[HN Gopher] Traffic spikes are bad for your product
___________________________________________________________________
Traffic spikes are bad for your product
Author : twapi
Score : 69 points
Date : 2025-01-31 13:47 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (andrewchen.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (andrewchen.substack.com)
| dogma1138 wrote:
| "My product went viral but it may not be offering the value I
| think it does so I blame the users for it"
| esafak wrote:
| You don't know that. There is such a thing as an unqualified
| lead.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Also the phenomenon that the first people who get on board
| are better (smarter, whatever) than the later people who get
| on board.
|
| See also: Product Hunt
| esafak wrote:
| So called _innovators_ : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tech
| nology_adoption_life_cycle
| dylan604 wrote:
| I'd assume the first users would be bots
| JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote:
| We would know if we had a link. Otherwise it's fiction and I
| believe it's yet another lame web site created by an ideas
| guy.
| layer8 wrote:
| That's not what the article says.
| Y444 wrote:
| I believe it does:
|
| "Turns out your product wasn't ready for all the
| international users. Or the power users. Or the teens. They
| want to use your product in all the wrong ways, posting bad
| and weird things."
|
| It is basically in line with the infamous "You're holding it
| wrong".
| layer8 wrote:
| The article's conclusion is that businesses shouldn't chase
| big app launches or "going viral", because that tends to
| not be valuable for the business, and that instead they
| should go for gradual, slow growth. In other words, the
| article doesn't blame the users, it blames businesses using
| the wrong strategy.
| Y444 wrote:
| For me personally this conclusion doesn't mean much, as
| the author bases it on his single experience with his app
| that by his own wasn't really ready for real world.
| layer8 wrote:
| I don't necessarily agree with the article's conclusion.
| I'm saying that the article's point isn't to blame users,
| it's to give advice to businesses about how to avoid that
| failure mode.
| dogma1138 wrote:
| That's not the articles conclusion, it's the excuse.
|
| Yes slow steady growth is a generic "good advice" but
| overall if the product was ready and provided value to
| the users they would have used the product.
|
| A conclusion would be don't ship a half baked product...
| And definitely don't blame users for not liking your
| product, not understanding it, not being open to it at
| the time etc...
|
| The users are always right and even if they are
| technically wrong it is still the fault of the product
| designer for not accounting for that in the first place.
|
| "We do not blame users, ever." is about as close to a
| prime directive as you can get regardless of what product
| or service you deliver.
| Pooge wrote:
| Timing is one of the most important part of the market.
|
| You could make a truly great product far too early and nobody
| would use it and you would get bankrupt. Then someone else
| would come with something, perhaps even worse, at the right
| time and cash out.
| dogma1138 wrote:
| Timing is an integral part of your product.
| Pooge wrote:
| I disagree.
|
| If the product fails due to timing but succeeds years later
| without having changed dramatically, I would argue that
| this was a good product from the start (despite having no
| users).
| mtlynch wrote:
| Clickbait title.
|
| This isn't a story about something that personally happened to
| the author but a general argument against big launches. They
| don't offer any concrete examples like the title would imply.
|
| The article itself is pretty thin and quickly devolves into a
| bunch of analytics jargon word soup like "Metrics: D1/7/30,
| consistent weekly growth (5-10% WoW), NPS (and qualitative
| feedback), DAU/MAU."
|
| Edit: The original title as submitted to HN was "My product went
| viral on social media but all I got were these shitty users." It
| looks like the mods have since changed it to a less misleading
| title.
| sksrbWgbfK wrote:
| > you launch an app
|
| "Free ReactJS web site filled with A/B testing and analytics, and
| a billion NPM modules" I guess.
| incognito124 wrote:
| There's something icky in calling users high-quality and low-
| quality
| duxup wrote:
| Might be better to say high / low quality SALES opportunity.
| caseyohara wrote:
| "High-quality leads" and "low-quality leads" have been sales
| terminology forever. Put your pitchfork away.
| dhosek wrote:
| I always think of Glengarry Glen Ross when I think about high
| and low quality leads.
|
| The leads are weak? _You're_ weak!
| hackernewds wrote:
| So has whitelist and blacklist. Carry your pitchforka
| dkarl wrote:
| That's what he should have said, then.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| > (I learned this phrase a long time ago from a friend who used
| to sell cars!). When your product goes viral, yes, you do a big
| spike in users. But what you're really getting is an Invasion of
| Looky-Loos, low quality users who come in, check things out, but
| don't stick.
