There are many stories on HN about great product launches that get money from tons of people on the first day. If we hear about slow launches, the store comes years later, after the product is a success. I'm writing this so that we'll have another perspective. I'm ten days into a slow, frustrating launch, but I am hopeful and excited.<p>Thirteen users have signedup for my hosted PhantomJS web service (BromBone.com). That's a lie. Four of those 13 accounts are test accounts I created. Why I am so excited about these nine accounts? I have nine people who have decided to take my service for a test drive! The great thing about that is that nine is only one less than ten. Ten doubled is 20. Find another 20 and I'm up 40. That's almost half way to 100, then 200, 300, and 400. Soon I'll have a 1000.<p>That may be a little optimistic. I've read so much about gathering interest before launch and talking to customers. But it din't go as smoothly as I would hope. Posts to mailing lists take me longer to craft than I would like. The discussion is positive and generates some traffic. But honestly it is a trickle compared to what I need. I posted twice to HN, but no one clicked the upvote button.<p>Why then am I so positive? I got two sigups overnight. And I hadn't done any new marketing the day before. My traffic is tiny. But every time I do a little piece of marketing, I see a spike. The spike goes away, but it leaves behind a residual traffic increase. Additionally, the nine users I have are actually playing around with the service. They're using something I crated! I think if I keep my efforts going, traffic and users will increase.<p>If anyone else out there is excited about getting just a handful of signups, you're not alone. I'm sure we won't all make it big, but I think there's reason to be excited. Just because my "launch" didn't bring in a flood of users doesn't mean that I can't grow the trickle into a stream, and then a river. Or maybe this is denial. Time will tell.
In the whole first month of Buffer, we had less than 100 signups. For comparison, we now have 560,000 users (2.5 years later). We now sign up 100 people within a couple hours. It amazes me to think about it.<p>I had a previous startup that also started slow, but never really changed. The key difference between the two, was retention. So I would highly recommend anyone who's getting started to closely watch retention. Does anyone keep using the product into their second week after sign up? That's the first thing I'd focus on with what I know now.
Oh, I can outdo you!<p>Many years ago I did an upstart that was a combination of delicious and facebook, using bayesian filtering to locate links and people you might be interested in from what you posted yourself. Incredibly clever product. Before Google had even thought of pagerank. We got funding, we had great engineers, and I was the CEO.<p>But you know what? We never launched. We ran out of money before we got that far.<p>You launched - I didn't.<p>Congratulations! You've made it further than most.
My advice: stop advertising PhantomJS and let me sign up for your service. Why did I have to scroll down 80% of the page to get to a sign up button? And nothing on your page convinced me that I should.<p>I am in your target market - I build websites for a living, and I hate testing in multiple browsers. Convince me, in one sentence, why this is a good idea, and give me the option of doing something about it.<p>Good luck.
I know how hard this can be. I've been doing startup stuff for 7 years. And it's still awfully painful. I'd encourage teaching to find an audience.<p>I've been blogging and blogging and blogging. I ended up giving that up at one point. I thought I had more important things to do. I thought it wasn't growing enough. But that was foolish.<p>The biggest thing that's changed a lot of things for me in the last year is simply sticking to a schedule of writing once per week. It all eventually adds up. It eventually opens up new doors.<p>It doesn't happen over night either. But the audience that finds you tends to stick with you. And tends to help market all the new projects.<p>What about creating BromBone.com was hard that you figured out? Any hosting problems that you solved? Any bugs in PhantomJS? Anything you can open source? Did you learn anything about what kind of mailing list post gets more traffic than others? Learn anything about making collecting signups easier?<p>I continue to collect tons and tons of ideas as I go through life that I feel were hard and I figured out or were interesting. A bunch of people just pass on when I write about them. Meh. But then every now and then, something spreads like crazy. An open source project here. A motivating post here. And years later you find, a lot of awesome stuff has built up. People following you. People wanting to see your next project and spread it.<p>Doing what we're doing is a career. It isn't a lottery. It isn't going to happen in one launch. It's something that we should expect to get better and better at. Forever.<p>> If you launch and no one notices, launch again. We launched 3 times.
