First off, best of luck with your project. Secondly, kudos on writing the post-mortem, as I know it takes some guts to own a "failure".
I think, however, the need to write something like this speaks to an incorrection assumption: you need a "launch". Of course, TC and HN can give you a nice bump in traffic and even signups. However, in the long run, this really doesn't accomplish much for you. It gives you the kind of traffic that will likely leave and move on to the next article, skewing your metrics. There's certainly qualified prospects in there, but it's hard to decipher with all the noise.
Again, the concept of a "launch" speaks to poor business models. It really benefits businesses where the word "traction" is more important than "revenue". Build a business that provides a service that others will pay for and grow as fast as the business can bear, bringing in those visitors that are truly valuable to you.
When we did the beta, I posted the launch details on HN and you’ll be surprised by the amount of constructive feedback and users that we got. Cucumbertown now has users from devs to CEO’s who came in through HN and are now engaged users.
Cucumbertown has some notions like 'forking recipes' – called “Write a variation” which enables you to take a recipe and fork and make changes. Additionally Cucumbertown has a short hand notation way to write recipes(think stenography for recipes) – for advanced users. Things like these appeal to the HN crowd a lot.
Also, don’t you think quite a few hackers like me are also cooks!
Wow the site's really progressed a lot since the last time I saw it. I'm not surprised you're one of the most passionate people I have ever had a chance to talk to.
Wow, forking and shorthand are great features! I had no idea from your homepage. Maybe I'm not your target audience but you should make that clearer the moment someone lands on your homepage. ("Why we're different and maybe better than AllRecipes or XYZ: ...")
Cucumbertown is very UX focused and from our research we came to a conclusion that our “aha” moment is to get you to the fastest possible way to write a recipe and give you that bout of joy. Now being hackers, we’d want to see forking & stenography in front of us. But that’s been a struggle we’ve been trying to showcase between simplicity to the “aha” moment and differentiation with others. Our primary audience comes to Cucumbertown because they are frustrated writing recipes in dropbox, google docs, wordpress & tumblr blogs as “blobs of text”.
I know as well as anyone the relative futility of relying on HN, Reddit, or TC coverage for building a successful tech product. Feedback and traffic from social news is merely a blip that says next to nothing one way or another about your long-term prospects.
However, if your site goes down for any reason a postmortem of this sort is definitely warranted. The word "launch" is not signifying much more than a point in time in this case, and I think you're jumping to a lot of conclusions about what hopes they were pinning on this event.
Right on. I second these sentiments. First, keep up the good work and best of luck moving forward. Very good that you're also reflecting on your successes and failures - always be learning.
The most challenging piece of a new business is, well, new business. And it's about growing your value proposition organically, one customer at a time, and refining the business. Analyzing bump in media attention won't really help you on that piece of the search.
Once you've nailed down the search, and you're simply focused on getting more publicity as you scale, then perhaps that sort of analysis will be of more use. But, I doubt it.
I think, however, the need to write something like this speaks to an incorrection assumption: you need a "launch". Of course, TC and HN can give you a nice bump in traffic and even signups. However, in the long run, this really doesn't accomplish much for you. It gives you the kind of traffic that will likely leave and move on to the next article, skewing your metrics. There's certainly qualified prospects in there, but it's hard to decipher with all the noise.
Again, the concept of a "launch" speaks to poor business models. It really benefits businesses where the word "traction" is more important than "revenue". Build a business that provides a service that others will pay for and grow as fast as the business can bear, bringing in those visitors that are truly valuable to you.