Day 47: Two posts, two duds

I posted Hide Feed to Hacker News twice (once yesterday and once today) and they both never left the /new page. I’m still convinced that if Hide Feed would do really well if it got a chance to get on the front page for several minutes, so I’m not giving up just yet. Maybe I’ll try again after a week.

Still, this is making me realize that I need to come up with a real marketing strategy instead of “post on HN and yolo”. I’m putting off posting on Product Hunt for now because there, you only get one chance (vs. Hacker News where you get a few), and I want to spend more time on the assets and whatnot.

For the time being, I’m going to work on Intention. I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to meet my goal for launching on Hacker News on Tuesday because Hacker Fellowship (the 10-week residency I’m doing) has been introducing a lot of mandatory events like a full-day hackathon yesterday and a 2-day hackathon on Monday and Tuesday. I have mixed feelings about these mandatory events — while it’s nice to get a chance to work with the other people here, they’re also a distraction from the work I already have going. These hackathons seem useful for people in the cohort who want help in finding co-founders or finding an idea, but there are a few of us in the program who are self-directed enough where this level of structure doesn’t feel so beneficial.

Reflections on Feedback Friday

I’m skipping Feedback Friday today because I didn’t have a chance to reach out to a maker asking if they’d like me to review their product. In the past 5 Feedback Fridays, I’ve done 3 where I didn’t talk to the makers beforehand and 2 where I did. The responses from the two groups couldn’t have been more different: Unsolicited Feedback Fridays are usually met with silence, whereas the ones where I discussed it beforehand have been met with tons of gratitude.

Looking back, it was silly of me to assume that everyone would welcome feedback out of the blue. I loved it when Michael did that for me, but that’s not going to be the case for lots of folks. It’s common sense that people are much more receptive to feedback when they request it. I’m making the rule that I’m going to cover only products where I’ve already talked to the maker about doing a Feedback Friday for them and they’ve explicitly agreed to it.

Much of my time has been taken up by Hacker Fellowship, so I haven’t had a chance to reach out to makers this week, but I’m hoping to do a Feedback Friday post next week.