What difference does being a top story on Hacker News make? Stats and Facts... | Hacker News Reader

What difference does being a top story on Hacker News make? Stats and Facts...

blog.freshdesk.com

86 pointsgirishm22 comments

Something I've always wondered: assuming all other things (connections, community, alumni, funding, etc.) being equal, does YC win out over other "incubators" simply because of Hacker News?

YC startups (quite rightly) get on the front page easily, which obviously drives a lot of traffic. Most other "incubators" don't have anything comparable.

If all else were equal, and getting on Hacker News is a benefit and not a liability, then obviously YC should win. x+1>x. (This should be obvious.) That's not an interesting question to ask.

The question worth asking is, how can I disambiguate between scenarios like startups being attracted to YC because of presumably greater access to HN's front page and HN creating startup founders who then go with YC as the path of least resistance? How do I distinguish between various possible correlations and causations?

(I can think of one obvious approach: survey YC-funded projects and see how many founders were on HN before they were founders, and how many got on HN after becoming founders/YC-funded.)

I meant more in the scenario of: "our startup got into 4 different incubators, one of which is YC. They all have strengths and weaknesses, which roughly balance each other out. Is Hacker News the trump card?"

Something I've always wondered: assuming all other things (connections, community, alumni, funding, etc.) being equal, does YC win out over other "incubators" simply because of Hacker News?

There are at least two ways the HN online community could provide an advantage to YC and the YC-funded companies. I will mention the one that is most salient to me first: it seems to me that HN is an interesting online community in its own right. The guideline for submissions

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

that a submitted link should be one that "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" raises the tone of discussion here and brings together a lot of smart people. That, in turn, provides the first introduction to the startup community and first introduction to YC to many readers. (I discovered HN, and then YC, by reading Paul Graham essays on pg's website, and occasionally following the link over to Hacker News. I don't have a strong enough tech background to contribute to many of the threads here, but I have gradually figured out which topics--mostly mass media reporting on science or education reform--are topics to which I can contribute based on my own personal background.) I tell young people I know who are interested in entrepreneurial, high-tech business opportunities about Hacker News. They learn here about YC. At least a few of the young people I know in my town are doing serious development (which leads to coding posted on GitHub) of software-as-a-service solutions for problems they encounter in their own work. They intend to seek out YC first when they have formed co-founder groups and developed a business proposal. So I think one YC advantage that derives from HN is that YC gets early proposals from a lot of highly motivated entrepreneurs who might not otherwise have even known about early-stage funding. And the YC application form discloses an applicant's HN user name, so HN users have the chance here to establish thoughtful reputations by their comments, and YC has the mutual chance to better understand its group of applicants through each applicant's behavior here, a win-win in adding information to the appplication process.

YC startups (quite rightly) get on the front page easily, which obviously drives a lot of traffic.

You were mentioning the issue of whether a YC-funded company tends to get more visibility here on HN. Reasonable minds could differ, but I actually think that the first advantage I mention above is more powerful than the advantage you mention in your question. YC-funded startups do get much visibility here on HN, but they are not alone in that visibility. People here upvote posts if they are interesting, whether the company is funded by YC or not. The submitted post makes clear that being visible here on HN is an advantage, because readers of HN include venture capitalists and other people in the industry who can help a new company make funding and market connections that will help the company grow. But I think many of us, even those of us who are aware of which companies are YC companies and which are not, cheer on and upvote posts about any interesting new company (or new inchoate business idea), so the exposure advantage is not quite as strongly skewed toward YC companies.

I'd be glad to hear from other participants what they think about this.

Nice response, but I think people do still reflexively upvote links for having "(YC11)" etc. in the title.

I'm curious: What impact did that have on your servers/infrastructure? Do you use some sort of elastic resource like EC2? Do you manage your own server? How did the server handle the load?

Thanks a lot for the information, and congratulations on your product :)

Our website is hosted on Linode with nginx and our blog is on posterous. The infrastructure was rock solid. Nothing gave us any scares.

