I did another Show HN for Findka with mod permission today (since previously it didn’t get any traffic). It worked this time. As of writing this, the number of thumbs up/thumbs down events has gone from 3K to 12K. So in the past 12 hours there’s been 3X as much activity on Findka as there had previously been since February when I launched. Also got 120 new signups out of roughly 670 people who tried out the demo (total signups is now 266, excluding 30 who’ve unsubscribed).
So I’m quite happy about that. I’ll be watching retention and new signups closely. While a spike in signups is nice, I’ve had a spike before that resulted in ~50 new signups, and they pretty much all churned (it came after I posted this).
(On the other hand… that was before I realized I was getting some bot signups. So not sure how many of those 50 were humans.)
I’ve started to work on some social networking features. Hopefully those will help with the growth rate by facilitating referrals. More importantly, it’s a feature that two of my main users have requested (both immediate family members). It’s a way that Findka can provide value in the short-term without needing to beat the chicken-and-egg problem of getting lots of data. So far, I’ve implemented opt-in public profiles:
After you sign up, you can create a profile from the Account tab:
I’m planning to add:
Thumbs up button on the profiles so you can see when people like content you’ve shared
Subscribe button so people can get weekly emails with new content you share
Some kind of discovery feature in the app so you can find other users with profiles. Maybe recommended content items will have “shared by …” links so you can view profiles from people who shared that item. Or there could be a separate sidebar tab for people. Heck, we could treat “people” as just another content item and seed it with Findka profiles. I’m not sure exactly what I’ll do yet.
My friend Jake who does marketing consulting for me also had a really interesting idea about how to monetize Findka. I’ll probably write about that next week.
I officially released Biff last week. I know at least a few people have tried it out because they’ve given me bug reports. This bug in particular was a real gem. I was sure to update Findka’s Biff dependency right after I pushed that.
I put my Materialize integration on hold while I work on Findka’s social networking features. However, I’d like to get it done soonish. It would be really helpful for efficiently producing recommendations in Findka and for powering my admin dashboard. Currently my dashboard loads pretty much the entire DB into memory (on the frontend), which was already starting to struggle at 3K rating events. At 12K events, I’m gonna have to take out the tables before I even try to load it.
And hey, Biff handled my little spike today without a glitch. So yay for that etc.