After spending the last three days coding our YC-interview demo, Wesley, Ajay and I decided to submit our project Readstream to Hacker News at 6 AM after an all-night coding session. Readstream is a fully-featured, socially curated stream of all the links brought to you by your Twitter timeline. Basically what we do is go into your Twitter timeline, find all of the articles linked to by the people you follow, and then present them to you in a format that allows you to quickly scan through and read the things that interest you.
For the first 30 or so minutes after we submitted it we barely got any upvotes. Then upvotes slowly started trickling in. Eventually we made it to the front page. And then we were in the #1 position. Wesley and I were high-fiving and smiling, responding to comments, and watching our Chartbeat go crazy. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of finishing a long night of coding, being absolutely exhausted, and then watching your project climb to the top of Hacker News. That’s a feeling you have to hold on to.
And now, without further ado:
After being on the front page for approximately 6 hours, and being at the number one spot for about an hour (albeit early in the morning) we got 5,733 pageviews, 3,698 absolute unique visitors and a 66% bounce rate.
One thing I noticed was that the bounce rate was a little higher than I would like. We thought that by throwing up an intriguing headline, and giving a little descriptive paragraph people would be ready and willing to sign up. And they were. But we also got a lot of people on Hacker News asking us to give them a way to see the app without using their accounts first. So lesson learned: don’t make people login with their Twitter accounts to find out exactly how the app works. Provide a video demo, or some other means of previewing to allow people to see the app before entering their person information.
Besides this I think the most interesting statstics come from our database. We signed up 720 users in our first day, and those users viewed over 12 thousand articles! That’s an average of over 16 articles per user. Good stuff!
So if you haven’t checked out our app yet you should try it out at ReadstreamApp.com. We think you’ll love it.
Congrats. The front page of NH is really a boon for drawing a lot of people to your site. I’ve managed to get on it two times in the past years and both brought me 5K+ visits in 24 hours.
thanks! yes there’s no better way to get feedback on/launch your product than HN
Thanks so much for your article, very effective piece of writing.site | site | HP OfficeJet 700 toner