To keep things in perspective - mainly so that the original commenter doesn't draw the wrong conclusions - most of the pageviews (28,876) occurred on the hosted blog, which is served by Posterous and not Freshdesk's Linode machine.

The other 10,000 or so pageviews presumably hit their Linode machine over the course of a day or two. There are 86,400 seconds in a day. On average, that gives their site 8 or more seconds to serve a single request. If your site cannot respond in 8 seconds, you will have trouble servicing any level of traffic.

This isn't comparable to being Slashdotted or TechCrunched. No need for elastic cloud servers in this case.

I had a blog story running on the front of HN for a couple of hours and my EC2 micro instance just died under the load. Since I didn't expected to have such amount of traffic in the first place, my WordPress installation wasn't optimized at all.

I have learn in the process and now I think my blog can handle way more rps even on a micro instance. Thanks to nginx. I have blogged about this a couple weeks ago:

http://blog.rassemblr.com/2011/01/wordpress-need-for-speed-o...

One of the next step would be to use nginx load balancing (upstreaming) feature but I bet I won't get that popular :-)

Sweet :)

We had a similar experience when we launched secretpoke : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2179649

We have been on the home page for about 24 hours, and on the top position for ~3 hours. In those 3 hours only, we saw about 5K uniques on the homepage of the app. But the most valuable thing was the 100+ comments that we got, and helped us improve.

Here was our take on the subject : http://secretpoke.posterous.com/how-we-used-hns-feedback-to-...

This seems pretty much in line with my own numbers. I had a post get to the front page for about ~36 hours and held one of the top few spots for a couple hours.

Over approximately 48 hours, I got ~35k uniques, approximately 18k were from Hacker News directly, with the bulk of the remainder coming from Twitter. Many of those twitter referrals came from people RTing HN aggregator feeds and the like though, so in reality probably more than that 18k number can be attributed to Hacker News.

To provide another data point, I had a top story one day in January of this year, with about 5,000 visitors linking straight from Hacker News and about 10,000 total unique visits for the day.

I wonder if the variance is primarily due to the topic itself, day of the week, or if the community has grown significantly in recent weeks.

That's a very good question, it may have to do with time of day or overall business of HN at the time the story peaked. For instance - my story held that position for that long with a little over 100 votes IIRC whereas the submission in this story has well over 200. Naturally one would expect the 200 vote submission to get more traffic despite having a similar frontpage lifespan. It seems as if position isn't the only determining factor in pageviews, time of day is also significant.

All of this is fairly obvious when you think about it, but nice to see data to back it up.

For me the biggest takeaway on this is the fact that putting something out there early and often. Once it is out there the market can judge it for its value that it presents. In the case of fresh desk that appears to be huge. It is amazing what a few simple blog posts can do. It always amazes me all the opportunities that present them selves when you put something high quality out into the world.

We never made top, but http://www.kymalabs.com saw a sizable jump when we first announced here, more than any other place we've shown up.

Thanks for sharing stats.

Apparently, it has the 'Slashdot effect'. Case in point: this one.

I had about 20,000 in one day. I don't know what rank I held because I wasn't aware that I'd made HN until 12 hours later.

To that point, my blog had been getting 25 to 50 views a day. I hadn't even turned off moderation. Big mistake. I got 60+ comments in that time. It would have been so much better if people could have seen each other's comments, some of which were very good.

My 15 minutes is over and now I'm back down to about 100 views per day.

Thanks for the stats, that is absolutely incredible! Hackernews zindabad!

If anyone cares, FeeFighters got 191 visits to http://feefighters.com from the link in your post, representing one of our higher referring sites for a couple of days

I look forward to the infinite recursion of follow-up posts.

Don't encourage them :D

Can anybody provide the TL:DR version? Lots of odd looking graphs from some traffic reporting program I'm not familiar with and tiny little text.

Your web design looks VERY similar to: http://www.olark.com/

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