I got a camera recently and have been debating whether or not to get Adobe's photographer package. Currently I just use Lightroom mobile.
Now I'm thinking I'll probably go with this. It looks really good!
Perhaps because I used it on my mobile phone.
Is this still the case?
"M" is one of those fundamentally ambiguous type of abbreviations that really shouldn't ever be used. (Kind of like nn/nn/nn date formats.)
It is commonly used to mean both "thousand" (M was the Roman numeral for 1000) and "million" (10K, 10M, 10B).
Why not? 10M seems the obvious.
I think andrewstuart was asking what qualified as a "user": how many were active, how much they engaged, etc.
But anyway, I was wrong; I poked around on the site and they indicate they really do have millions of users. So: wow, nice work!
[1]: https://www.accountingcoach.com/blog/what-does-m-and-mm-stan...
Paying customers now include consultants, journalists, realtors, insurance companies, and others! There are few developers who use it because it saves them time, but they're the exception.
That's classic HN/slashdot. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
For my use case this does not fall short. Although I'm sure you could come up with features I didn't know I needed.
The book [1] was downloaded by 9600+ people by now. It is an open source book that gets continuously improved. You build an React.js application along the way and transition smoothly from JavaScript ES5 to JavaScript ES6. It teaches the fundamentals of React without any tooling or Redux. Afterward you are ready to go to build your own React applications.
I must say I never expected this amazing reaction from the community.
My actual most visited website is one that has hit the front page, but not because of my "Show HN".
[1] http://jgthms.com/web-design-in-4-minutes/
[4] http://bulma.io/
<a class="button is-primary is-inverted is-outlined">Invert Outlined</a>
<a class="button primary inverted outlined">Invert Outlined</a>Also, it prevents the namespace from being "polluted" by class names that could be used for other things. For example, there's a "box" element, and a "is-boxed" modifier for the "navbar".
Lastly, the same modifier class can be used on different elements, since they are specific to the context in which they're used.
Just started migrating a new website, https://devel.tech, from Bootstrap 4 + mdbootstrap pro to bulma (https://devel.tech/site/updates#id15)
Far simpler markup. Better whitespacing / balance. Less javascript.
A good compromise in framework size to features.
Almost four years later, we've raised a couple hundred thousand in equity and grants (mostly the latter, happily), and I'm working full-time on it. Equity is from Intel Capital and grant awards are from Stanford, The Tech Museum of Innovation, and NewSchools Venture Fund (a nonprofit backed by various SV family offices).
I will say that there is lots of luck in where posts end up. My second post about BeeLine Reader — when we released our Chrome extension — hardly got any attention. This was a big surprise, given how popular the (very alpha-version) bookmarklet had been.
original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6335784
current website: http://www.beelinereader.com
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We're looking for a rails dev and a dev with PDF experience, BTW! Email developers@ ..
That said, we wouldn't want to let bugs linger! Is there anything in particular that you think the app should be updated to do?
We recently released another app (Read Across The Aisle, [1] a free utility for monitoring the political polarity of one's news consumption), and it used the same code base. We got no complaints about the app being outdated. Both apps seem to get the job done — let me know if we're missing something here!
We also gather data in our "Reading Challenge", which is more generalizable but is not a controlled experiment. This has shown that most people who take the challenge read faster with the color gradients, and that the average speed increase is 20%. But the effect is not universal.
You might try a couple of the other color schemes, including the "night mode" that inverts things. But if you read mostly in chunks, as opposed to linearly, then you're probably not as likely to benefit.
Everything you offer seems to be free -- how do you monetize?
BTW I don't really understand how the pricing works. I tried looking into it but according to the chrome app I'm on the "undefined" plan.
We got some awesome customers (including some big names) from our HN launch, and it kickstarted out growth. If I remember correctly, we finished out the week at about $4k MRR... nothing compared to now, but at the time it felt awesome to be making money.
We've come a long way since then, but our Show HN was a great way to kick things off!
I've really been interested in ReadMe because it fills such a simply yet extremely important need for developers. Would you be willing to ever do one of those Indie Hacker posts [0]?
Also, question: is ReadMe no longer free to Open Source projects? I see reference in your docs that say that ReadMe is free for Open Source projects [1] but on your current pricing page [2] I don't see any reference to the free-open source version.
[0] https://www.indiehackers.com/
They're one of our licensees (of BeeLine Reader), and sometimes people send us customer support requests because they think they're owned by us. I had no idea there was a different ReadMe, but I suppose it's not surprising.