- Brian Chesky, Founder of AirBnB
<a href="https://twitter.com/bchesky/status/312438036929576962" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/bchesky/status/312438036929576962</a>
Right off the bat.<p>I'm kind of buzzed so take my advice as twice as important related to usability<p>No pictures = not interested (for 'scripts' this is okay.. but if its something that you expect users to sign up to it must have imagery).<p>If its a script that you put into your own app, then make a video to show how it works.<p>You need a much better summary at the top of exactly what it does and why i should sign up.<p>You use ALL your <i>prime</i> real estate explaining what a headless browser is. I already know what it is, and lose interest immediately.<p>just my .02, now I will go back for real and look a second time in detail but I wanted to give you my raw first impressions.<p>===<p>At second glance, your call to actions are terrible (raw but honest, I want you to succeed).<p>My eyes move around the page like a dead rat rolling around in the wind.<p>look at examples of places that do it well:<p><a href="https://stripe.com/" rel="nofollow">https://stripe.com/</a><p><a href="https://bundlescout.com/" rel="nofollow">https://bundlescout.com/</a><p><a href="http://www.discourse.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.discourse.org/</a><p>Your signup button is literally -100/10. I can't rate it worse. I looked around how to sign up (I actually <i>tried</i> and still couldnt see it)
Disclaimer: I'm a hardcore phantomjs user. Add a service that scrapes results and I think you'll be overwhelmed with interest. Scraping is a pain. It takes a special niche talent -- but a ton of people want it. Let people submit what information they want off a page -- you write the script that does it for them. Pay as you go, etc. If it saves people time, they will pay for it. I do full-time consulting -- building out software systems for people, but I could just as easily keep myself 100% busy just building phantom/casper scrapers for people that have no clue how to do it -- and I'm not talking about stuff that falls into the "be evil" bucket. You're just building web services where there are none.
I find it odd that the hacker community likes to completely disregard non-technical people[1]. It's situations exactly like this where it would bring a huge amount of value to have someone dedicated to marketing/community outreach and evangelism for the product.<p>Even though it's a technical project, explained well and with patience even the most non-technical person could wrap their head around it and develop a plan to get it to market.<p>Being both a dev and a marketer, I've found there are two, entirely separate brainstorming mindsets: product design and development, and product marketing and execution. It is incredibly taxing and inefficient to frequently switch between these two mindsets, which is why I believe most developed companies evolve into having two distinct departments: product development and product marketing. I'm working on my own startup now in RoR doing exactly this (i.e. trying to switch between the two roles frequently) with much frustration. Luckily I have a great business partner that is entirely focused on strategy that can knock some sense into me when I become too bogged down in the development/coding thought pattern.<p>Going to a business school with essentially zero CS majors, I personally know a dozen people that would be interested in jumping in on a project like this, not even for the lucrative rewards of success but the experience of working on such a project and jumping into the tech world.<p>Just some thoughts...<p>[1]: Most recent example I've stumbled upon: "No marketers/MBAs/designers/unicorns/whatever." Source: <a href="http://hackerho.us/" rel="nofollow">http://hackerho.us/</a>
I once read 'If you build it, they won't come'. I think this is the case for most people. Getting people to your website or service is the hard part, not the development. We're all in the same boat here. For a product such as yours, I can imagine going to events, posting on relevant forums etc... would be your best bet at getting more users. Best of luck with your product, what you currently have looks promising.
Good luck to you. Not getting a single upvote for new stories on HN seems to be the norm, at least for me, so I wouldn't worry about that very much.<p>What you should focus on right now is whether or not the users you have actually use and like the app. If they do, then you've created something that people like and you should focus on growth. If they are not really using it after registration, then you should focus on improving the product until the usage rate goes up to acceptable levels.
My startup in 2008 spent 3 years in development limbo and never launched. My next one in 2011 launched with similar numbers to what you described here and we eventually scrapped it because we had no way to effectively promote it. We launched a new site in 2012 and we now have over 7 million unique visitors a month to our site and hundreds of partnerships with other services. The biggest change we made was focusing on building partnerships in the industry. We never went to any conferences or sales trips, everything was via email introductions. Try to find a way to make yourself useful to people who have distribution channels, at least that worked for our individual case anyhow.
Hey, I'm going to be in the same position soon. :)<p>I haven't launched yet, and while I feel that there's a large audience for the service I plan to provide, I feel like the majority of my potential users are content with what they have right now.<p>Either way, great job. I'm not sure if I could be so optimistic. Besides talking to potential users, have you tried advertising/promotions/etc?<p>Edit:<p>As justhw said, a demo or two and screen shot wouldn't be a terrible idea.<p>And while this may not make a great difference, add a favicon and change the title.<p>The title is currently set to "A headless browser as a service built on PhantomJS - BromBone"<p>So, in my sea of tabs, all I see is "A head" which isn't as helpful when trying to find the tab as "BromBone."
