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I'm creating a website to promote early stage sites and ideas
- hdivider 13y agoInteresting - bookmarked. Will probably try it out next time I launch a product. Stuff like this is why I prefer /newest to the front page. =) (Edit: Okay, it's on the front page now. Still, /newest is always worth checking out.)
- easymode 13y agoThanks so much :D I'm trying to gather how many eyeballs each listing can gather, and I'm trying to optimize getting the traffic to the listings. I'll post the updates in this thread. Thanks again :)
- grey-area 13y agoReally nice site. To maximise traffic, consider starting a mailing list as well which mails out new sites once a week.
- shearnie 13y agoHow many eyeballs do you think will come across your site? I've recently been featured on beta list and thinking about applying on erlibird although erlibird requires payment.
- easymode 13y agoHi. Thanks for checking it out :) In short, I have no idea how many eyeballs it's gonna get, but I have google analytics open and I've gotten 300+ visit since I linked it here already :D I would love to feature your product though. I'm really glad you took the time to check it out. It'd be extra helpful to know back from you about how many eyeballs you got from kickoffboost. You can submit your product on the site, or I can even put a posting up for you if you just give me your link :) Cheers!
- shearnie 13y agoCool. Just signed up. My signups from betalist have dropped off, so I'll let you know how we go with you guys if we get approved.
- mountaineer 13y agoTwitter auth is not functional http://imgur.com/70sPKpM http://imgur.com/70sPKpM
- collinjackson 13y agoIt's broken for me, too.
- derrick_l_grant 13y agoYeah it's bust here too
- juretriglav 13y agoSame for me. The author should set up some kind of exception notification, so as to catch exceptions he or she doesn't see. Easiest to set up is https://github.com/smartinez87/exception_notification https://github.com/smartinez87/exception_notification I'm sure it's all very test-driven though :) Also, a nicer error page would be ... nicer. The default Rails error page oozes professionalism (I'm guilty of delaying error pages styling for way to long too - who's ever going to see them, right?)
- mountaineer 13y agoI've been guilty of not setting up notifications and pretty error pages too. Thanks for the link. There are some free Saas tools as well: New Relic, Logentries, Honeybadger that can make it easier.
- tuananh 13y agostep 1: get traffic for your site (kickoffboost.com) first. step 2: nah do step 1 first.
- OGC 13y agostep 2: plant links in echo chamber step 3: nah, nothing happens, but everyone feels really good about themselves
- rex_gsd 13y agoI sent you an email to the one via your contact us link. I like the page!
- samweinberg 13y agoEven though I'm already subscribed to betali.st and erlibird, I just can't seem to get enough of sites like this. Bookmarked.
- dmgrow 13y agoAre there other similar sites that you could name (either for closed or open betas)?
- murtza 13y agohttp://www.reddit.com/r/sideproject http://www.reddit.com/r/sideproject Note: I moderate r/SideProject. This subreddit has similar content to "Show HN," but each link spends more time on the front page. It is also a good place to test submission titles before posting to HN.
- samweinberg 13y agoStartupli.st, AngelList and MoMB (http://momb.socio-kybernetics.net/ http://momb.socio-kybernetics.net/) come to mind.
- lubujackson 13y agoMetafilter Projects can give you some good insight/test users, especially if your product isn't just techie-focused.
- awaxman11 13y agoI'd add authorization. Right now you can access all the edit and show pages as long as you're signed in
- devinegan 13y agoYep, direct object vulnerable. https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Top_10_2013-A4-Insecure_Direct_Object_References https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Top_10_2013-A4-Insecure_Dire...
- easymode 13y agoI just fixed it. Thanks so much for pointing it out! I shared kickoffboost on hackernews just to see if anybody would be interested in this kind of thing. I'm getting so much traffic now and I was not prepared for it at all.
- coindega 13y agoThis is awesome! I just submitted Coindega (https://www.coindega.com https://www.coindega.com)
- WestCoastJustin 13y agoCool 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 http://www.kickoffboost.com/' http://www.kickoffboost.com/' and upload that to a s3 bucket, etc.
- lukes386 13y agoEven easier would be to setup cloudflare in front of the site. All you have to do is set the cache control headers for your landing page to something like "max-age=300, public". That way cloudflare's servers will eat the vast majority of your requests, but no one will see content older than a few minutes. We got HN'd the other day and this kept our median response time around 25ms, even for our slow rails app. Of course you have to make sure your landing page is publicly cacheable for this to work (i.e. no user specific data), but that's a small price to pay for a drastic reduction in the amount of traffic you need to serve.
- joeblau 13y ago+1 for Cloudflare. I use them for my site and responsiveness has never been better. Their service is truly excellent.
- deadreturns3 13y agoOT: hahahaha Cloudflare has really improved their image on HN by posting those technical blog posts. Who else remembers that thread where they got super-shat on?
- ra 13y agoAs a CDN for static content Cloudflare is an easy win.
