The homepage has a fresh list of articles every hour and is open to all. Still, I recommend signing up so you can add stuff to your reading list and follow blogs.
My initial plan was to monetize this with subtle ads, but that didn't work out as the traffic to the site isn't nearly enough for that. That said, I have a fair bit invested in this and I need your help figuring out a way to make this sustainability profitable. If this was yours, what bits would you charge for? Are there any features I could add to a "pro" subscription?
Appreciate any help and support!
Show HN: A Google Reader-inspired RSS reader - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35402979 - April 2023 (58 comments)
It's probably too soon for a follow-up Show HN unless there's something significantly different here - see https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html.
I'm sure that feels unfair given the work you've put in. But registration is a hassle that people don't go through unless they're expecting at least as much value or have built up a more significant relationship with the site. Especially these days, with endless popups asking for my email and registration walls, I'm strongly habituated to close the window when I see that.
In your case it looks like the marginal cost of serving more pages is very low, so I'd make as much as possible public and only require registration for features that need identity. I'd even try letting people vote on articles before registering, as for you that's valuable signal about article quality.
As to what I'd pay for, I'm already a NewsBlur subscriber, so I think there's a market for a personal front-end to blogs, the news, and the like. For me the valuable part is keeping track of the hundreds of niche authors I follow, plus knowing what I've read. The discovery component, which you've foregrounded here, isn't very valuable to me, but might make a nice freebie to draw people in.
But the lede is definitely buried. I'd suggest placing this at the top
edit: never mind, it's in the navbar also, I just missed it
I'd be happy to register if I used the service regularly, and to pay if it was really good, but asking me to register before I can even see if you have what I want -- a reliably good drip of AI news -- is a total turnoff.
Is that apparent to a user? You want ppl to stick around just a bit longer? Put a countdown clock to your master reset. Get it in their mind to come back and check again. Add just a touch of FOMO.
I’d also challenge your line of reasoning about what constitutes a user for your service. I hear what you’re saying about ignoring bad (non-paying) users in the case of SaaS products etc. but this is literally a blogging aggregator without a network. Get the network going by reducing all the friction in the world and worry about the rest later. 6 man months is not a lot of time for a product. There’s a whole “free” internet just a click away.
The good news is it does seem like there is market for this and as OC pointed out there are ways to make iterations and improvements that could get people to sign up. Keep moving! Good luck!
Keep in mind that most products are not successful and thus, in theory, "not worth putting in all this effort".
The feedback from people saying that they bounced because of registration is a signal that you can choose to address or ignore. If _enough_ people bounce before they can see the value, then ignoring the signal means you're effectively giving up on this becoming viable. Another alternative, though, is to find more ways to demonstrate the value before registration is required to make sure you're not losing people too early in the sales funnel.
I feel like asking people to look at it from your perspective is not a great attitude in product management, which is more about figuring out the prospective customer's perspective and making sure you're offering something they want.
As another example, I was interested in Matter/Readwise reader apps. Matter has a very limited freemium version, Readwise doesn't. I tried Matter, I liked it, gave them my money. Maybe Readwise is better, who knows, but I didn't even give it a chance since I wasn't able to check if it's going to be useful for me.
Maybe I'm a cheapskate so I don't want to "screw" myself with paying for a month of Readwise and checking what it offers or maybe the freemium model really works better.
> from my perspective, it's not worth putting in all this effort for someone who isn't willing to even register for free
How does free registration benefit you? It's just more cost for you (time to deal with problems, money to store the login information, and additional load on your server). The only way your statement makes sense - and the only reason you'd care that much - is if you're planning to monetize the information.
Good luck, but it's too shady for me.
Take a look at the B2C funnel here: https://www.alleywatch.com/2017/06/funnels-startups-primer/
That's not quite the right one for you, in that you have a freemium product where you could have a tier of unregistered users like Reddit does, but you get the idea.
The only users who are going to produce the sort of profits that you are hoping for with your months of work are going to go through a variety of stages. Unless you're running this like an influencer or an NPR pledge drive or something, none of those stages will involve them looking at it from your perspective. They're going to look at personal cost/benefit ratios for each step. Which, I'll remind you, is something you surely do for almost every purchase you make.
You can indulge your feelings of resentment here that "everyone else that commented about registering" aren't sufficiently respectful of your efforts. But given that you didn't show any respect for my effort in giving you free advice, you might be able to imagine how long you'll have to wait for people to come around on that. Or you could focus on meeting your users where they are and maximizing flow through your funnel.
