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grab

grab on Hacker News

Re:Show HN: WebSockets, Server Sent Events, Node.js, Redis & stuff on Sunday July 31, 2011 @07:33PM (#2830043)
early alpha release, been working on this side project for 4 months, ask me anything.

Ask HN: Best Practices on creating video for a startup?

Posted by grab on Saturday June 11, 2011 @07:44PM
from the ask-hn dept.

It would seem today you must have some sort of a youtube video (vimeo btw, does not allow uploading of 'commercial' videos, many startups may one day find a dead video on their homepage) describing your service or app, so what are the best practices?Do you just display it as is? Or use illustrations and flying text bubbles all over?A single narration voice? Or voice actor for each...

( Read More... | 13 comments | 23 points | on HN )
Re:Ask HN: Ok, so i have an awesome app, and 10K in budget, now what? on Tuesday May 31, 2011 @01:10PM (#2603428)
It is safe to say my app is a social one, like twitter, or even chatroulette. It does not solve anything in particular, besides boredom.

Chatroulette does not solve anything either, and people are more likely to use skype or msn for video. I doubt there is high traffic search for "chat with random strangers".

Anyway, i will share some progress. I tried a few ad networks.

Banner ads seem like a fail, only 0.1-0.15% ctr, this is horrible.

Adwords is also not kind to me. Since the idea is new and does not solve anything (as in there is no “how to….”) i can’t target specific searches. Some related keywords are getting very low traffic search and ctr is 0.04%, terrible.

Those were CTR if you didn’t notice, not conversions. Conversions from above are single digits.

What i did find to work marvelously well is ads direct to website (popups and such). Right now i have a decent coming soon page, and for some regions i pay 4 cents per conversion (as in email). For conversions from US it costs 60 cents per conversion. Is it worth paying x15 for people from us? Maybe it will be easier to get "big in japan" and get world domination only later on?

I wonder how many users will actually be created once I start sending emails out.

Ask HN: Ok, so i have an awesome app, and 10K in budget, now what?

Posted by grab on Wednesday May 25, 2011 @04:18PM
from the ask-hn dept.

I am a tech guy, creating apps is easy. I can get around the coding, design, ux and make it shiny. But how the hell do i get users? 10K/life is all the money i can spend on this.Social sites are bullshit, unless you got an army of friends, no one is going to notice you.CPC? Even with insanely low 0.2 per click, and 5% ridiculously high conversion, that’s only 2500 users. Only 5% of them will be...

( Read More... | 16 comments | 15 points | on HN )

Ask HN: Is a browser plugin startup doomed to fail?

Posted by grab on Sunday May 15, 2011 @01:00PM
from the ask-hn dept.

So what are today's acceptances for installing browser plugin apps? It's hard enough to get users, but also demand from them to install a plugin? Sounds crazy. Will IE users even bother installing anything? It will most likely require much more steps than firefox.Then again, in firefox featured addons page, some apps get 50k+ weekly downloads.

( Read More... | 1 comment | 3 points | on HN )
Re:Duality - A Social BitTorrent Client on Saturday May 14, 2011 @03:30PM (#2548372)
Cool stuff. But, meeting with 10 other peers each time i want something downloaded is not sexy. Also, since BitTorrent speeds usually are not amazing, i might as well let someone download the whole thing and then ask from them to give it to me.
Re:The three types of IDE on Saturday May 14, 2011 @12:09PM (#2547911)
Notepad++. Open source, has a bunch of plugins and its light. I tried a few ide(s) and most of them are way to much resources demanding for what they offer. Eclipse has a lot to offer, if you are an eclipse ninja you probably will benefit from using it. Aptana is also quite popular, but when i launch it and need to wait for it to load, it just kills my motivation to start coding.
Re:How much money is there hidden in US's sofas? on Friday May 13, 2011 @05:37AM (#2544091)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2524176
Re:ROME HTML5 demo on Thursday May 12, 2011 @05:45PM (#2542464)
impressive.
Re:Ask HN: How important is "unobtrusive javascript"? on Thursday May 12, 2011 @05:38PM (#2542435)
google is not an acronym for web standards. Half of the time google things (adsanse, adwords, analytics, gmail, you name it) don't work on my main browser (opera), and each time i say to myself, ffs, cant they hire someone to fix this..