Cool idea. I might suggest creating a static version of your site and hosting it on s3. This will make it much more stable if you have a high read rate. Then you can point the new submissions to a app server or something. You don't have to get fancy with this or anything, a simple 'wget -r <a href="http://www.kickoffboost.com/'" rel="nofollow">http://www.kickoffboost.com/'</a> and upload that to a s3 bucket, etc.
How do you pick what goes on the front page and how long it stays there? Or is it just FIFO queue with most recent on top? If so, how do you throttle it and what's the backlog?<p>One thing that I don't like about BetaList (as a submitter) - there's no insight into whether your submission is going to be accepted and if it is, then when it's going to be featured. If you can make your site better <i>for submitters</i>, you will have an upper hand over BL, which is <i>the</i> competitor to measure up to at the moment.
Hi Everyone,<p>The response to kickoff boost has been overwhelming and I'm in a bit of a struggle to keep up, but it's a great thing :)<p>I'm focusing the showcase algo right now so I can't comment or reply to everyone individually until later tonight, but I'll post some updates here.<p>I launched kickoffboost.com rather prematurely not having any idea that I would get this much traffic. I started coding for kickoff boost the day I read Paul Graham's post "Do things that do not scale" and basically just built a front page with DB hook to showcase products.<p>Right now, I am manually approving submissions. I'm working to implement a process where after approval, each product will have a "life" (say 300) and "age/clicks" (starting at 0).<p>When links are clicked, that product's age will be incremented, and the product will get front page space as long as age doesn't exceed life. The life/age bar will be publicly shown for each product. Once age exceeds life limit, the goes to "archived / older posts" and new products get front page view ( thinking about limiting front page to show 20 products at a time ). What do you guys think of this idea? I just want to optimize great new product's chance of discovery and I thought this would be a fair way to distribute the traffic love.<p>Like I said, I took Paul Graham's advice to heart and created something that really doesn't scale as of this moment. This has been extremely validating however, and now I am in overdrive to get things done. Please feel free to help me out by giving me ideas about how I can improve this.<p>I am really hopeful that I can turn this into something very helpful people like me who build things and often don't get the recognition they hope or deserve.<p>Thank's to everyone who pointed out bugs and optimization tips. I am getting to them one at a time. Thanks to everyone who submitted their products. Because of the premature launch, I cannot guarantee that I'll approve and showcase all the products just yet, but I feature all the submissions (as long as they are not troll submissions) in a just and fair way. Thank's to everyone who took the time to write to me and say that they see this as something useful. Thanks to everyone for checking it out. And thanks to PG for that essay "Do things that do not scale". I don;t know how, but the idea came to me within an hour of reading that essay.<p>Cheers!
easymode
For anyone who likes this sort of thing, you should also check out <a href="http://betali.st/" rel="nofollow">http://betali.st/</a><p>I'm not involved in either btw.
Interesting - bookmarked. Will probably try it out next time I launch a product.<p>Stuff like this is why I prefer /newest to the front page. =)<p>(Edit: Okay, it's on the front page now. Still, /newest is always worth checking out.)
How many eyeballs do you think will come across your site?<p>I've recently been featured on beta list and thinking about applying on erlibird although erlibird requires payment.
Submitted my latest project, <a href="https://sparklr.me/" rel="nofollow">https://sparklr.me/</a>
Out of curiosity, is there a criteria for what gets showcased, and if so, what is it?<p>Also, noticed that all the new things are appended to the bottom of the page. Makes it look like the site hasn't changed, imo, but maybe that's intentional
Yay! Another resource for early traffic.<p>StartupLi.st, which I created from my tent while on deployment in Afghanistan (crazy!), was an early mover in this space, and has some new features in the pipeline.<p>Kickoffboost looks pretty cool, and is in the same category as Erlibird, BetaList, KillerStartups, Wikindu, MoMB, StartupLift, etc. It's great to see so many sites looking to help boost the early traffic of very early startups.<p>Also, Mevvy and Ocitrus are newer resources to showcase your early startup.<p>All of these resources are recommended to use when looking for exposure and feedback on your early product/ prototype.<p>Eventually... TechCrunch will be an afterthought when looking for early traffic/ users. Cheers!:)
Here's an even cooler idea: instead of listing emerging ideas, ,and beta projects, what about creating a website service for finishing almost done apps (alpha projects if you like). That would be a more interesting list. People could upload their started, but not finished projects and outline what's left. There must be millions of good ideas that has been started, but never finished due to the fact that the developer didn't find the problem interesting anymore. Specialize in one thing, like iphone-apps.
Okay, I'll go for it. I'm very curious to see how the traffic will compare to Hacker News. Yesterday I put a link to my company (<a href="http://algorithmic.ly" rel="nofollow">http://algorithmic.ly</a>) in a comment and the response was overwhelming. I've heard that traffic from different sources can behave drastically differently in terms of conversions, and HN is notoriously bad with conversions, so I wonder how it will compare.
FYI, I submitted an app (<a href="http://memn.io/" rel="nofollow">http://memn.io/</a>) to this an hour or so ago and while I don't see it in any publicly available section, I am getting more than a few hits with kickoffboost.com as the referral. Playing around with your URLs showed that you can just increment the number to view any submitted product. You might want to switch to UUIDs or at least add more security.
I'm surprized there are very few apps presented from a user centric point of view. "This app is a ..." bad, "Make better ..." good.<p>This makes it clear and easy to grab how the app will contribute to make my life better, anf why using and buying it might be worth for me.<p>Hey Kalzumeus, your marketing lessons are starting to work on me! I was just a dumb programmer before.
This is really awesome! :) I submitted our iPhone App 7-Minutes Workout (<a href="http://www.tapelicious.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.tapelicious.com</a>) I'm looking forward to see it on your site!
Great idea! I love this and give you props for putting together a site that showcases new ideas. There's so much noise out there that it's nice to have a site that weeds through that noise. Awesome.
Your links are broken; middle-clicking on a link does nothing. Also, please let me decide, if I want to open a link in the same tab (left-click) or in a new tab (middle-click). (Linux/Firefox)
There was another site posted a month or two ago that was similar. Post an idea and get feedback. I even registered for a credit but now I can't remember the site, anyone remember?
Reminds me of <a href="http://www.killerstartups.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.killerstartups.com</a> back in the days (not sure if they are still doing that though).
Would be useful if you have newsletter for recently added/updates of the day. Consider feedpress.it to read your RSS, it already has the newsletter feature.
This awesome man. How muuch traffic are you getting to the site. Pre-HN post?<p>And are people paying you to feature them? Or just companies you like<p>Great job again man. i love it. Def bookmarked
Nice idea, I am also submitting our new launched app <a href="http://justprecious.net" rel="nofollow">http://justprecious.net</a><p>Btw found a silly bug. When I signed up by mistake I used myname@Gmail.com and now I can't login with myname@gmail.com
Cool, just signed up and submitted Soulmix (<a href="http://www.soulmix.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.soulmix.com</a>). Would love to see how a listing on KickoffBoost turns out :)