This is the wrong way to look at getting traction on HN. The more you do it, the more likely you are to fail, with the modal case being that none of your posts get any attention at all. I can't tell you how many people we see who think that a clever title and posting at the right time and attracting upvotes in a tricky way will get their content noticed. It pains me to see people spending their energy on something that we know from experience won't work.
What matters is whether an article is interesting. That's what you should spend your effort on. An interesting article doesn't mean you'll get noticed, but an uninteresting article means you won't. Articles that try to make a system out of how they succeeded on HN always miss this point. In reality, what happened is that they hit on something that the community found interesting. (In this case, it was how Nike sold its first shoes.) Then they try to generalize based on the mechanical tricks they used. But those are not what made the article interesting.
What makes this difficult is that it's hard to produce interesting articles repeatedly when your motivation isn't curiosity but marketing your business. With most content marketing articles, you can feel what the author was solving for: "What's a thing that HN would find interesting that we can use to market our startup?" You can even imagine the brainstorming session that led to that topic getting selected. There's a limit to how interesting such content can ever get—if it's not something even the author is intrinsically interested in, why would it excite readers?
Good points and I do agree. I honestly think we're arguing from the same side. One of the points the case study makes is to not overthink and think about "marketing".
To quote the last line of the case study: "He isn't a marketer on Hacker News, he's a Hacker News user on Hacker News."
Hi Dang. I do think we're arguing from the same side more than you might think.
Contrary to what you're saying one of the main lessons in the case study is NOT to use a clever title. To quote, "bleed out all the superfluousness".
Regards to the Nike story I never extrapolate back from this or generalise from this title. To quote, "In spite of this success, I’ll be the first to admit that I am pretty clueless when it comes to Hacker News."
And regards to your final paragraph, again, I couldn't agree with you more. And that is in fact the whole point of the conclusion. To quote,
"But to call him a great marketer I think misses the point. Adriaan is a great Hacker News user. He understands the intricacies of the forum, offers thoughtful insight, and is never pushy with his business. The naked eye doesn’t see self-promotion. It sees someone passionate about privacy. He isn't a marketer on Hacker News, he's a Hacker News user on Hacker News.
Once you start hanging with your perfect audience, you don't have to try so hard."
The reason why Adriaan is so successful is because he is intellectually curious. And that he isn't writing articles drummed up by a group of content marketers trying to game the system.
My own experience certainly backs this up. The two case studies I've submitted that reached the front page of Hacker News both took were purely done out of my own interest.
Choose the correct title and your startup can be projected to thousands.
If you're selling a product that HN readers will buy then that's awesome, and well worth doing. Those of us who sit and read /newest will happily upvote things that are great.
If you're selling something that will appeal to a different group of people who don't read HN, or to the mass market so HN readers won't make much of a dent in the metrics, then it'll just spike your bandwidth costs for a while with no upside. If that's the case then focus on marketing to your potential customers. Ignore everything else. 30K views from random people who won't buy what you're selling is vanity.
Adriaan from the article here. You are right. HN is the right target group for Simple Analytics. If I had posted a totally different product with no privacy angle or interest for HN readers, it would have little result. You need to find you target audience and I believe HN is one for Simple Analytics.
I also hear a lot of people knowing Simple Analytics from Hacker News. So maybe they don't convert to customer yet, they know about my tool. Which is super useful and got me talks with DuckDuckGo and other great companies. It's not only for selling your tool, it's also great for getting your name out there.
The founder of Mailparser in this episode of Indie Hackers[1] talks exactly about this. When he did Show HN, His thread was on the front of HN and he got so many views and advice but zero sales. But ultimately his Show HN thread lead him to a partnership that made him a solopreneur.
> 30K views from random people who won't buy what you're selling is vanity.
Not sure how far you would get in the world of advertising sales with that observation!
30K views from the nit-picking HN crowd could be very useful if you want to refine your product for a wider audience. Things like whether the page loads without errors or spelling mistakes will be useful to correct with the HN audience. You might not get sales but you will get your sales pitch debugged.
There is definitely a set of topics and themes that are particularly popular on HN, ex. privacy, de-Googling, write-it-in-Rust, Plan 9, etc.
If your product fits into this niche (or better, you can create a product specifically for the niche), I doubt you will have many problems. Otherwise, good luck reaching even page 5.
I think the most important point is in the final paragraph:
"Find the place where your tribe hangs out. Show up, help people out, talk about what you're doing, and the rest will take care of itself."
The article starts out sounding like it's about effective marketing, but as it progresses, the unavoidable conclusion becomes that it only works because he's sharing content relevant to HN, in a way that appeals to HN, because he himself is a HN user.
Marketing as an insider of the crowd you're marketing to is trivial. Marketing as an outsider is hard.
This exactly.
I've tried couple of times with my side project on show HN - https://tardis.dev (aimed at algotraders) and it didn't pick up, but on the other hand on reddit algotrading sub I received useful feedback and even few paying users.
Sites that display content based on upvotes are inherently chaotic, you can get published or denied for no reason at all. They are just biased into being useful, but there are no guarantees.