Presumably since you're in different markets, you can each own your respective trademarks?
Since then I have released version 2 which has the ability to add fx to the instruments, use MIDI devices and lots more. It gets a few sales a week with traffic still coming from those music sites.
I also made this synth that uses it, you can use your typing keyboard too: http://www.errozero.co.uk/stuff/poly/
...and a little pong game, you can control the paddle with any knob on a connected MIDI controller. http://errozero.co.uk/midi-pong/
It's built in a way that will allow me to drop in new instrument modules in the future and I'm hoping to get around to that at some point.
One of my synths is on Github and is structured in the same way as the acid synths: https://github.com/errozero/poly-synth
I tried to play around with the Web Audio API but never went very far; still searching for a good "getting started" tutorial, esp. how to control timing / tempo.
Your app is really slick; been listening to it all morning! ;-)
Will look at the instrument on GitHub.
Over time I got 60k+ downloads and sold it for $8.5k :)!
Original link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7950866 Story: http://www.germanespitia.com/habit-streaks
Project: http://symbolflux.com/projects/tiledtext [video]
Original Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5306155
Sorry about your wrists, I also suffer from RSI issues; recently I have started using voicecode which has allowed me to use voice for about 80% of my coding/computer use instead of typing/mousing. You might want to check it out?
It does have a large learning curve, is not cheap (Dragon + voicecode) and currently runs on Mac only (windows/linux in the pipeline), I am using that in conjunction with SmartNav for mousing.
I'm mostly just using mouse/keyboard now, but I have learned some things about how to do it. Partly it's about not freaking out about things—seems like the added tension makes it a lot worse. That has been much more difficult than I can describe briefly here, but it was important at least in my case. Additionally, having some mindfulness about how I was feeling physically at the computer and letting that direct break-taking has been very useful. Same with various stretching/yoga things I do regularly. I spent a lot of time learning/practicing meditation in order to getter better, unadulterated feedback about physical problems (and to help stay relaxed while computing). It's interesting how oblivious we can be to discomforts from posture etc., and how automatic correcting them can be once you just tune in.
Anyway, I'm still not fully recovered either, but computing is a much more pleasant thing these days than it has been for many years.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=ErgonomicNotes&type=comment
Unfortunately tools like the Jouse3 mouth-operated mouse cost too much to be experiments.
It helped us realize that a web-based version of our "CodeAcademy for Excel" product wasn't going to cut it. We built an integrated version that actually lives inside of Excel and won a contest with Microsoft.
I talk a little more about what happened here:
https://medium.com/gridmaster/what-weve-been-up-to-since-hit...
By now largest streaming search engine in the world at Alexa/Similarweb Top ~#4700 global with around 12 million unique visits per month. Not too shabby all around.
Launch post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9005641
The project went from 50 to 550 stars overnight, eventually reaching 3,000-something stars when the hype died down. (it's now at ~14,500 stars and growing)
That submission kickstarted my career. Among other things it led to me speaking at over 20 international conferences, to being featured in Forbes Austria and to the privilege of being employed as a full-time open source developer. (which eventually led to the creation of styled-components)
I wrote a bit more about my journey on my blog a while ago too in case you want the longer version: https://mxstbr.blog/2016/12/a-dream-come-true/
It's been an awesome ride and I wouldn't be where I am without HN!
It was on the homepage for around 24 hours I think. We had ~500,000 unique sessions during the first month after the launch. Hacker News played a big part in that.
We stopped actively working on the project, but it's still being used by more than 100,000 people every month.
I wrote a little case study about the whole thing here - http://codetree.co/case-studies/movieo
Buttons and action links are all over the place and I feel like most are added just to make them pass a "there is a button" test, without caring where it is or what it looks like
[0]: https://about.gitlab.com/2017/07/22/gitlab-9-4-released/#new...
MindMup (https://www.mindmup.com), an online mind mapping tool appeared in 2013, and got a nice traffic bump that day, it took about two years to reach that level of regular traffic. the site now gets between 400 and 500k visits monthly during busy school periods (seems to be mostly used by educational users), and grows around 5% per month.
ClaudiaJS (https://claudiajs.com) is an open source tool that helps deploy Node.js projects to AWS Lambda and API Gateway easily. Originally built for MindMup, we decided to spin it off as a separate open source tool. It appeared on HN about a year ago, and according to NPM stats now has roughly 85K downloads.