- AnSavvides 13y agoI second that, Cloudflare is the way to go - extremely reliable.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- yapsody 13y agoGreat website. Just Signed up and Submitted our new online event ticketing system Yapsody.com on your website. Hope you approve it. :)
- elisee 13y agoLooks nice! Maybe site screenshots should be clickable to make it more likely people will open each submission?
- ghc 13y agoOkay, 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 (http://algorithmic.ly http://algorithmic.ly) 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.
- d0m 13y agoHN is only good when it hits the front-page..
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- easymode 13y agoHi, I'm trying to manage lots of things right now. Kind of overwhelmed. But I just approved your request. Would be real cool if you share what kind of traffic you got from there in a day. Thanks!
- ghc 13y agoThe traffic to http://algorithmic.ly http://algorithmic.ly has been outstanding. I think your site just put us over the top. We have gotten more signups than we know what to do with. I'll have to write up a post about it.
- girvo 13y agoI'm glad you did: I'd love to talk to you, what you're doing is exactly what I'm looking for for my startup right now!
- gabrielrotbart 13y agoGoing to hijack and tell you that you've got all the right buzzwords to get me interested but I still have no idea what you're offering from the landing page. So much so as to dissuade me from signing up (to what?)
- keerthiko 13y agoBookmarked! We may submit our product on here once I consult with the rest of my team.
- tripley 13y agoMay I ask why you wouldn't submit a product here? I'm just curious.
- keerthiko 13y agoOur product is transitioning from closed to open beta. Among other reasons, a) We would want to set up tracking for referrals and to better gauge the effects of different distribution channels, among other things. b) we will have an explicit need for a traffic bump in a small window in the near future, so I would rather save an avenue like this to coincide with our other efforts. This scenario could exist for others too in situations such as looking to ride off a press story, and wanting to utilize the traffic to boost a crowdfunding campaign, etc. Also, unsure if this is actually a meaningful place for our product, as it's a mobile app and so not as direct, but that shouldn't really hurt I don't think
- tripley 13y agoThanks for answering keerthiko, that makes sense, I did some snooping and found BitGym, very cool product. Best of luck.
- notTHAT1337 13y agoOpened it, and immediately hated it.
- samelawrence 13y agoFor anyone who likes this sort of thing, you should also check out http://betali.st/ http://betali.st/ I'm not involved in either btw.
- eps 13y agoBetalist is awesome. Refered visitors are eager and curious early adopters. If you get featured, it's the easiest few hundred emails you can get.
- fbnt 13y agoThe Museum of Modern Betas (MoMB) has been around for many years now. http://momb.socio-kybernetics.net/ http://momb.socio-kybernetics.net/ It's worth a visit too if you're into this sort of stuff.
- varun1308 13y agoCould you also add the stats for hits on a particular item...
- easymode 13y agoThat's exactly what I'm working on :D I'm planning to work all those stats into an algo that would reward better ideas. Will keep you posted. Thanks!
- yodaiken 13y agoFYI, I submitted an app (http://memn.io/ http://memn.io/) 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.
- michaelxia 13y agoi listened to all the tracks on looti tooti. how do i give this guy my money.
- cheeaun 13y agoIs there an RSS/Atom feed of newly released apps?
- gcforky 13y agoWell this is something great. (i just gave you an standing ovation)
- PhilipA 13y agoMaybe it could be an idea to be able to comment the sites. Thereby you would get some retention of the users.
- easymode 13y agoDefinitely. Getting feedback on ideas is one of my aim. Kickoffboost will feel much more complete within weeks. This launch was to validate that there is a need for this kind of product, and I think I have the green signal to now make it awesome :)
- grafrein 13y agoThis is really awesome! :) I submitted our iPhone App 7-Minutes Workout (http://www.tapelicious.com http://www.tapelicious.com) I'm looking forward to see it on your site!
- esschul 13y agoHere'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.
- stdbrouw 13y agoWhy would developers who aren't interested in a problem any more be interested in documenting the code enough for someone else to take over? Color me skeptical :-)
- edotthekid 13y agoThis awesome man. How muuch traffic are you getting to the site. Pre-HN post? And are people paying you to feature them? Or just companies you like Great job again man. i love it. Def bookmarked
- lovskogen 13y agoIs there a RSS feed?
- BuddhaSource 13y agoNice idea, I am also submitting our new launched app http://justprecious.net http://justprecious.net 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
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- olalonde 13y agoReminds me of http://www.killerstartups.com http://www.killerstartups.com back in the days (not sure if they are still doing that though).
- Dj_Anthony2013 13y agoYeah! It's similar to killerstartups which is actually nice, isn't it?
- olalonde 13y agoYes. It got me pretty nice traffic back then and it was much easier then getting featured on TechCrunch. I will submit on Kickoffboost for my next project!
- chmike 13y agoI would love to be able to receive the new one by mail with some presentation text.
- Void_ 13y agoI would love to receive an email every week with new startups. And this would be a terrific way for small startups to get the word out. There would be a moderator who would decide which startups are good enough. I would rather have the moderator decide if something's interesting enough than HN crowd.
