Show HN: Soft-launch, first page on HN – here are the numbers | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Soft-launch, first page on HN – here are the numbers

6 pointsandreigaspar8 comments

[1/2]

Thursday evening (Mar 26) we made a soft launch for https://uidesigndaily.com (a UI website that I built for my wife)

The goal was to get some feedback, fix bugs and get about 30-40 subscribers in the mailing list, to see how the newsletter performs.

The launch went better than expected, and the feedback was generally positive.

Below are some numbers for those interested.

I posted it to 4 channels, IH, HN, Reddit and Twitter.

It was best received on HN with 203 points, it made it in the top 10, and it stayed on the front page for a good while. Reddit also surprised me, I posted in r/SideProject and got 26 upvotes and only positive comments.. ? That is so not what I expected from reddit... Was very pleasantly surprised to say the least.

Analytics: - 6.659 Users - 6,757 New Users - 7,906 Sessions - 19,125 Page views - 61.81% Bounce Rate - 10.1% Returning Visitors

Users timeline: - Mar 24 - 0 Users - Mar 25 - 4 Users [Soft Launch] - Mar 26 - 2458 Users - Mar 27 - 3693 Users - Mar 28 - 706 Users - Mar 29 - 186 Users - Mar 30 - 190 Users

As you can see, there’s been a spike and seems like it’ll stagnate around ~150, but it remains to be seen. It might dip even further.

Newsletter: - 546 Subscriptions - 52.1% Open Rate - 6.7% Clicks - 7 Unsubscribes

Slack Community: 40 Members. Interestingly enough, the Slack ad only received 30 clicks total. This means most users came through the welcome email, which has a slack community ad included.

Ad Performance: - 35744 Impressions - 836 Clicks on Website - 8 Clicks in Newsletter

[2/2]

Feedback/Critiques: - Make the ads more distinguishable from the designs in the gallery. - Subscribe popup on the post page comes in with delay and is annoying. - Developers do not understand the software icons listed, they need labels. - There was some confusion about the “open-source design” term, somebody thought it is created with open source software, instead of the design source file being available. - Some developers don’t know how to open the source files. A tip should be included that Figma is free and it opens up most file formats. - Find a license that is more in line with our permissive approach. Maybe public domain?

Bugs: - 13 different bugs found in production - 79 total errors thrown in production - 27 users experienced issues in production

Operational Cost: - $8 - $13 per day, most of which is egress traffic and server log storage.

Conclusion: The soft went much better than expected, and it revealed some interesting insights about this project. We are going to make all the requested adjustments, fix the bugs, and prepare for the official launch.

$8 - $13 per day in operational cost seems crazy high for that many users where are you hosting?

Anyhow, congratulations on the website, I love it!

Hey thanks a lot! Yep crazy high to the point of scary high lol. It's Kubernetes on Google Cloud. It is awesome no doubt, but man ... this could be ran on a $5/mo DO droplet. Was thinking of migrating tbh.

Yeah seems way to oversized for this kind of site.

You should definitely before your proper launch, I don't think that amount of money is sustainable. You'd definitely be cutting in your margins for no good reason.

I agree. I'll look into the DO Kubernetes offering, maybe that's more sustainable. I'd really like to keep running on k8s, but if it doesn't work out... I guess I'll just have to bite the bullet and do my walk of shame back to droplets.

Cool product and thanks for sharing those numbers! Where did you post ads?

Thanks! The ads are on the website itself. I wrote a custom ad service for it. Currently it supports 3 types of ads. 2 native ones in the gallery, and one on the post page.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com