Re:Ask HN: Need advice on growing my 2 month startup
by coryl on Thursday July 08, 2010 @03:02PM
(#1498413)
Good points. You are right about being able to consume before registering. We added some popular users on the homepage to help out with that, we'll add a feed for popular/latest posts as well.
I have an account on Howl, its http://www.howl.com/cory
There is a search actually, but you currently need to be logged in to use it. I think we can port that to our homepage as well, along with the leaderboard so its accessible to everyone. Thanks for the tips!
The jump from non-participant to publisher seems too big. I went to the site. Poked around and just walked away. Instead if there was a way to turn from non-participant to consumer, and then to publisher/producer, that would make it easier to get engaged.
So, make browsing easier.
If you consider sites like HN, or Reddit, Twitter, they make it easy to just consume for a while without contributing.
Another question: Do you have an account on howl? What's the URL for your link-blogging page?
Another feature to enable browsing: a way to search for people. So suppose I visit the site. I want to see if people are publishing links related to Python or astronomy, if there was a way to search for these keywords and find the link publisher that would lead to more people staying.