A set of small communities, like on Redit, have a much more predictable behavior. If you have content that interests one of them, it is very likely that it will get picked.
I think there are ways to game it, actually. You need someone else to give you that first upvote. I think/assume that those first few upvotes will make it visible to more people which will hopefully attract more upvotes. Of course the content still needs to be good enough to get those upvotes; but it makes it more likely to dodge the risk of good content going ignored because nobody sees it.
I recently posted one of my silly side-projects to HN and it reached the front-page; I'm not really into analytics and user tracking, but I was curious about how much traffic was generated.
So, I just awk/grep'ed Apache's access.log [1]. The results were about 23k requests from 17k unique addresses in a couple of days and then a longer tail for about a week, but haven't checked since.
Thanks for posting your stats. Your results match almost exactly what happened when a (trollish) article of mine[0] was posted a couple of years ago.
From memory, I got about 20K hits in the first 24 hours, and another 5K over the next few days, trailing off to nothing after about a week. It was exciting at the time but I had no evidence of any retention.
Out of curiosity, do blog owners expect retention from a popular article? I just don't consume content this way. Unless the article is covering a long-term project I might be interested in (following game development from inception to release, etc) or the article sells something to me and I convert to a client, why would I start visiting a blog on the off chance that the author strikes lightning again? I much prefer curation services like HN.
Hey Matt. Nice work with osdev.org, I'll be checking it out. Allow me to offer my point of view on your question.
I initially started out this blog to improve my writing skills; I don't have any tracking, ads, analytics. I don't know (and don't care, tbh) if and how many people read it. It allows me to write down things I've learned, really cement that knowledge, and it's also hella fun!
Many people that I know, which maintain their own blog are on the same page. Writing in public also allows other interesting people to offer their opinions, and start a conversation. This is the best thing I've got from it, helpful comments, criticism, and different viewpoints from strangers!
Ever seen https://www.die.net/earth/ ? I ask because it's really similar to OP's product Sunlight.live/ but came out in the late 90s early 2000s. It uses a satellite image of the weather, and a version of earth by day and earth by night to generate a composite that looks really sleek. Thanks for all the downvotes/fish.
Hey! Yes, I have seen die.net, and it was a source of inspiration. I wanted to build something original, use Python, learn about astronomy, and maybe help someone else with their ideas!
This matches up with what I saw. I don't have an access.log, but I took the total network traffic for that day and divided that by the size of one full page load including resources, which came out to about 10k to 15k page views for the first day.
That's interesting. We use IIS, I wonder if there's a similar means for doing analytics at that level instead of the analytics library on the front end approach. I'll need to look into that a bit, thanks.
I had a couple of moderately popular posts in June this year. HN sent 31,588 views directly - plus associated views from apps. A post of mine in March got 36k.
I wonder if HN has reached a local maximum of readers?
I take it you're always reaching some small subset of HN readers - filtered by the kind of people who visit links by the kind of people actually interested in the topic, etc. I know that of the links that I do upvote, I probably only visit a tiny fraction of them.
> What I’ve noticed some people do is put out a tweet directing people to the newest page. This gives their followers an easy route to find their post.
I'm pretty sure this method gets flagged. It's easy enough to detect a bunch of users landing on the new page with Twitter as a referrer all upvoting the same article. The mods and the community don't appreciate sockpuppeting (unless you're in YC of course).
> don't appreciate sockpuppeting (unless you're in YC of course)
That's not true. Votes from YC alums get no special treatment, and HN's voting ring detection software works the same on their posts as anyone else's. If you or anyone has concerns about this, I'd be happy to address them, but specific links would be helpful. It's pretty hard to respond to drive-by accusations like this, which have no information in them.
The first thing we tell YC startups is not to solicit upvotes and comments. If they email us complaining that their post didn't get traction, we tell them the same things we tell others.
Maybe I heard wrong then, but I was told that links posted by YC members are colored differently visible only to other YC members. Perhaps that was just a conspiracy.
Thanks for confirming this feature. I mean, if someone's name stands out in a nice bright orange color, I might feel just a bit trigger happy to upvote it. Unless you're just completely ignoring votes by other YC alum altogether, I can't see the ring detector being able to discern from authenticity vs bias towards liking orange colored names. Even just a few upvotes can give someone an advantage.
We don't see voting rings involving orange accounts getting more traction than voting rings in general. Our systems certainly aren't perfect, though. If you think you see a post that is being affected by sockpuppet voting, you're welcome to send us a link so we can look into it.
I would like to hear what you think you know about this, and how.
A large part of our job is trying to prevent HN from being gamed. YC startups don't get to do that any more than others, and if we notice egregious cases we email them and give them an extra scolding.
Posts that start with "Launch HN" get placed on the front page similarly to how job ads do. These are the two formal things that HN gives back to YC in exchange for funding it: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme.... The difference is that job ads can't be upvoted and decline in rank as a function of time, while Launch HNs can be upvoted and get ranked like regular stories after the initial placement.
