grab

early alpha release, been working on this side project for 4 months, ask me anything.

It is safe to say my app is a social one, like twitter, or even chatroulette. It does not solve anything in particular, besides boredom.

Chatroulette does not solve anything either, and people are more likely to use skype or msn for video. I doubt there is high traffic search for "chat with random strangers".

Anyway, i will share some progress. I tried a few ad networks.

Banner ads seem like a fail, only 0.1-0.15% ctr, this is horrible.

Adwords is also not kind to me. Since the idea is new and does not solve anything (as in there is no “how to….”) i can’t target specific searches. Some related keywords are getting very low traffic search and ctr is 0.04%, terrible.

Those were CTR if you didn’t notice, not conversions. Conversions from above are single digits.

What i did find to work marvelously well is ads direct to website (popups and such). Right now i have a decent coming soon page, and for some regions i pay 4 cents per conversion (as in email). For conversions from US it costs 60 cents per conversion. Is it worth paying x15 for people from us? Maybe it will be easier to get "big in japan" and get world domination only later on?

I wonder how many users will actually be created once I start sending emails out.

Cool stuff. But, meeting with 10 other peers each time i want something downloaded is not sexy. Also, since BitTorrent speeds usually are not amazing, i might as well let someone download the whole thing and then ask from them to give it to me.

Notepad++. Open source, has a bunch of plugins and its light. I tried a few ide(s) and most of them are way to much resources demanding for what they offer. Eclipse has a lot to offer, if you are an eclipse ninja you probably will benefit from using it. Aptana is also quite popular, but when i launch it and need to wait for it to load, it just kills my motivation to start coding.

impressive.

google is not an acronym for web standards. Half of the time google things (adsanse, adwords, analytics, gmail, you name it) don't work on my main browser (opera), and each time i say to myself, ffs, cant they hire someone to fix this..