|
| I find it strange that we generally frown upon the "Buy something
| or get out" mentality in brick-and-mortar stores, yet we seem to
| be cheering on this mentality if it's an online service. It seems
| like castigating your potential customers because they didn't
| give you money immediately or give you _as much_ money as you
| wanted is a shitty business practice.
| tomhoward wrote:
| It's not "castigating" or criticising potential users. It's
| advising founders not to waste resources attracting large
| numbers of visitors who are unlikely to be potential users, and
| instead do the hard work to attract and retain users who will
| actually value your product.
|
| I made this mistake multiple times back in early 2010s
| "virality hacking" days, and man it was a painful and costly
| learning experience.
| SunkBellySamuel wrote:
| Very concise, as someone who doesn't run an online business,
| my intuition would absolutely be "More traffic, more money"
| nine_k wrote:
| "More money" as in "a larger AWS bill"? Quite probably.
|
| "More money" as in "more sales"? Maybe, if you're lucky and
| there's enough audience for your product among the incoming
| crowd.
|
| "More money" as in "more ads shown"? Well, this is why we
| can't have nice things :-|
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| I don't read it that way. The hypothetical author here didn't
| "waste" any resources to make a viral video--it happened by
| chance. He got an influx of users from someone else's viral
| video, but he decided those people are "shitty" users because
| they didn't stick around and buy his product.
|
| That doesn't strike me as maximizing long-term users; that
| strikes me as getting free publicity and being pissed off
| that it didn't attract the kind of customers you wanted.
| gigatree wrote:
| He can still advise against waiting the resources though,
| because even the free spike wasn't worth it for him.
| duxup wrote:
| I don't think it is frowning on the visitors / curious folks
| personally.
|
| It is being honest about your opportunities / visitors during
| the spike.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _I find it strange that we generally frown upon the "Buy
| something or get out" mentality in brick-and-mortar stores_
|
| Loitering spends up resources used by other paying customers.
| Moreover, if you go into a brick-and-mortar store intending to
| make a purchase but the store is full of people walking around,
| talking, and not really purchasing anything, then all of those
| people are getting in the way. At best they're slowing down
| your paying customers who have to navigate around them. They're
| probably also antagonizing your paying customers with
| conversations about nothingburgers instead of conversations
| about the products. It's also extremely possible that they're
| causing fire/emergency hazards (eg, too many people, too
| constricted space).
|
| > _It seems like castigating your potential customers because
| they didn 't give you money immediately or give you as much
| money as you wanted is a shitty business practice._
|
| I completely agree. In the age of "everything online is free",
| it's especially shitty to demand people to pay up without
| giving them opportunity to view and exercise the product.
| Aurornis wrote:
| It makes sense. Physical stores and coffee shops have limited
| space. If your coffee shop fills up with people sitting around
| for hours while sipping a single coffee, you lose out on sales
| to people walking by who can't find a place to sit.
|
| If your online site or store gets a spike in traffic, the other
| customers shouldn't be impacted (assuming you didn't do
| something like self-hosting on an under provisioned server).
| The people can come and go without buying anything and not
| block any potential sales.
|
| However, all traffic drives more exposure. They may not buy
| something today, but they may remember it and mention it to a
| friend next week or a family remember at the next holiday
| gathering. The cost of traffic is nearly zero in this era, so
| any exposure that has a non-zero chance of spreading your brand
| name is good.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| That's one reason that we personally vet every signup request for
| the app I run.
|
| One of the services that we offer, is users being able to
| (anonymously) reach out to each other for help. If we have
| "looky-loos," or even scammers, it's not particularly good.
|
| Scammers usually have no use for our app. It's really too
| anonymous and locked-down, and our users tend to be fairly poor
| (and scammer-wise -some are even reformed scammers). Faecesbook
| is a _much_ richer hunting ground. They may sign in once (if they
| were able to get us to admit them, which takes a bit of work),
| and then never come back. Some of them never log in, because they
| don 't actually look at their emails. If they never log in, then
| we delete the account after 30 days.
|
| Looky-loos, on the other hand, are a pain in the ass, because
| they will log in once, peer around, realize the app has nothing
| for them, and never come back. We need to wait a year to delete
| their account.
|
| We absolutely don't care about scale. We may never have more than
| a few thousand users. We haven't even reached 1,000, and it's
| been a year. I tested the app with 12,000 fake users, so it can
| handle that.