Posts by YC startups after their initial launch don't get any special treatment. If a submission doesn't say "Launch HN", it's subject to the same rules as everything else.
Edit: HN also displays YC alumni names in orange to other YC alumni.
What the hell is going on with this website? The post pops up in a modal (which is not focused, so my cursor keys and space bar didn't work to scroll at first) that only takes up about a third of the screen. Close it and there's a bunch of article links with giant thumbnails.
Except that people have admitted to gaming the upvote system here many times in the past so its not all organics-based. I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of top articles had been shilled to N 'friends' / 'associates' / 'colleagues' etc before they had reached number 1.
If you look at all the new submissions there are many interesting articles and most of them only get like 1 or 2 upvotes. So either its all random luck or people are coordinating it like they do on Reddit. But ofc: I will trust this totally legit website about marketing that everything is hard work, organics, yada-yada-yada, here's my email bro and ill be sure to click your referral links too ;>)
Many thanks for posting this. It's really useful to find guidance on how to do stuff to more effectively engage HN readers with a website or project.
Of course, all my efforts so far have failed to engage the sort of people I want to engage. But then I've been here for less than a month - not an excuse, I know - and I am still trying to work out what sort of tone/content a post/comment needs to convey to get people to engage with it.
The other problem I'm suffering from is a lack of self-discipline: every day I come to HN with the intention to make an impactful post or comment, but then I click on some links and find myself drawn into articles and conversations that have nothing to do with my work/projects, but are just too interesting in their own right to be ignored ... and suddenly the clock's gone forward another hour and I've done nothing productive! HN is too addictive (but I'm not ready to quit it yet!)
I'll not post any links to my projects etc in this comment - maybe I'll try out Lesson 2 tomorrow.
I m quite baffled by meta posts claiming that hacker news has a different culture that anywhere else. Sure its not facebook but it s very similar to mid-level moderated subreddits. Major plus is there are no images.
I recently tried sharing an article I wrote for CryptoSlate about general stuff happening around gaming and it was flagged. I have no idea why. It wasn't spam. I wasn't selling anything. Honestly, a post on how to game HackerNews seems way way way more spammy than what I had flagged. I just wanted to share content that I had created. I don't expect I'll ever get 30,000 of you to look at one of my links.
FYI if the comment count goes above the number of points (after a certain number of points, ~45, I forget) - your submission gets penalized and drops off the front page really fast.
So there are times when you might want to hold off on adding comments if it's close to that threshold.
This is plain garbage. The best way to get visitors to your website is to create good content. No marketing, no click-bait or other garbage, just good content.
Hm, it is very doubtful that good content is simply enough nowadays. With tons of information in the internet, "just good content" can hardly be discovered by itself. There are should be ways for target audiences to find it, share it and engage with it.
That is not garbage, that is exactly what he's saying: do something interesting, then share it with the people who are interested in that kind of thing.
I posted a question [1] to see if there is any interest for octopus deploy alternative (fdeploy.com) but got zero replies. I'm still developing the tool for my personal use though.
Right. If HN readers are your exact target audience, then it’s totally worth it.
After we got featured on HN for awhile, whenever I hangout at some tech communities, there will always be someone saying “yeah, I came across the post about TablePlus (my product) on Hacker News the other day. Tried already”
That feels good tho. Also a good way to start a conversation and ask for feedback.
Author here. Ever since I knew of Hacker News, I've always been interested in the massive leverage it provide to both startups and individuals.
Choose the correct title and your startup can be projected to thousands. Write a thoughtful comment and you can make 20 sales. Ask the right question and you can end up with a Silicon Valley job (that actually happened)!
I came across Simple Analytics [1] a privacy-focused startup which pulls in huge traffic from HN. Fortunately all their traffic was all "/open" so I could compare traffic spikes with their founders [2] Hacker News activity and understand what really does works on Hacker News.
Yeah, it's just the title. I was on top for like 16h or so because I had a catchy title and some way of supporting that title within the content.
Comments were far different. Almost all of them were negative and highly unconstructive. I don't mind criticism, but I really mind criticism from which I can't learn anything. One HN reader actually took the time to write a constructive comment. I don't know who it was nor did I thank him at the time, but that one constructive criticism was way more helpful than all the traffic boost I got.
What matters is whether an article is interesting. That's what you should spend your effort on. An interesting article doesn't mean you'll get noticed, but an uninteresting article means you won't. Articles that try to make a system out of how they succeeded on HN always miss this point. In reality, what happened is that they hit on something that the community found interesting. (In this case, it was how Nike sold its first shoes.) Then they try to generalize based on the mechanical tricks they used. But those are not what made the article interesting.
What makes this difficult is that it's hard to produce interesting articles repeatedly when your motivation isn't curiosity but marketing your business. With most content marketing articles, you can feel what the author was solving for: "What's a thing that HN would find interesting that we can use to market our startup?" You can even imagine the brainstorming session that led to that topic getting selected. There's a limit to how interesting such content can ever get—if it's not something even the author is intrinsically interested in, why would it excite readers?