I've been using MindMup for a few months now and really enjoy it.
Show HN Link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6046227
Status: Still growing, almost 100k users, vibrant leaderboards
Project 2: CLMapper Chrome Extension (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clmapper/omonmigal...)
Show HN Link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4324884
Status: Unmaintained. Reached peak of over 4k users, now under 2k and decreasing
Not even one upvote though. Do any of these posts get on the homepage organically?
LE: 2nd (and last) try: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14841172
As lwansbrough said, a small number of reposts is explicitly ok (this is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). Reposts aren't a good thing per se (and can drive the, shall we say, detail-oriented segment of the community crazy sometimes), but it's worse for good submissions to fall through the cracks, so we make the tradeoff that way.
Edit: Taking a quick look at your post, I think you may be falling into some of the traps that prevent a project from attracting attention here: for example, the "I can't tell what this does" problem, and the fact that the intellectually interesting details aren't up front, so curiosity isn't engaged in the first couple seconds. Take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14841231, which are some tips that we send to YC startups and HN users who email us.
Here is an example SHOW HN that had all the elemnents you speak of but went nowhere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13474714
Now one can say that they were just all things that shouldn't have hit the front page, but these days I really believe that you need to ask a few HNers to upvote something for it to hit the front page. I think it's a dirty little secret of reddit and HN. Perhaps it can be fixed with algorithms somehow, but I am not sure how.
PS: there was one exception when I made a clickbait title with the word "hacked" in it, like a year ago. That hit the front page organically.
As for your submission, I have no idea what problem it's supposed to solve, and I'm not inclined to "sign up" to try to figure it out. I think screenshots or other graphics to 'show' what your site does would be helpful.
Here is what a sample feedback page looks like: https://visualtip.com/3c5090a169f6b9e955d3b57b9401497b
I don't know but I suspect many users are on mobile devices like me.
"app.initialize is not a function (in app.initialize({"api":"https:\/\/api.visualtip.com","key":"db4430ab8da22455511f9b26963a7151835ef5471b82"});"
I haven't the slightest idea what that means, but would have expected to at least see some sort of header or un-styled text rather than absolutely nothing!
Thank you for the feedback regarding the blank page. It's on our list :)
That said, you might want to add a few sentences describing VisualTips, and maybe the backstory, on your submission. A lot of people click into the comments to get a bit more context and decide whether or not they actually want to click into the submitted item itself.
Also, it would be helpful to have some kind of visual description on your homepage. I have a pretty good image in my mind from the text, but for such a _visual_ product it would be really helpful to see screenshots or, even better, a gif of it in action. Those visuals would likely help people get more excited about it.
The basic info on https://visualtip.com/tour is closer to what you need on the homepage. But visual-focused instead of text. And absolutely reduce the noise on the page by getting rid of meaningless text such as
"Security: We take security very seriously and have taken measures to protect our customer's data"
and the Deiter Rams quote which looks like a user endorsement needs to go too.
The tour page however tells me almost instantly that it's meant to get feedback on designs (even if that is only made clear in step three out of three). Now going back to the front page, those three steps are there as well, except they're shown as three separate features of the product instead of logical steps (I didn't make that connection) and the "You, the designer" part puts the "so what's that about clients/customers" in place.
Then again, I often feel like I'm thick-witted so take it for what you will. Or perhaps where you link from (e.g. link text / ad text / the search query they entered) gives enough context for them to get it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13984951
Subscribers increasing slowly but steadily. ShowHN didn't lead to any direct sales as far as our reporting shows but doing a "ShowHN" is something of an internal milestone for us and the comments have been interesting a good motivational boost. Hopefully have more to Show HN in the future!
Led to a large traffic spike, and attention from a company that would acquire it roughly 18 months later. The team has grown from 3 to 100+, with over 1m registered users. Although the domain has changed and it looks like nobody bothered to keep the original registered (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9848124
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10376468
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13960214
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10913789
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14409255
A few of them rank on google and get consistent traffic. There's definitely a lot of randomness in getting to the front page. If I were to do it again I think I'd collect emails or have some kind of plan for the traffic.
But of course, don't be too aggressive in collecting emails — none of that full-screen modal garbage — that doesn't do well in the HN world.
On this day, it was also featured on Product Hunt and The Next Web leading to around 30k uniques across 2 days. Traffic is now nothing like that unfortunately.