| jprete wrote:
| Your comment about looky-loos got me thinking about real-world
| socialization. People who hang around the edge of a group in
| the real world, looking like they're trying not to be noticed,
| get pegged as creepy - it looks like predator behavior in the
| wild! The group then has a reason to either invite them to
| participate or keep them out - otherwise they're making the
| space feel unsafe.
|
| The edge-hangers have two good choices: They can be very
| visibly present and then join the conversation when an
| opportunity presents itself, or they can leave.
|
| Social-media edge-hangers don't have to do anything, they can
| just hang there forever without clearly joining or leaving the
| group.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| In in activist group there is always a concern, founded or
| not, that law enforcement, opposition groups, or opposed
| individuals will try to infilitrate the group. People who are
| in this situation [1] in regards to romantic attraction also
| are creepy as hell.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approach-avoidance_conflict
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| In our community, it's actually very well-founded. There
| are many that wish us harm, so discretion is a habit.
| throw-qqqqq wrote:
| > Looky-loos, on the other hand, are a pain in the ass, because
| they will log in once, peer around, realize the app has nothing
| for them, and never come back
|
| I am not a native English speaker, so may be wrong, but as I
| understand the word, a looky-loo is derogatory for someone with
| no real intention to buy.
|
| If users do not "realize the app has nothing for them" (your
| words) before trying the app, by this definition they are NOT
| looky-loos and you're unfairly deriding them by calling them
| that :)
|
| In my humble opinion. No judging and no big deal, just a bit
| too harsh for my tastes.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Actually, they have plenty of opportunity to realize that
| it's not for them. We have a site, and the app store page is
| quite verbose, with videos and a full set of screenshots.
|
| One set of folks that might like it, are Zoombombers. They
| sign up, hoping to use it to cause harm to others, then
| realize that it isn't actually very good for that. The people
| the app Serves have a _lot_ of haters (I'm sure some of them
| hang out here). I try to do my best to shield them; or at
| least, not make it too easy to attack them.
|
| People tend to be cruel, shallow, and puerile. The Internet
| has allowed us to really riff on our Ids.
|
| BTW: As I'm sure you are aware, "Looky-loo" was the term used
| in the article. It's not one that I have ever used, myself,
| or plan to, in the future.
| jmuguy wrote:
| IMO you see the same issues when you have Google start optimizing
| ads for user signup. We've had a huge amount of user growth from
| ad spend. But not really the users we want, for the most part.
| erikpukinskis wrote:
| What's wrong with the users?
| michaelt wrote:
| Imagine my new food delivery startup delivers ultra-premium,
| Michelin-star-quality, $100-a-head food and wine anywhere in
| the five boroughs of New York.
|
| Any marketing to people who aren't in New York, or people who
| aren't rich enough to spend $100 a head on a meal, is largely
| wasted.
|
| Worldwide viral coverage on Reddit and Twitter? Youtubers and
| podcasters singing my praises? Meh.
|
| But sponsoring the New York City Ballet? I'll get far fewer
| hits, but the hits I do get will convert at a much higher
| rate.
| jmuguy wrote:
| Exactly
| hackernewds wrote:
| They're Google bots
| jmuguy wrote:
| In our case they're more "top of funnel". We make money
| generating leads. When optimizing purely for signups, we get
| a lot, but they're not the type of users that become leads.
| Its really just a google ads problem - we can tell google ads
| to focus on traffic that converts to leads, but there's not
| as much of that.
| lmeyerov wrote:
| My favorite here was we found Google's assigned ads
| consultant, when we dug into their glowing numbers, got us a
| big traffic spike in school kids using google's search bar as
| a graphing calculator. We are a b2b graph analytics company.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| This is true in every field - a stratospheric number 1 kills an
| artist.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LZEZ5QuyzM
| jaimsam wrote:
| That most "people" on social media are flakes, or looky-loos,
| NPCs, or just bots shouldn't be news to anyone.
| analog31 wrote:
| The thing that didn't seem obvious from the article is that
| "looking" means signing up. If this is the case, it's a conscious
| choice of the vendor.
|
| On the other hand, I do know that it's a widespread feeling among
| salespeople, that a person who interacts with them, without
| buying anything, is stealing from them. And wasting someone's
| time in order to make them feel like they owe you something is a
| familiar bargaining tactic.
| spankalee wrote:
| I don't think "looking" means signing up specifically. The
| advice is pretty generic, and it could be just users using the
| site/app/product. I think it just happens that a lot of
| products are going to have a sign up component if they're not
| just content for consumption.
