Comment by ilaksh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ilaksh | Hacker News Reader

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Well.. if we are doing ChatGPT anecdotes.. today I tried to "launch" the new version of https://aidev.codes. It integrates the ChatGPT API with Stability.ai (stable diffusion) for generating images and well as Eleven Labs text-to-speech and can create and immediately host an interactive web page on a custom subdomain.

I need marketing help. Or I should just stop trying. I don't see how people are able to get posts on the home page.. I could not get any attention or comments at all or any real user engagement today. I know this is a useful system or at least worth of a tiny amount of discussion. After working on it for months there is almost no reaction.

I don't think its the website. I think its just that I probably need to buy upvotes or something. But I don't have money for marketing. I'm very bitter.

What I keep telling myself is that marketing is going to be as hard as the programming. Which I have been doing the programming for months, so I will need to do the marketing for a long time also. But I am out of money.

If this doesn't get any traction (which it seems very close to zero) I will be desperate for any kind of contract within about a week. But I don't want to give up on the idea despite the apparent lack of interest. I think the biggest thing is that I only have 100 followers on Twitter or 600 followers on the other account and those people only care about one specific domain.

I also seem to have not been able to get a single upvote on reddit. And only one very short comment.

So I am suspecting that these sites are rigged. Or I should just give up on life? Not that I would actually consider that but that's the feedback that I seem to be getting repeatedly from the world.. that my efforts aren't even worth a short comment disparaging them.

Creating front ends that integrate different AI APIs is kind of over saturated, that's probably why you're not getting much attention. It's also somewhat hard to understand what's the value proposition of the website, you should focus on putting as much of that kind of information in everyone's face in the landing page, otherwise they'll just bounce. Take everything from your "Learn more" page and put it in your landing page. Simplify, condense and systematize the information in a way that makes it digestible and instantly obvious.

Also, I should note your comment is kind of off-topic, have you thought about creating a Ask HN talking about your issue? It's very possible other HNers could help you get your website and product more interesting. I would also recommend not being bitter about it, Hacker News is all about Silicon Valley and startups, the main rule for these is that 9 times out of 10 you'll fail. It's normal.

At last I should note, if you're doing things as a hobby, do them for yourself, remember to have fun and create NO expectations of what you will or will not be able to do. If you're trying to get a startup or product going, there's a reason why Y Combinator is so popular, if you truly believe in what you're building you should try getting it into an incubator.

Just my two cents.

How do I get it to an incubator? I believe in it, because its 100% useful in incredibly obvious ways.

And you are basically saying that there is no such thing as bootstrapping.

And honestly I feel that this is a failure of HN not of my website.

But you still give good advice to help people by not expecting them to click a single link to get to the FAQ page.

Bootstrapping is cheap and easy, but the chance of failure is much larger, it also comes with the consequence of giving you a lot of unnecessary stress since you're playing with your own assets. Regarding applying to an incubator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply

All the best.

If you listen to the people who have done this before (e.g. read/listen to indie hackers), Reddit/HN is very hit/miss.

Only thing seems to consistently work is Twitter - and then you should REALLY be building public if you have no audience so that you can build one. Have you tried this? If not, and you've been building in stealth mode, you've missed out on an opportunity but you can still start now.

You are figuring out so much stuff in an area without expert - make a Twitter post every day about what new problem you solved and you will quickly find a following as you establish authority in this new field. So many people are learning from each other about this stuff, it doesn't take much to become an expert.

I've been going through all the Indie Hackers podcasts. Consider listening to Indie hackers #008 or #009, I think they specifically talk about bootstrapping an audience from nothing.

You may even find people are more interested in an educational product from you than your service, and pivot, for instance.

OK thanks for the advice. Yeah I have about 600 followers on my @algonfts.art thing, but they only care about Algorand.

@aidevcodes has around 100 followers. I should post more routinely on there.

It's not helping that you are constantly hijacking threads which are really only tangentially related to promote your app.

As far as the website premise itself, I feel like this might've been useful 20 years ago when it was more popular to write static vanilla HTML with jquery sprinkled in. These days, if a person wants a relatively no code solution they're gonna go for WordPress or square space, otherwise they're probably going to design something using a framework such as react svelt or vue.

I just watched the demo and personally thought it was amazing. Don't give up! Keep going!

Thank you means a lot.

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