First of all, congrats on actually shipping. You've already accomplished more than 99% of people.<p>Second of all, you're actually charging money for your product. That's awesome. When just one of those users converts to a paid plan you'll already be making more money than any of those hyped social startups with big launches that never turn a dollar profit.<p>Kudos.
Re Pricing - I'd be interested in being able to buy a number of "credits" for this service instead of paying a recurring monthly fee. Something like $20 for 500 requests that I can then use anytime over the next 12 months.<p>Your service looks interesting but also something I'm likely to use a lot for a few days then possibly not at all for a while so I'd be reluctant to pay a monthly fee for it. A "credit pack" or pay-per-use ability would be a great alternative
I checked it out to see if it's something that interests me.<p>It took me a while to "get it" (i.e. understand what it does). The aha moment came with the sentence, "It doesn't display the page on a monitor."<p>If you can, try to get to the explanation sooner, using simple words. I think I'd seen the phrase "headless browser" before but I'd forgotten what it meant.
You posted twice on HN and no one up voted you - posted this 'Tell HN' and this time you're on the front page, I'm sure that a bunch of interested hackers will visit your website now and register with your service. Keep telling the world about your service, find out what works better and do it again.
I passed it along to 0-7000 people, depending on how things play out in the noise of G+ and Twitter. It's not something I have a use for, but it looks interesting.
As a former PhantomJS user, I certainly would have used you guys. I went through a lot of shit trying to set it up (this is phantomjs v1.3 i am talking about - mainly xvfb - which kept sending shitty screenshots). I am pretty sure you have a good market out there.<p>My suggestions:
1. Change your name - since you are doing a hosted phantomjs browser as a service, try to have either the word phantom or browser in your name.
2. Change your design - Go with bootstrap-based template for SaaS apps.
3. Too much content on your page. Cut them down.
4. Spin off couple of specialized tasks as separate services - screenshot capture and web scraping.
5. Quite a bunch of phantomjs and casper.js user groups/mailing lists. Actively participate in them.<p>Good luck!
Application Error
An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. Please try again in a few moments.<p>If you are the application owner, check your logs for details.
I looked up your page (I'm a web developer, interested in testing, using zombiejs right now), and there are two things. First: Way to much text. Second: I don't care what you use as an underlying software stack. Tell me that you parse the whole page, executing js and everything, and get the result back to me. Thats your message. And then add some text somewhere to tell me that I can write phantom.js tests which are executed against the page.<p>What I really don't know is why I need a phantomjs web worker. I mean if I am that deep into testing, I have a CI which does this for me. No need to add another external service to the stack. I'm also worried that 1000 requests for $29 are a little much? I don't know about phantomjs, but zombiejs was installed in way under a minute (using npm). So while you are saving me a few minutes for installing phantom.js (doesn't look like rocket science to me), you are taking my time for integrating your API and you are charging me?<p>I think by refining your messages and thinking about what exactly it is you are selling you might have a decent service there.
It's odd that your site isn't coming up in a google search for brombone. That's probably hurting you a ton. You might look into that. I've had even tiny pages come up pretty quick in google searches.<p>Good luck to you, man. I am really glad to see a real world example of what startup life is actually like instead of those one in a million instant takeoff sites that make real people feel so discouraged.
I don't mean to sound like a scrooge but... it's really expensive! I'm super interested in this service, but before paying 29/month (that's more than what i pay for a VOS server) i want to be sure that the service 1) Is working properly according to my needs 2) It's efficient 3) will be helpful.
A.K.A. Add a free plan to try it!
One challenge I've noticed is how quickly you can become accustomed to better results. Right now, a 100 sign up day would blow you away. But when that peters out, even to a point elevated from your current state, it isn't as satisfying.<p>Metrics continue to mess with you, long past the earliest stages.