| dingnuts wrote:
| >a person who interacts with them, without buying anything, is
| stealing from them
|
| This is so asinine. This would be like Target locking you in
| until you make a purchase, because you entered the store, and
| are thus wasting their resources. You owe them for being bathed
| in their fluorescent lights and breathing their climate
| controlled air, I guess.
|
| I swear: sales people must exist in their own bubble. Don't
| they know that Solutions hates them because Sales sets them up
| to fail? Don't they know that their customers hate them because
| the customer knows Sales will lie to get their commission?
| Don't they know Engineering hates them because they sell things
| that are impossible, on timelines that nobody can meet, in
| order to enrich only themselves?
|
| If Sales has a chip on their shoulder about anything they can
| get fucking bent
| lupusreal wrote:
| Sales is thinking _" none of these other people would have
| jobs if not for us, they owe their existence to us."_ One
| might naively think that sales would have the humility to
| realize they wouldn't have anything to sell if not for
| everybody else, but actually sales is perfectly happy to sell
| things which don't actually exist.
| ekidd wrote:
| > _On the other hand, I do know that it 's a widespread feeling
| among salespeople, that a person who interacts with them,
| without buying anything, is stealing from them._
|
| It's less this, and more that some customers have no business
| buying certain products, and the sooner you can filter them out
| of your sales funnel, the happier _everyone_ will be a year
| from now.
|
| Let's say you sell specialized enterprise SaaS that normally
| gets integrated at the API level. This means:
|
| - Lots of potential customers are too small to benefit from the
| product, or they don't understand what problem the product is
| actually solving.
|
| - Closing a sale probably involves lawyers and custom
| contracts, which costs $$$.
|
| - Customers need to either know how to use an API, or they need
| to have budget to pay the SaaS provider to write integration
| code.
|
| - Once the sale is closed, there's likely to be labor-intensive
| onboarding process.
|
| - You don't actually want customers who are going to try it for
| a year, hate it, and bail. You want people who love it and who
| will renew every year, or who will buy _more_ without another
| sales process.
|
| So sales people are trained to think about these issues, and to
| prioritize leads who have relevant problems, a good baseline
| understanding of what the product does, and enough budget to be
| able to properly set up and use the product.
| metadat wrote:
| > it's a widespread feeling among salespeople, that a person
| who interacts with them, without buying anything, is _stealing_
| from them
|
| If you're selling something low end, like a hotdog or pair of
| shoes, this makes sense. But for higher-end purchases there is
| a relationship component which can take time to build.
|
| I've encountered salespeople who get pissed off they've
| "wasted" time with me and it stood out as kind of a low-class,
| graceless, bottom-line only approach to the job and life in
| general. Sales can actually be pretty cool, but not with such a
| poor attitude!
| michaelt wrote:
| _> If you 're selling something low end, like a hotdog or
| pair of shoes, this makes sense. But for higher-end purchases
| there is a relationship component which can take time to
| build._
|
| I'd have expected the reverse, in some cases. Almost everyone
| who enters a shoe store can afford shoes and are seriously
| considering making a purchase.
|
| Whereas if you run a dealership selling $200,000 supercars,
| there's probably a steady stream of people who'd like a test
| drive but who don't have $200,000 in their bank account.
| metadat wrote:
| Dealerships don't generally allow test-drives on high-end
| models in my experience.
|
| Go to a Porsche dealer and notice how they don't get upset
| about you "wasting their time". Experienced salespeople
| have typically figured out the formula to winning people
| over.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Since the beginning of time (of software released on the
| interweb), people have been burned by the software not doing what
| it says on the tin. Or that it sounds like it might do what you
| really need even if that need isn't advertised on the tin.
|
| The reality is that people have needs and look for solutions.
| Some needs never have an off the shelf solution and it might take
| multiple OTS options strung together with some glue code. You
| don't know what's possible until you get a better look at the
| software. Why someone would be amazed that their perfect little
| product is not actually, you know, perfect solution for everyone
| is the real tell.
| Oras wrote:
| I agree with most points, however going viral has the benefit of
| strong backlinks for SEO.
|
| I had a website I shared here on HN, which made it to the front
| page and resulted in being mentioned in multiple newsletters and
| websites. The website site was on Google's 1st page when you
| search for the term, all due to the strong backlinks I gained.
| hartator wrote:
| > these shitty users
|
| God. You'll never be successful if you are that insulting to your
| users.
