre-built reports that serve a different role than the flexible reporting capabilities in Heap (and Google Analytics et al).