- derrick_l_grant 13y agoThats a great Idea. At the moment I trawl angel list but it's not really built for that type of interaction
- chmike 13y agoI'm surprized there are very few apps presented from a user centric point of view. "This app is a ..." bad, "Make better ..." good. 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. Hey Kalzumeus, your marketing lessons are starting to work on me! I was just a dumb programmer before.
- StuieK 13y agoHow did we do? "We help people quickly make decisions between competing options."
- agilebyte 13y agoStock options? Or just options in general? So is it like a friend giving you advice?
- StuieK 13y agoWe're trying to build a site that gives people the information they need to decide between different products/services/options. For example: http://www.slant.co/topics/697/~what-is-the-best-cross-platform-note-taking-tool http://www.slant.co/topics/697/~what-is-the-best-cross-platf...
- agilebyte 13y agoSo you are writing new reviews for each product in a "viewpoint" kind of way? I am thinking about Metacritic and how they evaluate someone else's review but still link to it.
- StuieK 13y agoIt's actually all crowdsourced. Anyone can add new Viewpoints, improve existing ones etc. Reviews typically go out of date very rapidly so we're building something that can be constantly updated/improved. I guess the UI has a long way to go before it's obvious how it all works. For example here is a pretty great rundown of CSS pre-processors (http://www.slant.co/topics/217/viewpoints/1/~best-css-preprocessor~stylus http://www.slant.co/topics/217/viewpoints/1/~best-css-prepro...). You can click through to see discussions, previous edits etc. (please ignore the lack of data in the bar charts on the "summary page", it's a brand new feature) (also, I did a little stalking, you will like our stack: node, backbone, coffeescript, stylus. All single-page as well :)
- alexshye 13y agoCool, just signed up and submitted Soulmix (http://www.soulmix.com http://www.soulmix.com). Would love to see how a listing on KickoffBoost turns out :)
- abcd_f 13y agoHow 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? 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 for submitters, you will have an upper hand over BL, which is the competitor to measure up to at the moment.
- ngoel36 13y agoAs a co-founder of Bitcast (http://www.bitcast.io http://www.bitcast.io - the current top listed "Kickoff"), I can say the traffic from Kickoffboost has been great! For some rough data: We actually launched on HN a week ago and had about 120 concurrent visitors for a span of ~6 hours. I assume this link, at it's #1 ranking since ~10pm PST, is getting somewhere around 100-150 concurrents as well (because of the off timing). As a result, it seems that around 10% of Kickoffboost's traffic (10-20 concurrents) has been consistently directed to Bitcast which isn't too shabby. I'll be interested to see what the numbers look like when traffic isn't being directed from HN.
- abcd_f 13y agoHow is this even remotely relevant to what I asked? And haven't you (or someone else from your company) had posted the exact same comment earlier under a different parent, a comment that is now gone? So presumably you just "moved" it here to get it higher up on the page. That's tacky. Don't do that.
- phdtree 13y agoLooks cool. Just submitted our litte side project phdtree: http://phdtree.org/ http://phdtree.org/
- troels 13y agoHow do you plan on getting traffic to your site?
- mrothe 13y agoYour 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)
- seldo 13y agoIt's like Freshmeat, for web apps! (Edit: apparently Freshmeat is now called Freecode? I guess it's been a while since I visited...)
- kushti 13y agoI've got "We're sorry, but something went wrong." trying to sign in with Twitter. Please check
- nccong 13y agoWould 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.
- nccong 13y agoOr better, make it push to a Facebook Fanpage daily.
- ronilan 13y agoSubmitted: http://www.placeunit.com http://www.placeunit.com Kick me :)
- JeroenRansijn 13y agoCool project!
- oceanician 13y agoReally good idea, but needs more consumer & business ideas on. Too many geek tools at the moment.
- kamakazizuru 13y agois there something wrong? I´m getting a "This site doesnt exist" error.
- speg 13y agoThere 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?
- sideproject 13y agoSubmitted - http://sideprojectors.com http://sideprojectors.com :)
- jaxbot 13y agoSubmitted my latest project, https://sparklr.me/ https://sparklr.me/ Out of curiosity, is there a criteria for what gets showcased, and if so, what is it? 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
- easymode 13y agoHi Everyone, 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 :) 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. 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. 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). 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. 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. 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. 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. Cheers! easymode
- atburrow 13y agoCould you add SSL support?
- cmb320 13y agoisn't that what hacker news is for?
- alfg 13y agoSuggestion: Maybe make the thumbnails link to their site as well.
- Andrex 13y agoAn RSS feed would be fantastic, I think. Otherwise the site seems to do its job nicely.
- pla3rhat3r 13y agoGreat 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.
- jitnut 13y agoMuch needed! just submitted http://pepnest.com http://pepnest.com :-)
- nickfrost 13y agoYay! Another resource for early traffic. 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. 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. Also, Mevvy and Ocitrus are newer resources to showcase your early startup. All of these resources are recommended to use when looking for exposure and feedback on your early product/ prototype. Eventually... TechCrunch will be an afterthought when looking for early traffic/ users. Cheers!:)