| spankalee wrote:
| This is just a saying format. "I jumped out of a perfectly good
| plane and all I got was this shitty t-shirt" kind of thing.
| hartator wrote:
| > Looky-loos, low quality <users>
|
| I don't think it stops here.
| solatic wrote:
| That's a nice excuse for pessimism. But the way you think
| about the world affects the way you interact with the world.
| If you think that people suck, you will eventually treat them
| that way. And you never know which person you pissed off ten
| years ago is the person you need for something tomorrow.
| toolz wrote:
| To play devil's advocate:
|
| That's quite the claim and a bit misleading. Successful
| businesses have been firing customers forever. I think they
| intend on insulting users they want to fire.
|
| I don't fully disagree with you, but I don't think it's correct
| to suggest you can't be successful with the attitude expressed
| in that article.
| lemonberry wrote:
| The last agency I worked at ridiculed their clients
| relentlessly. Every problem was blamed on the clients. A total
| lack of accountability from the owner down. It was a terrible
| place to work.
|
| My approach with my clients: if they don't understand or
| misunderstand something then I failed to explain things to them
| clearly. Not a big deal, I correct it so we're on the same page
| and move on. It's a great opportunity for both of us to learn
| and grow.
| YmiYugy wrote:
| I did not find the article very compelling. The biggest problem
| is the lack of context. What kind of products is the author
| talking about? I got the impression that this is mostly about
| SaaS offerings, but who knows? Moreover, the arguments presented
| are insufficient with regards to it's thesis. The author claims
| that traffic spikes are actually harmful, but then just argues
| that they are mostly irrelevant. The only argument towards actual
| harmfulness presented is that disappointed users could spread
| negative sentiment. I don't find that very convincing. Something
| conspicuously absent from the article is a discussion of
| conversion cost. If you have a freemium offering how much do free
| users actually cost you? Especially for consumer facing software
| the cost can be really low. It's not like you have a sales team
| doing calls with each potential customer, people crowding your
| store. Might a surge of signups still be profitable, even if the
| conversion rate is much worse? But even if you accept that
| unmitigated spikes are harmful, aren't the remedies easy to
| apply. If you notice an unwanted spike you can easily increase
| friction by e.g. limiting new signups to referrals until the
| spike is over, temporarily restricting your free tier, etc. In
| conclusion, traffic spikes might not be that harmful and are easy
| enough mitigated as to not warrant taking action to prevent them.
| nfm wrote:
| My take is that they're not necessarily harmful in and of
| themselves, but it's absolutely harmful to think that this is
| the way to grow and get traction. It's not a repeatable
| approach and it's likely to pump some top of funnel metrics
| temporarily without having meaningful impact to the bottom
| line.
|
| This can be very distracting if you're pursuing it
| intentionally and treating 'going viral' as a prerequisite to
| success.
| asdev wrote:
| TLDR retention is more important than top of funnel
| TZubiri wrote:
| Ngmi
| davidee wrote:
| "low quality users"? I think you mean folks trying to assess if
| it's a low quality product.
|
| I just couldn't finish this thing. Disdain mixed in with some
| wild understanding of the world.
|
| The fact that we so often care about DAU/MAU as a key metric for
| running a business continues to be one of the many issues some of
| us face when trying to build "quality" businesses of any
| size/scale.
|
| "here at wannabeMegaCorp our mission is numberGoUp"
|
| cool cool I'm out (even if I missed a later point). I'm all for
| reading a take I don't agree with, but this was something else
| entirely.
| cess11 wrote:
| From https://a16z.com/andrew-chen/ it seems this person failed at
| running a company that his rich friends had invested in and then
| they kept him around as some kind of consultant.
|
| I'm not so sure it's the kind of person I would turn to for
| advice on anything.
| AznHisoka wrote:
| I feel he's the epitome of an armchair entrepreneur. He spouts
| a lot of advice on what not to do, how hard it is, how to beat
| the cold start problem, but never seems to get into the arena
| himself and show how successful implementing his principles
| could be.
|
| (Yes, I'm aware he worked at Uber, but he never was responsible
| for turning it into a zero-awareness brand to a household
| brand. Not taking any credit away from that tho, and I actually
| agree with a lot of his content.)
| cess11 wrote:
| I don't see Uber as a success. They used a big bag of cash to
| replace organised labour with cheaper, unorganised labour,
| much like how the mafia works but out in the open. It does
| not provide anything new, it's just cabs without licenses
| driven by people living in precarious conditions.
|
| In some places they've been forced to ditch this business
| model too.
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