I built it partly so that I could get some experience with Ruby on Rails (which is a wonderful programming language, by the way) and partly because I thought that it would be.. well, a nice thing to do.

When I launched the app, I told a few people about it and it started to grow, getting 10 people over the course of a few days. Then it got noticed by Hacker News, hitting the first page and sending a ton of traffic and interested people signing up. It even got a write up in Mashable, and a load of people emailing me with their suggestions (all of them appreciated), advice and some stories of how they were now working on their own projects with the help of people they’d swapped email addresses with through the site.

There’s a problem, though, that I’ve heard a lot of hackers make. Without a monetary incentive it becomes remarkably easy to lose interest in the app you’ve just built – if you have an idea for another app, the desire to abandon your old app is much stronger if it’s not paying you. It’s sad, but true. But of course, I didn’t want to charge money for my app, it would completely go against the spirit of HackerBuddy – but it still meant that I could get easily distracted by other projects.

I had a list of improvements I wanted to make to the site, the biggest one being a way to improve how you can find people with specialist skills like node.js, or Redis, or any of the skills I hadn’t thought to code into the app properly. While I tweaked and adjusted small back-end features, this problem is one that I always pushed to the back of my mind, allowing myself to be distracted whenever I sat down to fix it.

I found it unimaginably easy to distract myself by getting excited about other things I could be building, instead of improving my current app. From a lot of what I’ve read, and from a lot of the creative hackers that I’ve spoken to, this is common. What I needed was a way to keep myself interested in HackerBuddy, without that incentive being cash.

Recently, I found my incentive. I added a count of how many people were registered, on the homepage, for all to see. Right now the site prominently features the text ‘Join 2,306 of your fellow hackers‘. It’s an incredibly simple thing to do, but it’s changed how I think about my site.

Now, if that figure doesn’t continue to grow, people will be able to see that my app isn’t getting any more love. Making that measure of success publicly visible has given me an incentive to keep improving.

That change gave me the motivation to fix my issue of people not being able to list all the things they’re great at. Now, if you check out the Browse Users page, all of the profiles are searchable with a fairly pleasing instant-y effect. All because I made it easier for people to see if my app wasn’t getting more popular.

I don’t know if this will work for everyone, but it’s working for me. You can also help make that figure go up by signing up to HackerBuddy and helping out your fellow hackers. (And for everyone that has, I genuinely can’t thank you enough).

20 years later, everything has changed. There are obviously still companies that launch this way – but if you’re a developer, those rules don’t apply to you.

The barrier to entry has never been lower – and the access to a market has never been easier. You can design an app that markets itself to more than 500 million people via Facebook as a way of spreading. You can design your app to be worth tweeting about, and be seen by people that otherwise wouldn’t know you existed. You can test whether there’s a market for your idea by buying some cheap hosting from somewhere like Hostgator, getting a free $100 Google AdWords voucher with it and buying a $4 theme from Themeforest.net to collect email addresses of people that are interested in your project. If it’s popular, you can go ahead and build it – if not, you could have just saved yourself a lot of time and money.

What took businesses years, and hundreds of thousands of dollars to do, you can now do in an afternoon. All you need is an idea and a laptop.

Surprisingly for a company who’s success is based around advertising, they made the classic marketing mistake of advertising features instead of benefits. One banner ad showed an image of the Nexus S, and cycled through text saying “contour display” and “front and back camera”.

A contour display is a feature – as a bit of a tech lover I could assume that a contour display may give a seemingly bigger image. In truth, I’m not sure – is it brighter? Clearer? Do films look better on it? Compare that to how Apple talked about the iPhone 4′s retina display:

“With a remarkable 960 x 640 resolution in a 3.5-inch screen, text and graphics look unbelievably crisp and sharp”

Advertising a front and back camera is also not a benefit to the user – it’s another feature. While you can guess at what they mean – that it allows video calling – you’re still forcing the viewer to guess. Again, when Apple advertised the iPhone 4′s forward-facing camera, they introduced it by advertising FaceTime – i.e. what you can actually do with both cameras, rather than just the cameras themselves.

The second advert, running on Spotify, is the best example of advertising features over benefits. This advert again showed a huge image of the phone, but had the accompanying text “Gingerbread”. I own an Android phone and I’m quite techy, but even I don’t know what benefits Gingerbread on my phone has. Someone that doesn’t own an Android phone is even less likely to know what updates Gingerbread brings with it, and users that don’t have an Android phone may not even know what Gingerbread means.

It’s repeated in every marketing book that’s ever been written, but it’s worth saying again: whatever you’re advertising, don’t talk about the features – talk about the benefits of those features.

We had the task of encouraging more sales of the large size coffee as that’s where we made the most money (the markup was, and I suppose is with all coffee shops, astonishing). Large, sadly, wasn’t our most popular coffee size – medium was. We needed to find a way to change that.

We managed it by simply relabeling the large size of coffee as “medium”. The old medium became “small” and we introduced a new “large” – a huge, expensive coffee that we didn’t expect, and never really thought, anyone would buy.

Despite the change we found the vast majority of customers, when asked what size, would still reply “medium, please”.

In a way, it’s quite sad to see the constant decline in viewing figures for Lost over the years. It’s an ingenious, albeit confusing, story and even though I’m looking forward to seeing it’s conclusion, I’ll be sorry to see it go.

Viewing figures are from TV by the Numbers (and listed in full on the Lost Wikipedia pages).

Taking and mashing up this data as you see fit is encouraged.

The graph above (and the table below) shows the percentage of each countries citizens that have a Facebook account. While you’d expect the United States, the home of Facebook, to be up there it’s interesting to see which countries populations are more devoted to Facebook.

More than half of Iceland & Norway’s populations are on Facebook.

Data comes from Facebook’s Ad Manager and Worldbank. Population data is from 2008, while Facebook data is from April 2010. Taking, mashing up and playing with this data is encouraged.