One nice upside is that when I launched, it was picked up by a manager at BT Shop, a fairly large online electronics store in the UK, and I have released a variant of the app which uses their own affiliate scheme and branding. They've integrated this into one of their category pages at https://www.shop.bt.com/category/cables-and-adapters,cables/....
The traffic bump and feedback was motivating and helpful to know I was on the right track with my content. I also learned there are some comments you just need to ignore and focus on your own vision :)
edit: my traffic was lower than I originally remembered, it was ~5k per month, not 25k in mid-2014
I was in college then and found making a well formatted resume a huge pain when I was applying for internships. I met my Co-Founder also via that particular post, and went full time on it after passing out of college.
We are bootstrapped, pay ourselves well and work remotely. Not sure if that qualifies as a 'big' success, but we receive these kind of comments from our users that make us super happy - https://www.resumonk.com/testimonials
Response was great: lots of sign ups and feedback, but I haven't had time to do anything. Started a new job and moved cities. Everything is open-sourced if anyone wants to take a crack: https://github.com/tmm/notational
Besides the traffic increase, the repo trended on Github and now we have +1,400 stars.
tl/dr: HN provided a nice boost, but websites don't grow if you don't feed them.
Backstory: ~5 years ago I started driving a taxi, for fun & adventure & freedom. And to support myself, while trying to figure out how to finish recovering from a head injury [1]. After 8 days I made an account on kuro5hin.org (k5) & started blogging about my experiences.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13123659
At first I was just trolling k5 user "Zombie Jesus Christ", who had grand ambitions to help people, but was handicapped by a history of mercury poisoning -> mental illness. My point in being 'TaxiCabJesus' on k5 was to show that it's the little things that count. After a 3.5 years I'd learned a lot about what people actually experience (which I hadn't appreciated due to my upper-middle-class upbringing), and was forced into retiring from the taxi driving gig...
One day kuro5hin.org went away. K5's absentee founder Rusty hadn't prepared for a datacenter move, and the site was lost. I posted in HN submission RIP kuro5hin that my story "Electronic Taxi Dispatch, v1.0" was last to post [2], and one of you responded that you appreciated my k5 submissions & encouraged me to re-post them at a site of my own.
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11609802
I still intend to write a Taxi Wars trilogy: A New Hope, The Vultures Strike Back, and Return of the Drivers. I also have some other stories to tell. Retrospectively I realized that I was learning about the various 'predicaments' that people find themselves experiencing. Draft titles include:
The Predicament of 'old people' / Ordinary Rendition: The Public Servants' Quagmire / the predicaments of doctors and patients
I joined Toastmasters several months ago. Recently I gave a speech that's based the 'predicaments of doctors and patients'. It went over pretty well, which was motivation to work on my little site...
933 HN users are signed up and have received 38109 email notifications so far.
Comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11080539
Stats: https://www.w3counter.com/stats/98986/dashboard
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2. Show HN: A date range picker for Twitter Bootstrap ( http://daterangepicker.com )
5-year-old open source code that averages 3000 visits per day and 750 git clones per day.
Basically, I've built this simple project to see if there was any commercial interest in building rest apis using mock data, and I am almost certain that the answer is no - which is fine by me, i'm waiting for the next idea.. :)
Edit: By the way, besides simple SEO with google, I haven't bothered doing any marketing at all with this project, because I'm being mostly lazy, also because if the idea was any good, it should (hopefully) had success initially, and also because I suck at marketing..
Moreso when your tool serves a very specific target of people looking to satisfy a particular need.
I would try user profiling and then search engine optimization or content marketing around use cases where people will want to use it.
You also want to compare it against the apiary's of the world.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7907070
I submitted a Show HN the other day for a natural language chatbot that gives harm reduction info about drugs and it pretty much went nowhere fast. Got way more traffic from being on the front page of reddit r/drugs (and arguably a more useful demographic)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14690658
To the people asking, I definitely think there is a high amount of luck getting anything on the front page of HN. Just has to be right time, right place, but it's inspiring to read about people who have seen their businesses launch, in part, from that brief exposure.
It was up for a nice 24 hours and while I got a huge amount of traffic (10,000 page views) it resulted in only 100 accounts.
