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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.
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.

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.

> 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.

> 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!

> 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.

>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

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.
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.
> these shitty users

God. You’ll never be successful if you are that insulting to your users.

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.

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.

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.
> Looky-loos, low quality <users>

I don’t think it stops here.

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.
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.

This is true in every field - a stratospheric number 1 kills an artist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LZEZ5QuyzM

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.
What’s wrong with the users?
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.

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.)

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.

> (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.

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.

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.

I don't think it is frowning on the visitors / curious folks personally.

It is being honest about your opportunities / visitors during the spike.

> 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.

There's something icky in calling users high-quality and low-quality
“High-quality leads” and “low-quality leads” have been sales terminology forever. Put your pitchfork away.
Might be better to say high / low quality SALES opportunity.
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.

Ngmi
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.

TLDR retention is more important than top of funnel
“My product went viral but it may not be offering the value I think it does so I blame the users for it”
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.

You don't know that. There is such a thing as an unqualified lead.
That’s not what the article says.
"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.

That most "people" on social media are flakes, or looky-loos, NPCs, or just bots shouldn't be news to anyone.
> you launch an app

"Free ReactJS web site filled with A/B testing and analytics, and a billion NPM modules" I guess.

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.

> 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.

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.