Alexis Ohanian (kn0thing) from Reddit (YC S05) on Getting Traction | Hacker News Reader

Alexis Ohanian (kn0thing) from Reddit (YC S05) on Getting Traction

gabrielweinberg.com

35 pointsepi0Bauqu16 comments

I'm actively looking for more good interview subjects on this focused topic (getting traction). If you have any ideas, introductions, or would like to be interviewed, please let me know.

Thanks for doing this, they are amazing and super-relevant.

Ideas:

@ev/@jack on twitter

@tonystubblebine on crowdvine

@joshu on delicious

chris dixon/caterina fake on hunch/flickr

pg on viaweb

kevin rose on digg

steven chen or chad hurley on youtube

andrew warner on mixergy (recursive intervews, perhaps? :)

craig newmark on craigslist

jason fried on 37signals

that's off the top of my head anyway.

Email me if you need intros to anyone I interviewed.

Also, why aren't you on camera? Email me if you want to know more about my setup.

Thx--I'll definitely take you up on that. My setup is certainly sub-optimal, but me not being on camera is deliberate. On my second interview, I lost my feed and so went without it. After it was done, I thought it worked better than the first (with me in it). Since the interviewee does the vast majority of the talking, it seemed I was just sitting there being distracting from the main content. But maybe I'm wrong?

It breaks with the norm, but I think it may be preferable for interviews. All we want from the host is for them to be a question-enhancing proxy for ourselves. Seeing your own face in a mirror wouldn't improve the experience of interviewing someone yourself, so seeing the host's shouldn't either.

That's a good portion of the book "Founders At Work".

It's about time PG just put an Amazon affiliate ad for that book on the front page. It really has become mandatory reading in all the entrepreneur circles I seem to travel in. Or maybe I need to get out more -- that's probably it.

I would be interested to see a Hacker News reading list sorted based on votes. Hey wait, I know a site that could do that...

Your welcome. I'd love to interview any of those people!

Dailybooth would be a great company to ask about traction.

So to summarize:

- Make a lot of fake accounts to submit content, so it looks like there are many more users than there actually are

- Get mentioned in a very popular essay by Paul Graham

- Eventually stop submitting content from fake accounts once you have grown enough

- Once you are so big that your referral starts showing up in the New York Times, etc. log, people will naturally start putting your buttons on your site.

- There will be some other huge sites that haven't organically put your button on their site yet. Cold email them.

- Post in the comments of any site that mentions you, regardless of the size to make yourself available to them.

Well, when you say it like that...

There's also a big-font preface: "This only happened to work out well in a very specific instance and while a few elements of my story may be generalizable to your startup, so don't follow any of my advice as though it were intended to be guidelines-for-success."

Some really useful tips here.

I always wonder if Reddit is profitable or not. Maybe it doesn't matter :/ Maybe it's a loss leader or something?

There was a thread on there a while ago where some admins answered questions. They said that it was.

Good interview, Alexis seems like a nice guy

It's all a facade. Dude eats babies.

All millionaires have different quirks. I forgive him

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