Comment by andrewmcwatters | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrewmcwatters | Hacker News Reader

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andrewmcwatters

You're going to do great. Just steer the ship back in the direction of the elevator pitch experience. After that 20-30 second experience, if people are interested in more (provide Getting Started at the end of all of that, not the beginning,) they will click on it and want to learn more about what you have to offer.

Avoid putting things in people's face before they've gotten to know you. You're not trying to be a food blog throwing pop-ups in people's faces about how they need to subscribe to your newsletter. You're trying to be a competitor to Electron.

Here's what their website tells me what they do:

> Build cross-platform desktop apps with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS

Ah! OK. I'm interested. And see how specific they are? Don't be vague. Don't say "web front-end," what do you mean? React? They then show me screenshots! Of what big companies built!

Then. They provide a Getting Started section. Not great, could be better. I want to see how it's used. But this is the bar. Be better than that bar.

Edit: Even Electron's site provides Getting Started at the end.

Having the getting started button at the end is a good idea I think, we'll look into that.

We say "web frontend" because that's as descriptive as we can be really. We support any web framework that runs in a browser. As for screenshots of big companies' apps, we don't have any major companies that have adopted Tauri yet, as we just came out of alpha, but we will add a section like that as soon as we can.

It's difficult for us to demonstrate how Tauri is used in short snippets that could fit at the beginning of the Getting Started section. Electron's site doesn't have any code snippets either, just snippets for installing via npm and some example apps.

I understand the difficulties of competing with incumbents because size and usage are not your strong points yet, sort of. You all have over 16k stars on GitHub as a proxy for interest! My team still has under 1k.

It also doesn't help that we chose a language that isn't popular. But you all need to think about how decision making like that massively effects adoption.

You won't learn these lessons quickly, they take years, so ignore people who say you need to experiment and research what works. The biggest issues you'll face is that no one will tell you what's wrong unless you're faced with it in threads like this on HN or other places where you'll meet consumers.

The worst part of it is, these are the obnoxious glaring details. There might be massive decisions you make that consumers can't pinpoint for you. Thought-leaders don't often describe those details because of survivorship bias.

What I can see this team failing at, too, is that you need an anchor client. You're spending all this time on BS that doesn't mean anything at all.

Specifically, at GitHub, they already had users using Atom, which made for a great way to advertise Electron. It was Atom!

You need to essentially find whales (Read: engineering leaders at businesses) and make the product good enough for one of them to say, yeah I'll use this over Electron, and if they're an attractive user, pump them on your front page. Find a way to make a deal with them so that you can funnel developers to their hiring channels.

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