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."
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 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.
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?
See for instance, straight from the frontpage at the moment: https://www.useslate.com/
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.
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.
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!
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.
They have a $14/mo plan?
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.
