I feel like half of what I see here is advertisements thinly disguised as blog posts. Now this company needs to promote itself a second time by calling attention to the first time it promoted itself?
"Show HN" is already kind of meta, so this definitely strikes me as meta-meta. I think the main problem here is the post title: "We did a SHOW HN and it landed on the front page of Hacker News". Good for you. Really. That's an accomplishment, or exciting to say the least. But by definition there are hundreds of front-page links a day -- we don't need a briefing on all of them. What would be next, "We did a post about our front-page experience that landed on the front page."?
The best part of this article was seeing what they did wrong, how they listened to the feedback and made changes.
Maybe a bit wordy, but I would have gone with something like, "What we learned we were doing wrong when our Show HN landed on the front page."
To play devil's advocate: Sometimes analyzing the results of a traffic spike can be interesting and worth sharing. I've seen other post-mortem analyses much better than this one, and I personally don't regard this as too spammy.
| Less than 1% of those visitors actually tried our presentation demo (only about 5 did) which was surprising (and disappointing).
I think it's been documented that engagement from reddit/facebook/etc is very low because you're often using a shotgun approach instead of targeting people who would actually become customers. On the other hand, this product would really be in the wheel house of a site frequented by tech entrepreneurs. It's cool to see that you were able to get feedback and act on it.
If I could throw my two cents in, I, and I assume anyone else visiting your site while at work, will always be hesitant to click a play button.
I have posted a blog post[0] explaining I was building a redundant storage service for developers. It was on the front page for about 4 hours. I think the best place it got was about 18th. I didn't put analytics and wasn't very careful about my logs. Actually the logs report the same IP all the time: the HTTP proxy and no referrer URL :)
I got very few people who sign up (which amount to choose a login and a password, no email required), I think it was around 10. Only one person tried really the service (i.e. uploaded an SSH public key and uploaded a few files).
The interesting thing is that even when the post had slipped from the front page, it was still generating a bit of traffic, possibly doubling the number of person registering.
The best thing I got from that post though was some feedback on HN itself but also a couple of persons sent me an encouraging emails. For that reason alone, even if you're not ready (you never are), post publicly your work as soon as possible.
As another commenter mentioned "it's been documented that engagement from reddit/facebook/etc is very low". It is all about the unfiltered feedback and what you do with it.
I think it's very easy to miss that there's a video in your homepage. The first thing I saw was the green "Try PitchIt now", I had to go back to search for the video.
I think it's because it's the same colour and roughly the same size as the surrounding text so it looks like some kind of a logo. Maybe you should display the video player to make it more obvious?
You can't miss the video that way, and I know what will happen when I click the "play" button (I won't be taken to an other page for instance). In your case the video puts itself on top of the rest of the page, meaning I can't listen to it while I idly browse the rest of the content.
As for the actual "hands on" demo the first thing I see is a prompt for me to input an email address. I immediately closed the tab. You want 0 friction here IMHO, use fake addresses to give the potential user a taste of the application. Then maybe at the end prompt for more info.
Yes, we didn't have the room for that type of change before with the extra text heading. We'll have to try that out as well... it would be more obvious for sure.
The name is not working for me at all. I read it as an abbreviation of Pitchlet. The l and I are too close together for me. Only when I saw the link with a lower case i the lights went on.
But that is not the only reason. And I can see why I might be the only person thinking of applets here.
A pitch is a "Sales presentation". There is only one thing worse than a presentation, and that is a "Sales presentation". As soon as I see "Pitch", my entire being prepares itself for a person bothering me. I think of car sales people and evereyone else who approaches me when I enter a store. Unfortunately there is only negativity associated with all that. So for me "Pitch" is a negativ word.
Hey, that could just be me. It has a lot to do with cultural background. Maybe I would call it KeyPoints.
Interesting feedback. I think we are way to close to even see that. A font with the bars on the top and bottom of the I would be a better fit.
Sales (and by extension pitches) is a necessary reality for all companies. Selling is hard. I am not good as sales and we built it to help us sell which is always easier and more effective with visuals.
There are a lot of other uses for PitchIt besides sales but so far the name has clicked with us. Besides I would have to remove my tatoo if the name changed!
Delay? We were originally using youtube to play the video but now we have switched to Wistia. It is much better and we can link directly to the instant demo at the end rather than showing other random videos.
> "Since we made those changes, we have noticed the ratio of people who try our presentation demo now is up from an embarrassingly low 1% to a much healthier 28%."
I think you've made positive changes, but don't forget that your organic audience is much different than the burst traffic from a link aggregator like Hacker News.
Not that your conclusions are necessarily wrong, but it's easy to make false correlations when more than one variable changes.
We have made a lot of changes so drawing conclusions is difficult. Removing the name/email on the instant demo instantly increased activity there. Moving forward we also introduced a 30 day free trial which will now be our target metric. We are iterating a lot of things and hopefully can limit are changes and get more targeted data.
Maybe it has something to do with the 15 second delay between the click on the play button and the actual start of the video.. unacceptable these days imho. Nice read thou :)
We have used other webinar type sw in the past. For every user of webinar sw you can quickly find a story when a meeting was started late or users (connections) dropped out. Internally (read internal network) it works great but as soon as you have others included or someone who doesn't have the plugin installed issues arise.
PitchIt started out as an internal app to help us show our slides remotely while trying to sell a different app. After consecutive calls where clients only asked about what presentation software we were using and if it was for sale, PitchIt was born.
Our focus is on simplicity and the ability to respond to adhoc meetings and opportunities to "Pitch" your products. Your attendees must only click a link and they are in. No plugins to install and it doesn't require high bandwidth.
The landing page looks so much better now, still the 3 images are a bit heavy and maybe distract the user (2 of them are very dark and the other one have a lot of colors). I would try another images
Yes, you are probably right. We have gone as far as we can ourselves and our next action would be to bring in a designer to help out. I am only pretending to know about colours.