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Ask HN: How do I get users to engage?

by Drei01Matt on 11/24/14, 4:21 PM with 14 comments

• by codebeaker on 11/24/14, 5:02 PM

  I'm not convinced that "cron as a service" (standalone) is a valuable enough proposition at all.

  I would guess if people are signing up, and you're not able to convert them there's a disconnect between your understanding of what that means, and theirs. (That said, you have a demo video (gif?) on the homepage, so I imagine that would help.) From the video it's not clear what you did, you posted a cron expression and a URL, and got back a load of null data in the response, and then the gif went dead at the next prompt, I waited a while to see if anything came up, but it was stuck at a blinking `$ |` prompt.

  Full disclosure, I'm working on something http://www.harrow.io, which is a more general CI/CD service, part of which might mean running things on a schedule, we have alpha clients doing just that; however our case is a bit stronger, since we already understand their environments, and have keys and secrets in place to actually do useful work on their infrastructure, and send emails, and integrate with cc menu if things are going wrong.

• by ViXxRoXx619 on 11/24/14, 5:05 PM

  This Problem do occur in Various fields where people just sign up according to their need but do not log in for miscellanious factors. If you want to engage people for real then be calm and work hard and so the first step would be popularising your app. Popularising: inspite you having your own website, you have to work to spread information about your app in varuous social networking sites +(plus) you have to make an short video with appropriate deacription that reflects your work and publish it to video hosting sites. At first if you don't have ads, then it's your choice to find out the free ones for beginning to list your site aming search engine or try some modification to your work so that dearch engines will list you as much as top. Or you can try some uniqueness with your app or website, for ex: have a unique name for your app or website that no one ever had which could! Bring your work top to the list when they search out. Good luck!

• by michaelbuckbee on 11/24/14, 5:05 PM

  The general term for what you're describing is onboarding. There's all sorts of different approaches but the highest value - quickest thing to do is just sit down with a developer who might want to use your product and watch them try to sign up and use it.

  I entered my email in your site and it says: "Thanks! We'll be in touch soon."

  This is also really confusing given the "Get started in 29 seconds" thing - which almost seems like I should cut and paste into a commandline? But it doesn't have any directions? Is there an API key?

  Hope that helps.

• by sebg on 11/24/14, 4:49 PM

  1) Find out where people who run cron jobs hang out

  2) Figure out what they care about

  3) Engage them to figure out what problems they have

  4) Figure out if/how your app helps them solve the problems they have and show them how you can make their lives better

  5) Repeat steps 1-4 indefinitely.

• by striking on 11/24/14, 5:12 PM

  Perhaps take a look at onboarding examples on http://useronboard.com

• by mszyndel on 11/24/14, 4:54 PM

  Are you sure that running cron jobs as a service is big enough market? I can hardly imagine any use cases.

• by bobsadinook on 11/24/14, 5:06 PM

  blog