Impressive. Congrats on shipping and launching.<p>Constructive criticism: it looks like something I could <i>actually</i> use i.e. automation, server-side rendering, useful for SEO. But, I left the landing page and couldn't tell you <i>exactly</i> what the product will do for me. I have a vague idea that it might be useful for SEO or automation. I'm too busy to read the long copy. I'm not too busy to write this post, though :-)<p>I'd like to see different headlines (or landing pages) that speak to my pain points. "Having trouble getting your Knockout.JS website ranked?" "Frustrated by trying to automate testing of your JavaScript-heavy site?" etc.<p>Again, kudos. Something tells me this service is going to do fine... patience, right? ;-)
Great post. Those super-early adopters are awesome. I consider myself lucky that, as a high school senior and one-man team who utilizes free software and services like AWS EC2, I don't feel compelled to amass a userbase to put dinner on the table. It's really a great experience to have nothing more than $10 (for the domain name) and a bunch of (well-spent) hours invested in a web service. And the best part is: I built it for myself and anyone else who finds it valuable. I built it because I wanted a web-based alternative to iTunes on iOS. It's pure freedom - the idea that almost anyone can build something they want to use and put it online makes me appreciate the Web all the more.
To add more points of view. For me, your design is not that good. It is a mix of a website for a web framework and something with a menu plus the sign in in the same page. Copy the same design than the other service providers do.
The design is not perfect. The texts are not well placed.<p>I think 4 different prices is too much. 3 is good or do something like "user, team, company", and then if we need to have more options we can contact you.<p>Your website is your biggest investment in Marketing. You should polish it. You also need to understand what your customers need. Their needs are certainly different than what you think.
The creator of Bingo Card creator I believe said on here before (or maybe on his blog) that he had a similar growth. Now it's his day job. So I'd just keep thinking about it the way you are. Good luck! :)
Although just a side project, one of the most important things I've learned with Hacker Newsletter is to just stick with it. It seems like too often we (the HN crowd) lose our passion for something a bit too quickly and move on to our next big idea.<p>You can see my subscriber growth rate here:
<a href="http://imm.io/ZCRJ" rel="nofollow">http://imm.io/ZCRJ</a><p>For almost a year I could not move the needle it seemed, but then finally it happened and from there it has gotten easier. Now I have 15,000 subscribers and think I can hit 25k to 30k by the end of the year.
I'm in a similar position, except I'm not trying to get new users. In fact, I'm trying to maintain a very small set of users so I can test ideas on them before I try to go bigger.<p>Getting users is great, but getting traction, meaning users who keep coming back is a much better goal to aim for. So out of your 9 users, start looking at the percentage, although small, that are regularly using your app.<p>I'm up to 83 users with 0 marketing and I'm trying out new ideas, watching the analytic data and responding over and over. It's a great spot to be in. Keep it up.
As a practicing software developer who works on web applications daily, I did not get hooked after reading your site.<p>If you want to acquire me as a user you should post some instructional tutorials and videos on how I can use your service and why I would benefit from it.<p>New relic is doing a great job of marketing this way, with their IRC channel, reps contacting you to ask how things are going in a non-pushy way, and they're also giving out cool t-shirts (obviously an expense, but I think you could do it for someone who buys a $99 account?)
Exciting dude! I'm in the same position. I've got 57 subscribers (probably 7 from friends, ha!) already on my web app, and it hasn't even launched[1] (psst - we're launching tomorrow). I was excited to learn that the latter part of sign-ups included people I had never heard of. One of them being a former Olympic silver medalist diver who does triathlons that signed up! That's a pretty cool feeling.<p>[1] - <a href="http://www.competehub.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.competehub.com</a>
You might consider some simplification of your web page... there was a cool automatic "tutorial" JS app posted here a few days ago... and maybe security as a selling point. I'd like to throw suspicious pages at it and see what happens if anything... big market for that and you can charge a lot more than you are if you make it remotely "cyber" related. Feel free to talk to me/pm if you want some pointers on the security side of the house.
Congrats and best of luck. You got me laughing real hard on the 4 users part.<p>Advice:
Your site could benefit from some visuals, like a screen shot/ demo.
Hi, I just signed up, sounds like a neat service, but when I look at the lowest price plan, starting at 29.99 is pretty steep.
Though not comparable, there's a reason why dropbox starts at 9.99$ a month, and salesforce starts at 5$ a month (per user).
Maybe you should look into having a lower price point but with less features or less requests per month.
