[raleigh_user]

Fomo.com is doing a few million and is owned/operated by 1 individual (although he has a small team). Believe he acquired it and grew it like crazy. I’d reckon (if he chose) the company could do a 100k a month in profit.

[ashelmire]

This is an example of a product that probably does something cool, but really doesn't do a good job of explaining what it does or why I would use it on the front page. But it looks pretty.

[sosodev]

You know those annoying notifications that usually say something like "Dawn in Idaho bought a 3 pack or gorilla stickers just now" on e-commerce sites? That's what fomo does.

[ryanckulp]

thanks for the feedback.

this homepage is actually our 3rd and probably most abstract implementation.

1st, 2016: https://web.archive.org/web/20161108025452/https://www.usefo...

2nd, 2017/2018: https://web.archive.org/web/20190107040431/https://fomo.com/

indeed, the numbers speak for themselves. over the last few weeks since deploying we saw lower signup conversion rates. but, we also have a few product launches forthcoming.

balancing between "be short and to the point" and sharing a vision is perhaps more art than science, and that's why we have so much art on our website.

[ashelmire]

Second one seems to come closest for me. I prefer something clear like "see that notification at the bottom left corner of the page? We do that". But I get it; you're selling why someone should use the product (a bit abstractly, perhaps). As a tech product though, don't forget to highlight the actual product(s) and to be specific.

The "Install Fomo in 29 Seconds" section from the first iteration makes me feel confident, as a developer, that there's a clear path to get your product working for me and it won't be a pita. A documentation link at the top, rather than hidden at the bottom, would be nice - see how Facebook presents their tech offerings (granted, open source) at https://reactjs.org/ etc.

I'm just one guy who makes decisions about what techs to use for myself and others though, so yada yada grain of salt. Maybe I'm not who you're targeting as much as salespeople themselves.

[i_cant_speel]

Yeah I clicked around and came back here, still not knowing exactly what your product is. IMO it should be made a bit more explicit on the landing page.

[justaguyhere]

Look at the bottom left corner of the screen, then it becomes clear immediately. And yeah, it looks pretty.

[gadders]

I always thought that a lot of those "Fred just purchased T-Shirt X" pop-ups when you are on a site are all fake data anyway.

[ryanckulp]

many of our competitors do allow customers to plug in fake data, it's sad + illegal + gives the space a bad rep. sigh.

this is why we aggressively build native integrations, sometimes 1 per week. deters bad actors.

changelog: https://new.fomo.com

[gadders]

Fair enough :-)

You should label/brand your pop-ups with a link to somewhere that explains this.

[Skrillex]

Maybe they are. I know of one site that had a premade array of "X bought Y" in the source HTML, which I imagine they repopulate after some amount of time.

[weka]

I've been looking at their site for about 5 minutes and I still have no idea what fomo.com does...

[kowdermeister]

Same here. What problem do they solve?

[puranjay]

They "automate" social proof. That is, when someone buys something on your site, or performs a specific action (such as sign-up for a newsletter), FOMO will show a little pop-up in the left corner stating so ("XYZ from ABC just bought 2 widgets"). The idea is that knowing something is popular will make others more likely to buy it.

I reckon they could do a better job of conveying this, but I work in marketing and I understood it immediately. So I imagine their target audience understands it well enough.

[aerovistae]

That is so weird to me. Does that actually work on people? I see it now that you point it out, the popups in the lower left, but before I had been automatically mentally dismissing it as just annoying sales bullshit, like any other popup ad. There's statistical evidence that sales are actually influenced by that kind of nonsense? That amazes me.

[puranjay]

It does. Probably not on the HN crowd. But on the usual e-commerce sites that use this app, it definitely works. The audience isn't quite as technically literate and doesn't have that banner blindness people here have developed.

Plus, the e-commerce sites that use it are usually small startups. They need to show that real people are buying from them to prove to shoppers that they're legitimate

[thirdsun]

It's not just banner blindness. Even as a less tech-savvy person I imagine I'd just assume those notifications to be fake, fictive customer stories that serve to illustrate a feature, similar to how "customers" used to rave about knife sets and fitness devices that changed their life on home shopping TV shows.

[ryanckulp]

https://blog.fomo.com/tag/case-study/

[pwython]

There's sort of 2 types of social proof. Fear of missing out and testimonial. My favorite examples of social proof (not fomo.com) are hotels.com and opentable.com. When looking at a hotel: "15 people have booked this hotel today," or while making a dinner reservation: "23 people have reserved a table at this restaurant today."

In these cases, you're being pressured to act fast before the hotel/restaurant is fully booked. Further, this "proof" that people are making all these reservations right now also could make you believe your choice is a popular recommendation, persuaded your decision making.

[ryanckulp]

yep, you can do this with Fomo(.com) as well.

[spike021]

FOMO means Fear of Missing Out.

So, say you're interested in a certain smaller brand that may not sell thousands or more copies of certain items, but something on the order of 50, or 100, etc.., then when you see that others have been purchasing said items you worry you'll miss out on your chance to buy one, and then you'll be one of the only people who like the brand who don't have said item.. thus, you wind up purchasing too.

[eswat]

Many hotel/flight booking sites – Expedia, Booking.com, etc. – have been using this pattern for a while. I assume it works, at least in that context, very well.

[radley]

Twitch.tv uses it a ton (check out their chat feeds).

[lostgame]

It says 'marketing' right on the front page, right next some unique drawings which indicate the kinds of things they can create. It took me less than 5 seconds.

[tomp]

Incredible. If the stats on the website are to be believed, they have 11k users, and the cheapest plan is $35 per month (with yearly disocunt applied) so that must mean several $100k per month (though older customers might have cheaper legacy plans)...

Edit: https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/growing-a-social-proo...

[ryanckulp]

hey, the 11k figure is active websites. you can verify all this via our Open API: https://fomo.com/open

since a customer can have unlimited websites per plan, we actually have around 5,500-6,000 customers. many will add a personal site and a company site, or an ecommerce store and a blog.

yes, older customers have plans as low as $8-12 /month. good times.

[arbuge]

How did you get started with this, i.e. how did you get your first customers? Looks like a really interesting business.

[ryanckulp]

thank you. we actually acquired a Shopify app, which already had some customers via organic app store traffic.

more here: https://blog.fomo.com/how-we-bought-a-small-software-startup...

(note, 2.5 year old post)

[arbuge]

Great read, thanks. Congrats on your success.

[Consultant32452]

That website called me a loser because I write code.

[wonderofworld]

Fomo is the same offering as Proof (https://useproof.com). Great case of the same idea in the market with difference customer segments able to produce paid users in a semi-automated-saas model

[Toine]

René Girard would approve