10 Tips I Learned From Analyzing How a Company Repeatedly Launch on The Online Community?-?Startup Week?12

This week was rather short. I was adjusting to a new lifestyle with coronavirus social isolation. Now, I’m working from home mostly. I was analyzing community driven sharing and user growth by another company, and how I can apply its tactics.

How to Repeatedly Launch On The Online Community

I was studying a promotional strategy from a founder of OneProfile. I saw him on Indiehackers. And his company is in quite an early stage as well, which started last September.

With 2000 people have signed up so far, I thought I could learn a great deal from him to hit the next milestone. Compared to Kaffae, his launch strategy was really successful.

Here are some takeaways:

1. It’s ok to repeatedly relaunch over and over on Reddit/Hackernews/Indiehackers.
2. It’s all about headlines. (Experiment with number 1).
3. Be clear what it will do and how. Blogging Jargon like “Your” is not necessary
4. Playing with an adjective is a bonus (gorgeous, beautiful, free, etc)
5. Make sure to include what you improved since the last post.
6. It’s ok to share posts on feature related threads.
7. Start the opening with “you are working on this project that does…” (especially on Reddit)
8. Best if you can include “Based on the feedback from the community last time…”
9. There is no hard number of how long you need to wait until the next share. It’s more of what you did during that time.
10. Don’t be discouraged if your share gets 0 votes. That means very little.

I am not going to lie, I have been not much active in the online community before. So, learning from other successors is a great resource. Some of the existing loyal users did come from Reddit, and the founders cannot estimate its power in the initial traction, especially you are targeting consumer applications.

My Relaunch on HackerNews

Over the past year, I launched on HackerNews 4 times. Their community guideline says it’s ok to launch if there’s a significant change in your product. Each time I made sure I’ve made major feature weather it’s adding recommendations or social features.

But the results had been weary. The first time I shared, it received 0 upvotes. Since then, the responses had been floating around 1 vote.

Learning from OneProfile, I decided to take a look at my own headlines.

They were all track your reading in them. So instead, I wanted to remove that altogether. Instead, I wanted to focus on its personalization aspect. What came out was this:

“Show HN: Build a Personal Library of Articles Automatically”

The result was 8 votes. And generated more than 100 visitors to the site with 4 signups. It’s not mindblowing, but much better outcome than previously (if you get only 1 vote, you will get about 10 visitors).

If you notice, the math does not work linearly. After a certain threshold of upvotes, which I imagine around 30, it will generate explosive traffic to your site. That’s why you hear founders going crazy with their successful launches. It’s the jackpot dynamics and winner takes all dynamics of the community-driven growth.

Right now, I’m working on data visualization that I made using Kaffae. It’s on how news is reacting to coronavirus and the change in how different countries are mentioned by publishers. I will be sharing the result of sharing that next week.

Stay tuned!