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Comment by dlphn___xyz | Hacker News Reader

online forums like HN and reddit aren't useful for meaningful feedback - seek out local meetups and pitch your idea

If you submit your project to HN you will be getting unparalleled feedback imho. The depth and range of expertise here is incredible - from VC to legendary developers and CEOs - and a lot of people are comfortable sharing their feedback. On top of that, there are just experts across all intellectual fields hanging out here.

But it's technical feedback, it's idea feedback, product feedback, it's not likely to seed your users or paying customers. And a lot of submissions go unnoticed.

Submission to HN is not enough in itself. The title and link in any "Show HN" submission needs to be calibrated to both catch the eyes of the right HN readers (so they learn - if only fleetingly - that the project exists) and also intrigue them enough to devote 5-10mins of their time to investigate the project and offer feedback.

I have not managed to work out (yet) how to craft such a submission for my OS project. Putting in the time and effort to get to the stage where a submission does generate interest/responses is the entry price that I need to pay, to earn those responses.

In the meantime browsing HN has become one of my main pleasures, and an education on subjects way beyond my comfort zone.

Yep, I’m in the same boat. Worked on a project and made a Show HN that linked to Github that linked to the website and docs. No comments or upvotes so I’m sure it got lost in the sea of other Show HN posts.

Try again, timing can matter a lot. Friday 4pm est vs Monday morning will change the number of responders and even the responses

Thanks man, I’ll give it a shot!

Look at the work SaaS websites do to ensure visitors become users, the same stuff should help open source project submissions: having a clear value proposition, a direct call to action, a desired outcome for a visitor etc. A readme showing a bunch of steps to munge your code into something useful can be considered a very poor landing page if the point is to discuss the product.

Like anything, it takes practice, and there is a lot of unpredictability involved. The distribution of votes is power law. Here is my submission history over the past 12 years or so:

https://github.com/breck7/hn/blob/master/visualization%20(1)...

The good thing is often even posts that get just 1 or 2 upvotes or 1 or 2 comments, sometimes lead to the most meaningful offline impact.

100% disagree. HN and reddit have been invaluable for getting feedback on our open source work, and a quick back of the envelope search of my emails has found in the hundreds of off-thread conversations over the years spawned by these posts. Even if sometimes the threads in themselves sometimes don't produce "meaningful feedback", they often lead to a new connection or two that can produce years worth of highly helpful assistance.

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