I'm not giving up though - I'm still constantly improving it and it has come quite far since the first Show HN version :)
I'm taking this as a learning opportunity but the best part is that I use ewolo myself everyday and it's really keeping me motivated :)
The project: https://urlroulette.net/
I actually wrote a post about being on the HN front page: https://hackernoon.com/urlroulette-24-hours-on-hacker-news-e...
It's also available to read for free online (https://leanpub.com/the-tao-of-tmux/read).
tmuxp (https://tmuxp.git-pull.com), a tmux session manager, gained over 1k stars over the years.
vcspull (https://vcspull.git-pull.com), a repo sync tool, compare to myrepos. Received a lot of valuable feedback on documentation that I ported to other projects.
We are consistently getting a good rating in Play Store [1] and thanks to HN we now have around 50 daily active users playing 75-100 games. Meanwhile, we are developing the features that were suggested in the comments and we felt are required.
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.buildmyvoc... - Two-Player Vocabulary Game
Show HN Link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13983085
Summary: A new diff algorithm
Result: About 50,000 visits to the web site, which then averaged about 1000 visits a day. Not much repeat traffic from those visits, but the daily traffic is now about 1200 visits a day.
Synopsis: Elm arch. in Haskell, but supports isomorphic js
Show HN link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14685677
Status: Still kickin', ~17k views, top 15 repo globally on GH (for a day)
- They got me around ~3000 subscribers for hugobots.com which I have been promoting through my repositories (it would have been much more; unfortunately, I forgot to put the link on the first day while the repository was on the first page. I put it on the third day and the emails that I got were mostly from the traffic from the people sharing the post on twitter/facebook/reddit etc)
- One of the project (developer roadmap) got me two sponsors paying me around ~1000$ each every 6 months for just putting their links in the project readme.
- Follower count on my github profile was around ~100 at that time; now it is about 2.3k
- Had been approached for freelancing gigs and was able to make connections.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13970781
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13664127
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12282264
My Show HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14778497) made it to the homepage, but I don't think its what you're asking about. My site is just a personal site with random content so its no different than before my post.
Show HN Links: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=peterburkimsher
Summary: Chinese-English word-for-word translator for education.
Result: 16 points, 4 comments, still no idea how to market it.
Compare to catfs (https://github.com/kahing/catfs/) which I recently posted but did not make to front page, and right now it's at 14 stars. I would say both projects have similar audiences comparable in complexity, which would mean front page on HN gave goofys a 20x or so boost in terms of github stars.
Note that the first time I posted goofys it did not make it to front page. @dang emailed me to re-post it and the second time it was boosted to front page.
I submitted RemoteBase 400 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11890991
For the first time, someone paid for something I made from scratch. I wrote about what I learned from this launch: https://sung.io/lessons-from-successfully-launching-remoteba.... I have since gotten a job, and the site sort of stopped making money. But I am still iterating on it.
Also submitted Dnote 100 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14031649
I pitched it to a live audience shortly after: https://sung.io/pitching-dnote. I never got around making an actual sale.
Ghostnote https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9145007
I still make good money on Ghostnote and is working on new features plus a new SAAS service.
Weekendhacker https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2563718
This one is alive but not really active. Around 8K users on a mailing list. If anyone want to take over this project pm me.
PinView https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3862889
FinalTouch https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2991206
This was fun to do but just a project we did for fun.
Posted in November 2016. Got a ton of traffic for about three days (~20k users/day). Now DAU is around 10-15. More a side-project type site, never was intended as a business.
I still get a regular stream of traffic now, and there are tons of others making sounds for UI. So, hopefully it helped kickstart that market a little.
I'm in the process of creating a second set of sounds now to try and keep the interest alive.
Original Post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8527861
I did not notice it, and the traffic brought down my tiny blog with the 25.000 visits I got the next couple of days.
It was a really cool feeling, and I learned what measures to take to keep my self hosted WordPress blog up in these cases. Unfortunately I never needed it afterwards. If someone is interested in a write up, let me know so I can make one.
Since then my blog gets about 40 visits a day. Only a small amount, but it still satisfies me and keeps me writing.
[1]http://www.pinchofintelligence.com/photorealistic-neural-net...
I have just under 900 people signed up for an email list of hand-picked talk recommendations - about 200 of these were from HN, and a couple people sign up every day.
Based on the feedback I got, I'm working on an add-on to send email alerts with talks based on people's interests (if you want in, contact me, I need a few beta users)
https://certsimple.com now has clients including Superdry, CrowdCube, The Motley Fool and most of the fintech startups in London.
