We did a Show HN and it landed on the front page of Hacker News

I feel like half of what I see here is advertisements thinly disguised as blog posts. Now this company needs to promote itself a second time by calling attention to the first time it promoted itself?

| Less than 1% of those visitors actually tried our presentation demo (only about 5 did) which was surprising (and disappointing).<p>I think it&#x27;s been documented that engagement from reddit&#x2F;facebook&#x2F;etc is very low because you&#x27;re often using a shotgun approach instead of targeting people who would actually become customers. On the other hand, this product would really be in the wheel house of a site frequented by tech entrepreneurs. It&#x27;s cool to see that you were able to get feedback and act on it.<p>If I could throw my two cents in, I, and I assume anyone else visiting your site while at work, will always be hesitant to click a play button.

I have posted a blog post[0] explaining I was building a redundant storage service for developers. It was on the front page for about 4 hours. I think the best place it got was about 18th. I didn&#x27;t put analytics and wasn&#x27;t very careful about my logs. Actually the logs report the same IP all the time: the HTTP proxy and no referrer URL :)<p>I got very few people who sign up (which amount to choose a login and a password, no email required), I think it was around 10. Only one person tried really the service (i.e. uploaded an SSH public key and uploaded a few files).<p>The interesting thing is that even when the post had slipped from the front page, it was still generating a bit of traffic, possibly doubling the number of person registering.<p>The best thing I got from that post though was some feedback on HN itself but also a couple of persons sent me an encouraging emails. For that reason alone, even if you&#x27;re not ready (you never are), post publicly your work as soon as possible.<p>[0]: <a href="http://hypered.io/blog/2014-02-17-building-reesd/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hypered.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2014-02-17-building-reesd&#x2F;</a>

I think it&#x27;s very easy to miss that there&#x27;s a video in your homepage. The first thing I saw was the green &quot;Try PitchIt now&quot;, I had to go back to search for the video.<p>I think it&#x27;s because it&#x27;s the same colour and roughly the same size as the surrounding text so it looks like some kind of a logo. Maybe you should display the video player to make it more obvious?<p>See for instance, straight from the frontpage at the moment: <a href="https://www.useslate.com/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.useslate.com&#x2F;</a><p>You can&#x27;t miss the video that way, and I know what will happen when I click the &quot;play&quot; button (I won&#x27;t be taken to an other page for instance). In your case the video puts itself on top of the rest of the page, meaning I can&#x27;t listen to it while I idly browse the rest of the content.<p>As for the actual &quot;hands on&quot; demo the first thing I see is a prompt for me to input an email address. I immediately closed the tab. You want 0 friction here IMHO, use fake addresses to give the potential user a taste of the application. Then maybe at the end prompt for more info.

Since you asked:<p>The name is not working for me at all. I read it as an abbreviation of Pitchlet. The l and I are too close together for me. Only when I saw the link with a lower case i the lights went on. But that is not the only reason. And I can see why I might be the only person thinking of applets here.<p>A pitch is a &quot;Sales presentation&quot;. There is only one thing worse than a presentation, and that is a &quot;Sales presentation&quot;. As soon as I see &quot;Pitch&quot;, my entire being prepares itself for a person bothering me. I think of car sales people and evereyone else who approaches me when I enter a store. Unfortunately there is only negativity associated with all that. So for me &quot;Pitch&quot; is a negativ word. Hey, that could just be me. It has a lot to do with cultural background. Maybe I would call it KeyPoints.

Delay? We were originally using youtube to play the video but now we have switched to Wistia. It is much better and we can link directly to the instant demo at the end rather than showing other random videos.

&gt; <i>&quot;Since we made those changes, we have noticed the ratio of people who try our presentation demo now is up from an embarrassingly low 1% to a much healthier 28%.&quot;</i><p>I think you&#x27;ve made positive changes, but don&#x27;t forget that your organic audience is much different than the burst traffic from a link aggregator like Hacker News.<p>Not that your conclusions are <i>necessarily</i> wrong, but it&#x27;s easy to make false correlations when more than one variable changes.

Maybe it has something to do with the 15 second delay between the click on the play button and the actual start of the video.. unacceptable these days imho. Nice read thou :)

Why would I just use a webinar company? <a href="http://banckle.com/pricing/meeting.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;banckle.com&#x2F;pricing&#x2F;meeting.html</a><p>They have a $14&#x2F;mo plan?

The landing page looks so much better now, still the 3 images are a bit heavy and maybe distract the user (2 of them are very dark and the other one have a lot of colors). I would try another images

It&#x27;s always ironic when a post about getting on the front page of HN, get&#x27;s onto the front page of HN

Don&#x27;t forget to follow-up with a post on how &quot;We did a Show HN&quot; post did.

This is all too postmodern.