Apparently HN gives you great advice and then 1536 users in 4 hours.
Anyway, I wrote a post on here and it somehow found its way to the front-page. It only stayed there for 2 hours but it spent another 2 hrs on the 2nd and 3rd pages. I tracked the signups that came in on that day, and in 4 hours, there were 1536 new sign-ups from HN (directly and indirectly). Directly in the sense that they clicked on from here and signed up, and indirectly if the person signed up having been invited by someone who signed up from HN in that time. Of that number, 61% are active have have returned to the site more than 3 times and have created groups and 80% have invited people to their groups.
To any new apps/startups launching, HN is a great place to get that initial traction and the best part about it – for me atleast – is the number of criticisms, advise and feedback I got. That was much more important to me than signups.
App url: http://wolfpacktal.es
Ran into some problems that hopefully you'll shake out. Surprised by the choice of web stack (.net and asp).
I didn't see an option to delete accounts, did I miss it?
Basically, deploying a .Net site requires at minimum 1 personal license of Windows and 1 server license of Windows. Sometimes a non-free copy of Visual Studio, and usually a license for SQL Server (since many MS people use the whole stack for integration reasons). Without buying hardware, Windows hosting is also always more expensive.
Compared to a LAMP/Rails/Django style app which you could theoretically get off the ground for the hardware cost of a local PC and cheap VPS hosting.
Of course developer familiarity, your local hiring pool, initial launch scale, business partners, vendor integration, etc, etc, etc, all influence the tech choice and its impact on cost.
If you are awesome and outgrow that VPS with some paying customers, then I think you can swing the $1,000 on a windows license.
I really hate being a shill for MS...
Those words don't mean what you think it means. You're right that most CLR code will be faster than equivalently idiomatic Ruby code that accomplishes the same task, but the reasons for it have nothing to do with compilation.
Also, I've heard mention of BizSpark which kind of defers your costs but I haven't got any hard evidence that it is still a good option for startups.
1. .Net and Asp have not insignificant upfront costs when compared to a stack based on Ruby, PHP, or practically anything else.
2. You're basically tied to Windows application servers. There really isn't much of an option to move to another OS (whether because you've changed hosts, or you want something more stripped down or leaner, or you've found a valuable library that's only available on a BSD or something).
3. ASP (even with .Net) presents a pretty rigid framework for application development (though I'm sure there's ways around it). If what you're after is MS's take on MVC, that's probably fine, but if you're looking to push boundaries, you might want to think about a more piecemeal approach.
Do my friends have to sign up for Wolfpack to be able to use this service? Does the messaging only happen on your platform, or does it duplicate messages across other platforms as well (fb messages, emails, etc)?