Revenue would be near impossible to do, however we could have analyzed traffic using SimilarWeb or Ahrefs API.
We could also have analyzed the sitemap to check the last update date.
Those articles are really fun to write (I haven't written this one, I'm just the editor), but at some point you have to stop otherwise you end with a 20k words essay.
Agreed. A subset of products are "stripe verified" on Indie Hackers - should be a good enough population.
I think the parent article is interesting, thanks for your contributions. I am not saying that the same should have contained revenue, performance data - just that it would be interesting to see :)
I find your warning a bit unfair as there are literally no CTA inside the blog content promoting our product and only 2 internal links toward other educational posts.
But anyway,
I thought about taking a random sample of pages who returns a "200". Let's say 150, and manually tagging them to find if they're "dead" or not.
And then reuse the "dead or alive but a 200" ratio for all the pages but I was afraid that I'd need to tag much more than 150 pages to have a significant statistical result.
> I find your warning a bit unfair as there are literally no CTA inside the blog content promoting our product
It’s obviously blog content designed to promote your product, hosted on the company’s product website. I don’t see how the FYI is unfair.
I added it because the content was valuable but HN can be finicky about blog posts from companies advertising their own products. Trying to get ahead of indignant dismissals.
> It’s obviously blog content designed to promote your product, hosted on the company’s product website. I don’t see how the FYI is unfair.
There's so many blog posts posted here that could fall under "content marketing" umbrella if you want to be strict. I feel like there's no problem with that if the content is valuable and people like/upvote it. After all this is a platform that is doing marketing for YC where YC companies are supposed to post their content too.
That "warning" also stuck out to me as a bit unfair as I was even looking for how it hooks into ScrapingBee (as I was curious how these scraping-aaS platforms interface with custom code) and couldn't find anything.
Yours ended up coming across as the indignant dismissal. As a community member I didn’t appreciate the warning. From the second paragraph on your comment was an interesting contribution, though. I’m surprised that many of those PoC businesses have stayed online at all, but I guess romaine are easy to renew.
For what it's worth, you could watch how quickly the confidence intervals converge as you sample the data, to see if it's worth continuing or if the variance is too high and whether you'd have to check thousands of pages by hand:
from scipy.stats import binomtest
chance_of_dead_page = binomtest(landing_page_counter["dead"], landing_page_counter["total"]).proportion_ci(confidence_level=0.90)
print(f'Chance of a dead but existing landing page (90% Confidence Interval):{chance_of_dead_page.low * 100:.2f}% to {chance_of_dead_page.high * 100:.2f}%')
> I find your warning a bit unfair as there are literally no CTA inside the blog content promoting our product and only 2 internal links toward other educational posts.
I've worked in or adjacent to the content marketing world long enough to know that a CTA is not necessary for the post to be marketing/advertising. One of the major goals of content marketing it to establish the authority of the brand. You are well aware that the raison d'etre of that post is to spread awareness of and establish the authority of ScrapingBee.
It doesn't mean the post is not interesting, useful or valuable. But that post exists fundamentally for marketing/brand purposes.
Parents warning is completely fair, especially since they immediately point out the value of the post.
Traffic didn't increase nearly as fast as MRR growth.
What happened was a conjecture of 3 things:
- better conversion with better success rate and dev experience (doc / SDK etc ...)
- revenue extension from existing customers
- SEO rising, slowly but surely on article which converted a lot
Ravi de voir que même sur HN on sait apprécier les belles villes!
Si tu jamais tu as des questions, surtout n'hésite pas a me contacter, je suis souvent sur Twitter (Pierre de Wulf).
Et sinon bon courage et bonne chance pour ton projet!
PS: qu'est que toi ou tes collègues font dans leur travail de tout les jours que tu n'aimerais plus faire ou plus facilement? Maintenir un cahier / ficher de toutes les tâches que tu n'aimes pas ou que tu trouves redondante peut être un bon début pour la step 0.
Sinon il se dit aussi beaucoup que partout ou dans une entreprise il y a un excel a maintenir, ou des fichiers a s'envoyer régulièrement, il y a un SaaS qui attend d'être monté ;)
We could also have analyzed the sitemap to check the last update date.
Those articles are really fun to write (I haven't written this one, I'm just the editor), but at some point you have to stop otherwise you end with a 20k words essay.