It was a solo attempt at the beginning. Right now there are 5 of us working on it and building a business around it.
Also a lot of complaints over my poor choice of language, and "why don't you open source it, we'll do a JS port". I did. They didn't.
Anyway I don't think it's seen much use since that (mostly positive) experience - if you're willing to download and execute a java app you still can:
There was a lot of traffic in first few weeks. Now it has been stable - around 25 weekly (<100 monthly) active users.
I guess these are the people who are actually using it daily to manage their expenses. I had the same question - how can I make all of these people visiting first time come back again.
Got ~1500 active subscribers on the newsletter, some web traffic, some passive income, a lot of interesting contacts, met some cool people in Zurich, where I live. Overall, really glad I did it.
Original post here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12365693
The result was a spike in GitHub stars, more users and feedback. So a great way to increase an open source project.
The traffic spike, remained a spike and didn't continue long. But it gained a few regular users. I run my own blog with HexoPress (http://hexopress.com).
Here is the HN post :
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12504012 https://www.powertoothpaste.com/
This should be at the top of the list.
We're doing well, and hiring! :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10890531
I got a few hundred sign-ups but not much else; I am still maintaining the site but have not found as much time as I would like to develop it.
When it was first posted it hit front page, then hit reddit, melted my machine. I started moving to static files, but not in time! HN removed it from the homepage.
By the way, the image at the top should be served in different weights (bytes) for different screen sizes. Instead it's unnecessarily large (bytes) for a small screen phone where it's kind of 1.5 x 2 cm. It's wasted bandwidth on the server and not nice to look at while it loads one line at the time.
I got a good spike of traffic from Reddit and Medium, HN a bit less.
Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13687353
Summary: Simple web analytics
Result: Lots of great feedback, added about 100 active users
I think the exchange rate between Github stars and Facebook/Twitter Likes is favourable. Tinder Swipes, not so much.
Not much of a BTC/Github-Star exchange yet.
I had around a 30% increase in users and around $500 in sales over the following couple of weeks, which was pretty great.
You may want to clarify on the home page that it's $10 bucks for life -- I almost didn't buy because I thought it was $10/mo.
$10 for life is a no brainer. $10/mo you have to think a bit harder about.
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Read https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html. Point users to something they can try out for themselves. Don't require signups or permissions that aren't obviously needed. Avoid popups. Avoid overly slick website design and (especially) marketing language: HN users tune all that out and in fact it hurts you. Text and text-based layouts are good. Information density is good. Avoid super-large fonts and excessive pictures, they make you look lightweight. Put intellectually interesting details up front. If you're launching a company, corporate branding is fine; otherwise it's a negative, so tune it down.
Add a first comment to the thread with the backstory of how you came to work on this and explaining what's different about it. This tends to seed better discussion.
Make it easy to tell what the product/project is; otherwise the discussion will consist of "I can't tell what this is". Link to any relevant past threads.
Your primary mission is to engage intellectual curiosity. If you try to sell HN readers on your stuff, you'll evoke objections. Engage their curiosity and they will sell themselves.
Mention areas you'd like feedback about or open questions. Surprising or whimsical things that came up during the work are also good--they are unpredictable and that makes them interesting.
A little humor is ok; more than a little feels presumptuous. Don't be chummy, just answer straightforwardly. Don't address other users by their usernames (it's not the convention on HN and feels out of place). Don't introduce yourself more than once.
Don't say nice things about yourself or your work. It invites comeuppance. Instead, be humble or even mildly self-critical; then readers will look for nice things to say, and even when finding fault, won't make as big a deal about it.
Don't ask for upvotes. Our software ignores most promo-votes, plus HN users notice them and get mad. Especially make sure that your friends don't post booster comments or softball questions. HN users sniff that out a mile away and then we have to kill the thread.
Email us a link to your submission when it's up and we might be able to give you some help or make sure it doesn't get flagged.
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This originated as advice for YC startups but I always liked the pg/yc tradition of giving the same advice to everybody.
Also, do these sink at different speeds (they used to I think)?
Currently though, it's a case of squeaky wheels getting the grease. I'd like to reach the quietly creative users who would never dream of emailing us because it feels too demanding.
Edit: when we notice a particularly good Show HN and the submitter has an email address, we often email them a repost invite. Some of the best threads have originated this way. So everybody, (a) please make sure you have an email address in your account, and (b) please don't delete submissions that don't get traction.