How to Make the Front Page of HN Without Even Trying | Hacker News Reader

How to Make the Front Page of HN Without Even Trying

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103 pointsLanceJones21 comments

I once heard somebody -- maybe Guy Kawasaki-- say "Create more value than you capture.". This has become my guiding principle for marketing on the Internet. I strongly believe that if you consistently help people out directly, and/or write/contribute/share in a scalable fashion via OSS/blogging/etc, then they will be around for you when you need it. This isn't hippydippy fluff : specific mechanisms like link building for SEO tend to promote it, too.

That is also why I got in touch with these guys: they did something extraordinarily nice for an HNer, and I wanted to know if there was some way I could help them out.

FWIW I spend a lot of time helping people out for free and it has lead to more opportunities than I can even begin to describe. I have never regretted it. Try defaulting to Yes when asked for help -- it's easy (particularly when you are obscure), and you might like what happens.

> I once heard somebody -- maybe Guy Kawasaki-- say "Create more value than you capture."

Google and my memory suggest it was Tim O'Reilly (of O'Reilly Media) who coined (or at least, popularised) the phrase but Guy Kawasaki rephrased it as "eat like a bird, poop like an elephant".

'without even trying?' Seems more like 'if at first you don't succeed...'

During our 2-week beta test period, I had tried [unsuccessfully] to get some initial traction on Hacker News by writing a few posts on this blog about launching a start up, building an audience, etc. My attempts were likely unsuccessful because just as we were preparing to launch, there was a glut of “Ask HN” submissions [...]

TBH, I think it's more because posts about launching a startup or building an audience are not interesting unless you're already famous. I do look at 'rate my...' posts, but I'm a lot more likely to look up someone's company via their profile because they make interesting posts or comments on a variety of subjects. If their submissions are always about their own site, I start avoiding them - like a person at a party who's there solely for networking purposes, or a personal injury lawyer at a funeral.

Edit: I don't mean that you're doing this Lance. I mean some people who have posted 100 times but only ever about themselves.

So it seems people should try and get one of these magical Joanna devices that generates plenty of page views :)

I think the article is a good example of how you make your own luck and how no experience is a wasted. I have always liked Steve Jobs speech at Stanford (http://onemansblog.com/2010/02/01/steve-jobs-outstanding-sta...) which is along similar lines.

More general advice: if you have some special talent—anything at all—then you can be someone's Joanna. Basically, you just have to "overachieve for marketing purposes." Don't give crap away for free, while only your paying customers get the 'real thing'; instead, make sure even the least of what you do—replying to comments on a forum, for example—is extremely polished. By-and-large, people's first impression of you will be through something you did for free, so make those first impressions great, and you'll make them want to see what paying you gets them.

This advice also applies to companies. If you're an engineering-focused software company—i.e., a company that has building, not selling, in its genes—and you have a $1MM budget for advertising, don't spend it on a spread in the New York Times; instead, invest that money in building a product—like any other your company would build, for a client, for money—but then give that product away. If you built something that's really useful, it'll do a much better job of organically spreading your brand than any ad campaign ever could.

You don't have to share the product. Share the genes. A lot more people are interested in software development done right than in whatever your first product was. You can find any number of examples of this: FogCreek, for example, is mostly a company built on the premise that developing software should not have to suck. Their core product (which supports that premise) is not necessarily interesting to all people, but everything they do rightly gets the halo effect because they spent a decade improving the lives of engineers by sharing what they have discovered to work about running a software company.

You could say similar things about 37Signals, Balsamiq, or a host of smaller companies that I look up to.

I think that's one thing a depressing amount of people don't realize about social networks and online communities. Nobody gives a crap about your company unless a) it's mind-blowingly cool, or b) they give a crap about YOU.

Unless you're in category A, you're not gonna get anywhere by just shotgunning a link on every site that has a submit button. You need to give a little (i.e. participate or provide value in some other way) to get a little.

I disagree. Those who talk loudly and frequently about themselves are the ones who we see and hear from most on social sites.

Quick example: Dave Winer. Everything he posts anything, even something inane like "I bricked my iPod", it's on the front page of every social site? Why? Because he submits it everywhere and constantly talks about himself.

Ok yeah that is a good point. So let's add category c) Be persistently annoying (no half-assing it).

But on the other hand, we have people like patio11, who are not annoying, just talkative.

In the big scheme of things, a bingo card generator is not really exciting. But his writing is interesting nonetheless, and it ends up being widely distributed. If he didn't talk about himself, nobody would know Bingo Card Creator.

Combine it with c) and make it something like 'Contribute and be visible'. No distinction (at that level) between it being sharing and useful (Patrick) or just overdone noise (many others), but they're both taking a similar tack.

The bloggers who blog about making money from blogging would be in that category.

But the stuff patio11 posts related to BCC is interesting. I think writing interesting posts and submitting them to HN counts as participating and providing value.

Who is Dave Winer?

He is the guy that set back RSS 10 years with his constant whining.

You can't just join social sites, start posting incessantly, and expect anything good to happen.

I mean, we built up @TweetSmarter on Twitter to get more retweets than @NYTimes and it took a LOT of time—years of providing Twitter tech support and building up a reputation. Now, however, it's true that anything we talk about gets noticed. But it's the tip of the iceberg.

Step one: Write a post titled "How to Make the Front Page of HN Without Even Trying". How could such a post not make it to the front page?

Man, I love the idea of launching... and then going out to buy your co-founding other-half their birthday dinner.

Coolness.

title = "<something boring> in Node.JS"

"Luck surface area" -- ingenious.

I also love this term. It reminded me of a wonderful post by Marc Andreessen from 2007, where he discusses "Luck and the entrepreneur.. The four kinds of luck"

http://pmarchive.com/luck_and_the_entrepreneur

In the post, he skillfully dissects the book Chase, Chance, and Creativity (1978) by Dr. James Austin - a neurologist and philosopher.

increasing the likeliness of a "Positive Black Swan"

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