Ask HN: Is it okay to post on Show HN multiple times?
If yes, then how often?
The rules in the faq [1]are very fuzzy on purpose, so I will just share my interpretation/opinion:
I think up to three reposts are fine, but I usually don't complain until the 5th or 10th repost. One per week is fine, I think the upper limit of tolerability is one per day.
Don't repost if the previous post got traction, If I have to pull a number out of thin air, something between 20 and 50 upvotes/comments/upvotes+comments
Your previous two post got a minimal traction but not too much. I think it's fine to repost it, but I'd expect even less traction. Try to use a more dry title, like "Show HN: Pingr – Uptime monitor" or "Show HN: Pingr – Know when your site is down before your customers do" or something like that. The name in the title is not mandatory, but I like it. Perhaps add a comment with more details and a personal history.
Sometimes it is easier to get traction here writing about an interesting problem you solved while making the site, for example how do you detect that it's a problem in the site and not a problem in your site, how difficult is to coordinate the distributed network of monitors, problems with spam or dos with the free trial If you meet an old friend and have to tell a funny/weird technical anecdote about your project, what would you tell?
Some feedback: The lifetime subscription is too long.
So is it okay if I post tomorrow for example? I'm just new to HN.
By the way I even tried to make a welcome comment, but I think that I'd need to get into technical details more.
Thought probably I'd make a separate article for this, not in show HN section.
Regarding "Show HN: Pingr – Know when your site is down before your customers do" - I asked a lot of people and they told me that it's way too promotional for HN :)
Anyway thank you for your answer!
The ShowHN section has an order similar to the front page, so you need some upvotes to get there. Perhaps the mods do some manual deduplication, I never read that, but it may be part of the tricks that are the secret sauce.
> I even tried to make a welcome comment, but I think that I'd need to get into technical details more.
Expect to see technical questions. It is not obligatory to answer all of them, but it is nice to answer if they don't reveal your secret sauce. It is important that you interact in the comments, specially in the ShowHN post.
> Thought probably I'd make a separate article for this, not in show HN section.
Technical articles are always welcome. It's tricky to get them technical enough but not too technical. A few nice graph are generally helpful.
> Regarding "Show HN: Pingr – Know when your site is down before your customers do" - I asked a lot of people and they told me that it's way too promotional for HN :)
I think it is fine, but each one has his/her own opinion here. Someone will complain and ask to change "before" to "as soon as" and another user will ask to change it to "just after" :) But it is better that the title explains what the project does instead of how you did it.
It's interesting that everyone was telling me it's better to expose personal experience ("Show HN: I build something because something..") instead of what the project actually does ("Show HN: Uptime monitoring").
Anyway thank you for your kind response! :)
Did you ask a bunch of regular users of HN of people that don't use HN? Each site has it's own personality and it's very difficult to understand the details from outside.
I think 'Show HN' is signalling to people that you don't think anyone would be interested in the content. It is like apologizing.
Make content people are interested in.
Show HN isn't for content links. From the "Show HN Guidelines":
> Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread.
> Off topic: blog posts, sign-up pages, newsletters, lists, and other reading material. Those can't be tried out, so can't be Show HNs. Make a regular submission instead.
An interest in venues like "Show HN" is a sign of marketing theatre as opposed to doing the hard work of marketing. If you contact real customers and make sales that is success. Getting the high score on Product Hunt is O.K., it's like being on the "Shark Tank" TV show. But it is the high-value customer you need to have a business.
If I was in the poster's shoes I would expect to take at least 3 to 10 specific actions a day in order to get my product in the face of someone who might be interested.
(e.g. that could be writing a blog post about the product, the problem it solves, and the surrounding environment. It could be calling a phone number you saw on a web page by a person who is complaining about the problem, set up a search engine ad, put up letter-size posters around a college campus or other hotspot, ...)
That's my basis of how I react to the post, just in that situation my head would be so full of how to talk to customers that I would have no time to get hung up on a lackluster response from 'Show HN'.
your show HN posts should be different in subject matter and should not be consecutive or sequential, or otherwise shove other postings off the page