Interesting that HN is missing, I've seen sites launched (not always voluntarily!) by a single posting to HN, and I've seen how much coverage you can get from here when announcing my 'two week' project reocities.com .
That seems like an oversight.
That seems like an oversight.
HN will generate similar traffic to a techcrunch post, if you look at the raw numbers. The big difference is that the TechCrunch traffic is from a readship of a million, and those who click are genuinely interested in your service, that they just read about.
HN will also give you a pretty large boost of traffic, but more are just interested in checking you as a startup, not as an end-user.
3-4 years ago (first time I had a project covered by TC) it delivered ~3x more traffic compared to what I see nowadays (probably because the volume of daily posts has skyrocketed over those years).
I'm sure controversial topics (Angelgate, etc) still drive traffic, but if HN is creating 10k uniques for top stories then the "HN effect" is greater than what average TC coverage provides.
Plus, I've seen a lot of early adopters and tastemakers have moved to HN for finding things more on the cutting edge.
As much as I hate to say it, planning an effective HN marketing campaign may end up being more useful than trying to pitch the bloggers...
:)
The sites on the list have a pretty low chance of your site getting "overlooked" as easily as it happens on HN on a fairly frequent basis. There are just so many stories submitted here that they can't all possibly be upvoted. The sites listed are blog-like and guarantee your site gets visibility for some amount of time.
What didn't help is that you posted it as 'self post', so one without a link (those are penalized).
Better to wait until 8:30 tomorrow morning, post it as a linked article and put your explanatory text in the first comment.
Good luck!
I put a lot of work into this site and to have it only get 3 comments and 2 points was kind of a let down, and also kind of confusing.
The 'self' presumably refers to the article being HN only.
To avoid meta-discussion and 'Ask HN' style posts clogging up the new page they are penalized, so they'll typically drop off faster even if they do receive a lot of votes. And if they don't receive a lot of votes then they're gone even faster.
So if you want your 'rate my startup' post to be seen best just post the link, and add any extra info as the first comment in the thread.
I launched http://www.moreofit.com awhile ago and was on the frontpage for awhile too. Got 4k uniques, which trickled down to 100 in about 24 hours. Since then, I get about 200 uniques a day :(