Ask HN: I built a side project. How do I get people to use it?
At the start of the pandemic, my girlfriend and I decided to work on a side project to keep ourselves busy. We ended up creating https://www.mynamefairy.com/ ↗. It's like a tinder for names. It's been a fun project to work on, and its accomplished the technical growth goals that I wanted to get out of it (I learned how to do more modern css, how to setup a FE build with webpack, some vue.js, how to dockerize and deploy a django application, how to use postgres instead of MySQL), but at this point it's been released for over a year and gets maybe 1-2 people a day. Those people are spending time on the site (avg time is 4 minutes, some spend up to 30-40 mins per session), but there just aren't very many of them.
I'm not so much interested in trying to monetize it (although that would certainly be nice), but it'd be great if we could get more people using it. I've shared it on a few of subreddits. (r/django[1], r/python[2], and r/webdev[3]). When doing so, I tried to balance the self promotion aspect with information about which classes I took and found useful, tools I worked with, and various lessons along the way. Those posts did provide a nice little bump for about a week or so, but traffic dropped again afterwards. At this point we're trying to brainstorm what would be the best use of our energies to try and get more people using the site.
Some ideas we've had: * Focus more on SEO. If I google "tinder for names", we don't even show up. A lighthouse test gives us 100%, but clearly that's not a good enough benchmark for how discoverable we are. We've even thought about paying some SEO expert to help, but so many of the services we find seem scammy. * Try and find more parenting/expecting mom forums online and posting there. * Trying to find places around town we could leave flyers (we're based in Amsterdam). * Just keep on hammering away at features to try and make the site more useful/compelling.
Has anyone else faced a similar quandary and, if so, how did you go about getting more exposure for your project? It's still just a hobby, but we're willing to pay a bit of money if it helped us get some traffic and momentum on it again.
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/django/comments/kync31/side_project_i_built_using_django_and_what_i/ ↗ 2: https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/kz8uxu/side_project_i_built_using_django_a_tinder_for/ ↗ 3: https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/l3dior/side_project_i_built_using_django_a_tinder_for/ ↗
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I believe FB ads allow you to target based on pregnancy status, but you're probably looking at $0.25+/click to drive traffic.
SEO will be hard, since the incumbents likely already have strong backlink profiles. There is lots of volume, so maybe make sure you have onpage done well, then maybe see about widget backlink building or something similar to try and grow your domain authority. Maybe create content using the SSA's annual name reports while adding something novel so as to help incentivize people to link to the content hosted on your domain.
Display ads may yield $1-3 CPM, so if you're wanting to monetize, your largest assets will be your remarketing lists (for showing related display ads) and your email list (sends are super cheap). You can show display ads on the site, then maybe look about affiliate offers where you can try to send relevant offers.
You don't need to rank for "tinder for names" because I doubt anybody thinks that they need that specific service.
The obvious market is expectant parents and you should be focusing on that, either in terms of forum posting, SEO, or paid advertising.
I would look at your competitors. I searched for "Baby Names" and the #1 result I found was this site:
https://babynames.com/ ↗
It's hard to beat the power keywords in the domain name but you should understand how people get to that site, be able to explain fluently why your site is better than that site, etc.
I think you have to look at it from the other side, you built something and now are looking for people that use it. What you'd want to do usually is to find people that have a need and then built something to solve that need.
So starting from that, who would want to use your service (expecting parents?) what do they do currently to solve that problem (naming books? other websites?) and how do they find that solution. Once you clarified those questions in a lot more depth than you think necessary will it become clearer how to reach those people as well.
Imagine you had the problem, what do I name my baby? What are things you would google? Where are communities you would hang out? I would start by posting in Reddit communities for expectant parents, and for people interested in naming. For example: https://www.reddit.com/r/namenerds/ ↗
Focus hard on SEO if there is an initial user intent you can spot from Google. I would also recommend using HARO with tools like headcomai to get media exposure and backlinks!