I can totally relate to the author of this post. People say that ideas are the easy bit and that it's the implementation that is the hard part. Well, it's actually slightly different than that. Ideas are easy, implementation is hard, getting people the use it is nearly impossible.<p>You'd say; "then just make something that people want". It's not only the word "just" that's thrown around lightly. Even making something that people want is incredibly difficult. I'm slowly starting to believe that most successful websites are mere flukes, coincidences, being at the right place at the right time. That sort of thing.<p>I'd like to open a discussion here. You've made a side project, say it's a website, and you're interested in driving traffic to it. Other than relaying on posting a "Show HN", what strategies would you apply? Also, does someone has experience with paid strategies and is willing to share some pitfalls and do & don'ts?
If you want to build a business and not side projects you need business development and marketing.<p>There is a bias(extremely wrong in my opinion) in HN against this and that product is everything but real world business doesn't work like that. Unless you have a viral product(which still needs marketing to reach critical mass) it is marketing that will make or brake it.<p>Also .io and other extensions might be trendy and fun to use but real businesses use .com . If you target end users they will hardly remember the tld of your website. How many services that end up in .io or other similar ones do you use?
I want to say <i>thank you</i> for implementing Mozilla Persona. Enough with crap login forms or a hundred OAuth providers.<p>Hugepic is something I've looked for in the past, congrats on launching. One little bug I found: the login button is misaligned (and is being affected by the link hover style) <a href="http://cl.ly/image/442S1B1E3A3R" rel="nofollow">http://cl.ly/image/442S1B1E3A3R</a>
I personally have a fear of making things nobody will use. I know that the act of working on something is not a waste of time since you learn from the process of building but I can't ignore the feeling that I wasted my time anyway.<p>The way I do my projects now is that I try to get a core group of influential people in their niche to get excited about the project I'm building and I leave it to them to tell their friends about it. I've never spent a dime on marketing. A lot of traffic to one of my sites comes from FB, for example, and mainly from fan-created pages.<p>With the new project I'm currently working on, I noticed a group of users trying to shoehorn their activities into an existing platform that didn't exactly fit them. The first thing I did was to contact a lot of these people personally and asked them questions about what they were doing. After getting a fairly good idea, I then asked them if they were interested in testing something that I'll make for them in the next few weeks which got a positive response.<p>I spent a week building the core features that I thought were the most useful for them. All the core features worked but since I ported a lot of existing code from my old projects to speed things up, a lot of the other stuff was broken but that's okay. I hate building useless stuff so I needed to know right away if I was on the right track.<p>I invited the people I contacted to test it out. They didn't like it. Discouraging but expected. After a weekend of tweaks and discussions, they started getting more and more excited about the project as they started to see things progress. I made sure I involved them in all of the design discussions and tried to make them feel that this was their project as much as it is mine. Basically, tons of buy-in which also works wonders for my morale to keep going. They're excited, I'm excited, and now we're at the point where they've decided that they're going to bring all of their activities over to the new site.<p>It's a lot of upfront work to be sure, but this way, I can approach it more from a systems analysis standpoint now than a marketing exercise later.<p>TL;DR Find a key group of prospective users and involve them in your project from the beginning. Let them be a part of its creation, generate excitement, then let the marketing take care of itself from there.
Around the World is great! It just needs a flashier UI and introduction. It's seriously addictive. Please don't give up on it.<p>If you want to explore it further next year hit me up for some graphic design advice/help.