It's up to you.
the mainstream web is unfortunately a cesspit mostly made up of predatory sites that provide a barely useful service which is easy to live without, which only exist as a way to hoard peoples data or lock them into subscriptions in the hope that they'll forget they're paying it. if your site is different and you want people to actually care, you'll need to show them.
For mine: the registration wall is the same as thousands of others which I dismiss just the same - because if I'm asked to register this early it's because my registration is the product - and not the alleged value that is used to scam me in. And that's from someone who has worked on plenty of marketing efforts. The request for registration is not a signal of quality. The content offered before that registration would be - and there isn't much of that. Your site may be high value and totally deserving of registration but the bar for my registration is much higher than that.
I would love if there was a "simple mode" that let you only see the titles, just like the HN homepage. There is a lot of information on the feed pages and I find it a bit overwhelming.
Also, it would be great if I didn't need an account to see the blogs, curators, and popular pages.
I built the Hacker News Personal Blogs site a while ago, after people shared their blogs in an Ask HN post and then someone compiled those into an OPML file on GitHub (those that had Atom/RSS feeds): https://hn-blogs.kronis.dev/ The List Of Blogs page might be relevant to discover a few more blogs to add, if anything catches your eye. That site of mine is pretty basic and I just threw it together in a day or two because it felt possible, but I hope that your site actually goes somewhere in comparison!
Also, embedding the blogs inside of iframes is pretty cool, I wonder how common people preventing that with X-Frame-Options or frame-ancestors is. It was actually interesting to see posts from Substack and other sites being captured as screenshots instead, as a workaround.
(Secondarily, I'm guessing some of the `type` attributes should probably be "atom" rather than "rss"?)
[0] https://github.com/outcoldman/hackernews-personal-blogs/blob...
I'm just using the file that someone else made, but I guess they didn't really make the distinction between those URLs in the code, though it shouldn't be too hard to modify: https://github.com/outcoldman/hackernews-personal-blogs/blob...
It is also true that there are both RSS, Atom and possibly other feed types mixed in there. What I did for my site was to crawl through all of those feeds and process them one by one: get all of the posts, do some ordering and grouping and output everything as RSS feeds in a consistent format.
For example, here's the top 100 user feeds for 2023: https://hn-blogs.kronis.dev/feed-top100.xml
Those have HTML links for each of the posts, though I'm afraid it's not exactly what you're asking for (the HTML URLs for the sites/feeds themselves), because I don't actually store that anywhere in my case, though the original feeds of the sites should have that information too.
X-Sieve: CMU Sieve 3.0
X-Spam-known-sender: no ("Email failed DMARC policy for domain")
X-Spam-sender-reputation: 500 (none)
X-Spam-score: 5.2
X-Spam-hits: BAYES_20 -0.001, HEADER_FROM_DIFFERENT_DOMAINS 0.249, ME_HAS_VSSU 0.001,
ME_QUARANTINE 5, ME_SC_NH -0.001, ME_SENDERREP_NEUTRAL 0.001,
RCVD_IN_DNSWL_NONE -0.0001, SPF_HELO_NONE 0.001, SPF_PASS -0.001,
UNPARSEABLE_RELAY 0.001, LANGUAGES unknown, BAYES_USED user,
SA_VERSION 3.4.6
X-Spam-source: IP='143.55.232.5', Host='pc232-5.mailgun.net', Country='US',
FromHeader='biz', MailFrom='org'
X-Spam-charsets: plain='utf-8'
Clicking the link the first time gave me a default nginx: 502 Bad Gateway
nginx/1.22.0 (Ubuntu)
The link worked the second time.Edit: I got an account. The "blogs" page is a mix of blogs you follow and default blogs. I guess that shouldn't really need an account to see the default blogs.
Immediate feedback:
- a page, obviously linked from a banner / menu which describes what this thing is, how it works and who it is for. It may be obvious(ish) to HN but don’t assume anyone else will know what you’re trying to do - more images. - some way of marking stuff read, otherwise you always get the same list - the “in app” reading is interesting, I don’t know how this affects any traffic to included links? You may run into friction if all the reading happens here on your app?
This was previously discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34553190 for anyone interested
Thanks for making something focused on reading & the small web. :)