We Shared Our Idea On HackerNews, And Here’s What Happened…

On June 29, we shared our idea for the first time with the world. We submitted Our Journey To Empower A Thousand New Kickpreneurs on HackerNews, and shared the story on our social networks with families and friends. Our story reached the front page of HackerNews and was on there for about an hour (moving from #5 to #11 and then #20). It was super exciting 🙂

The result?

Overall it was quite good in terms of traffic volume: 552 unique visitors from this one effort (although some people might have expected thousands of uniques from HN).

But the people stayed on the site just 21 seconds on average. That means that most people were interested enough to come to the page, but not interested enough to read the post to the end.

We got 3 awesome comments! 🙂

3 email signups (0,05% of 570) 🙁

We definitely were aiming for more engagement and feedback. We got some from cinbun8 on HackerNews:

I took a look at the kickstarter stat page and I was pleasantly surprised to find that they have a 44% success rate at funding projects. I expected that to be much lower. Tech projects have a 34% success rate which still seems high to me, but it is interesting to note that this is the second worst success rate.

I would be interested in what makes a kickstarter campaign click. The other side of the coin which is equally important is to find out what makes a campaign fail and the lessons that come out of that. Could you please also interview some folks that were unable to reach their pledge and how they felt they could have amended their approach ?

http://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats

As well as our good friend SteliE:

What’s the most surprising thing you’ve learned so far from interviewing people?

And a good suggestion on reddit:

You might want to interview people from different tiers of project, not just the “most successful.” Because often their secret to success is going to be “be an established corporation with a track record of success and a large fan base,” and that’s not a viable option for most people. Neither is “spend ten years running a massively popular webcomic.”

And June Hollister from Crowd Fund Forum shared two good questions to ask our interview partners:

The first question I would ask any successful crowd funding campaigner would be; what was the most effective marketing strategy you used to achieve the success of your campaign?
and
If you were to do another campaign would there be anything you would do different to improve the process of the campaign?

Plus we got introduced to some great people who might help us make Kickpreneur even more awesome.

The goals for our next “buzz campaign” – we’ll try to get more engagement from the blog post itself:

higher average visitor duration
more opt-ins
more comments

Any suggestions how we can make that happen?

Rico Mossesgeld
Reply July 12, 2013

My first suggestion would be to mix visuals in. I honestly felt like not reading your original post because a wall of intimidating text greeted upon arrival. So I didn’t feel like reading it anymore.

This post on the other hand had nifty charts, engaging me more.

It could also be the referrer. I found myself more engaged with this post because I was directed from Bootstrappist.
- Ramin
  Reply July 12, 2013
  
  Hi Rico,
  
  thanks for commenting, that’s valuable feedback and we’ll mix more visuals in the future (we got the same feedback from a HN comment).
  
  Also will try cooperating more with bloggers, although HN is still a pretty good source of awesome people 🙂
  
  Ramin

We Shared Our Idea On HackerNews, And Here’s What Happened…

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