I made this poll on Hacker News a little over a week ago. For some unknown weird reason it didn't make it to the front page, but it still got enough votes for the (non-scientific) results to be interesting.
I chose these choices carefully.
The poll asked "Which companies have you a) heard of and b) know basically what they do?"
Here were the results (% of respondents that met the above criteria):
- Bingo card creator - 82%
- Directed edge - 40%
- Bluefrog gaming (previously Draftmix) - 21%
- Duck Duck Go - 71%
- Mibbit - 21%
- Mixergy - 79%
- Newscred - 8%
- Revizr - 1%
- Tarsnap - 59%
I chose these choices carefully.
- Revizr - this was the top "review my startup" post (by points) that I found on searchyc.com. And yet no one had heard of it. And the people who voted were probably more in the know than just "front page users" because they're people who review new or older stories, i.e. visit pages other than the front page on HN.
- Bingo card creator, Mibbit, Tarsnap, Duck Duck Go - these are startups by prominent Hacker News members who also have stories about their startups occasionally on the front page. Within this group, Bingo card creator has the most straightforward name, Mibbit hasn't had a lot of recent posts, Tarsnap has a lot of comments about it and Duck Duck Go has had a decent amount of recent posts on it.
- Directed Edge, Bluefrog Gaming - both YC startups, i.e. associated with the program that runs HN. Bluefrog is an older one and Directed edge is newer.
- Mixergy - Mixergy has been posted a lot lately. This seemed to definitely make a difference because its name isn't that straightforward.
- Newscred - they just had a top story like the day before I posted this. That didn't seem to make that much of an impact in and of itself, sort of like Revizr but before an exponential decay.
OK, tl;dr :)
- Just a few posts, even popular ones (Newscred/Revizr), did not create brand awareness.
- Recent saturation (Mixergy) can work.
- Persistent mentioning and community participation definitely works.
- Having a very straightforward name (Bingo Card Creator) is helpful.
- Being associated with the core of the community (in this case being a YC startup) contributes to brand awareness.
