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 http://www.kickoffboost.com/' and upload that to a s3 bucket, etc.
Even 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.
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?
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.
As a co-founder of Bitcast (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.
How 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.
Sorry, that was a reply to a different comment! I was going to speculate on the selection process, but the OP has done a good job of answering that above.
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.
The Museum of Modern Betas (MoMB) has been around for many years now. http://momb.socio-kybernetics.net/ It's worth a visit too if you're into this sort of stuff.
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.
Thanks 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.
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?)
I'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.
Hi. 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 :)
Submitted my latest project, 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
I 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.
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!:)
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.
Why 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 :-)
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 (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.
Going 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?)
Thank you! I'm glad someone finally agrees with me. I keep getting overruled on this point, but I wanted to put an interactive product demo on the landing page.
Algorithmic.ly is a simple service for certain kinds of algorithms without needing to manage the infrastructure. So if you're building, say, an e-commerce site, and you want to add a feature that adds a "people who bought this item also bought these" presentation box onto each page, you can use Algorithmic.ly to build a data model, choose the "item similarity" algorithm to continuously run on your model, and then use Algorithmic.ly's REST API to push data into the model and query results from the algorithm.
I hope that help explain it, and I hope someday I'll get to build a cool interactive demo into the landing page :). For now, the conversion statistics are not helping my case for putting more on the landing page.
The traffic to 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.
FYI, I submitted an app (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.
It'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-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 :)
I 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.
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?
Yes. 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!
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.
Definitely. 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 :)
Our 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
