Guerilla Launch Tactics, or Manufacturing Buzz for Bootstrappers | Hacker News Reader

Guerilla Launch Tactics, or Manufacturing Buzz for Bootstrappers

madhatted.com

27 pointsmixonic9 comments

Wouldn't asking friends to upvote your HN submissions count as gaming the system?

I'm sure people do this regardless, but to just admit so on your blog seems a bit careless.

I wouldn't call it inappropriate.

It would be bad if I was creating fake accounts or something. If I'm trying to launch, I don't think reminding friends to share and talk about it online is improper. These are obviously the technical bunch of my friends and colleagues, and they won't be voting on something if they think it sucks.

It's more about the timing, getting activity all at the same moment to rise above the noise.

Voting rings, where a group of people upvote each other's posts all the time, are generally discouraged on forums. The behavior could lead to banning on some sites, but on HN, the behavior is automatically detected and the votes simply don't count.

But asking some friends to upvote an individual post is what all HN submitters are doing anyway! That's not gaming the system.

I agree completely. I mean, you can't get noticed at all initially unless a few of your friends upvote your stuff...just the way it is.

Very useful post, thank you. I'd love to see some charts in there too.

There's a point you make in the article that I think will get overlooked: Thanking people.

I'm fascinated with the human psychological flaw looking at short term vs. long term. We tend to optimize for short term without giving much thought to the long term.

You're most likely going to want people to help out again so thanking them for their time and effort, no matter how minimal, has never gone unnoticed.

I like the hangman idea...how did you promote that? How many visitors to the game actually continued on to spinto?

Looking at the numbers now, I see 13.5% of visitors went through to Spinto. We're only talking about 350 visitors to playhangman.net though. Most were probably from a discussion about Ember.js on meetup.com.

I spent a little time optimizing hangman for iPad and iPhone, I want to make the games easy to share and play on those devices. So, there is more that can be done.

In general, making games or projects on Spinto is obviously a win. Plus, yeah, it's fun to send people messages with playhangman.net they need to guess to read :-)

yeah it's a great idea...the more I think about it, the more ways I can see to use this myself in different ways. Thanks for the great idea!

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