Smash Robot

I recently built a web app named HackerBuddy – it pairs up startup hackers who want to mentor other hackers. If you’re building an iPhone app and want some help, for example, HackerBuddy will match you up with someone else who wants to help.

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).