Hacker News Reader

Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I do in fact make this point in the case study:

"The point is that once you start hanging with your perfect audience, conventional marketing goes out the window. You don't have to try so hard.

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."

Hacker News is useless, unless you blog / product is aimed at the Hacker News archetype.

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.

[1]-https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/024-moritz-dausinger-of...

> 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.

Actually, Patio11(ie kalzemeus/Patrick) showed/proved a simple SEO strategy:

Create good content for one group of people (ie HN readers) while generating SEO juice for the real buyers(teachers).

PS It only works if you are earnest about both sides of the equation.

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