What sort of inbound traffic numbers are you getting? I have to be honest - I was completely turned off the landing page. Further more, the content structure reads like a blog to me - I had no idea it was service at first glance. I'd be happy to give you some action items / critique over Skype or Hangouts if you're interested.<p>Drop me a line - @twanlass.
Sounds like a cool test app, if you have a lot of time to click through and to double-check the results. You might want to look at <a href="https://www.rainforestqa.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.rainforestqa.com</a> , they do something similar but on a much larger scale and automated. Perhaps you'd get inspired for the next step.
Congrats on the launch.<p>I run a monitoring service that's built on top of PhantomJS. Happy to chat anytime about the tech or what I've learned about the business.<p>It would help to have a clear call to action from the homepage. One thing to keep in mind is that most major hosting companies don't charge for inbound traffic any more so pulling data is basically free.
I am glad you launched!
If I can just give my 5 cents here, it will definitely get you more users if you could summarise your test into easily readable point forms or short paragraphs to explain your product on your main website.
Similarly, if you are sending out to your mailing list, you will want to keep it concise!
Yep its great. I am on similar boat for <a href="http://hirehub.me/" rel="nofollow">http://hirehub.me/</a> , trying to gain traction and get some feedback. Which is so important to improve the product.<p>Congratulation you made it to first page of HN which would be enough to gain traction to get useful feedback on your product.
You are still lucky that your article is up here and i am sure you have thousands of sign-ups by now.
I tried with my multiplx.com - an alternative for Google Reader and I am not able to get the traffic i need neither my post came to limelight in HN. So, it all depends... not sure when and what picks up..
I'm in a similar situation and it's encouraging to read that this seems to be commonplace. I'm just about on the cusp of having one satisfied customer willing to participate in the develop-deliver-discuss cycle, which makes me very excited, but I'm not sure where to go from there.
This is probably not very important but What is the expected workflow when someone visiting your site at <a href="http://www.brombone.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.brombone.com/</a> clicks sign up and clicks cancel in the following screen? I just get an error.
I started <a href="http://www.cameralends.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.cameralends.com</a> about two months ago, and have gone from a handful of visitors/day to about a hundred/day, and regular signups to boot. Hang in there, the fun is just starting :)
I would recommend for BromBone to simply say first thing on your site that you provide a service to get screenshots of a web page. Could eliminate most of the rest of detailed explanation about headless browsers. Never even heard that term.
I didn't understand the product on the first scroll. You should put the product in easier words. What is the use case? Why should I use it? A video demo/lots of screenshots would fit better. And get a template from wrapbootstrap.com
I really suggest you to change your pricing names. "Hans Plan ... Ichabod Plan"?! Change them into something much more meaningful to your users: the name of your customer segments. like "freelancer" then "design studio" and so on...
I've just finished reading The Lean Startup. There is so much in there that is relevant to this if you haven't already read it I highly recommend you check it out. Especially the sections on engines of growth and metrics.
Pfff. 13 users are much more than my pet project (<a href="http://www.DNSDigger.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.DNSDigger.com</a>) has. It is a couple of years old but i recently started with paid accounts and API-access.
I think a trial or atleast a demo will go a long way for brombone. Also, it doesn't look like you are selling something from the first look at the website. It looks like an article or a blog post to be honest.
Just Make Lemonade. If you start with a low base (9 sign ups), then just focus on percentage increases in user growth rather than actual users. This can make your growth charts look great for several months.
Is your service available in country's that restrict access to certain websites? It could help them to access them. May be get some attention from vpn provider to increase visibility for that kind of matter.
My first impression when I opened your site was "Oh, another open source project!" — I think this was not the impression you wanted me to have :) Apart from that, very interesting service, well done :)
Heya,<p>Do you plan to license this for self-hosting? If you do, I think you might be surprised at the enterprise buyin on this sort of thing. I can <i>immediately</i> think of $confidential projects that could use this.
Working on a web product for +1 year here and we are still a few months away for release. Personally I think I'll cry when I see the first sign up that <i>isn't</i> a test account. If I ever see it.
I was just wondering if you were planning to integrate CasperJS too, which is an awesome addition onto PhantomJS. If not, it'd be interesting to have access to an online PhantomJS REPL.
Same thing happened to me, posted twice to HN with no up votes then I got my first sign up and I was super excited. From that point there really should be no turning back.
Having great ideas and failing to get any traction is something me and I would be many people are familiar with. Of course we mostly hear about the successes.