I made a database of TL;DR business strategies/case studies | Hacker News Reader

I made a database of TL;DR business strategies/case studies

growthunt.com

99 pointsgrowthunter42 comments

This was posted here already two days ago as "Show HN". Then, it had no activity but two fake comments (new users who were just created at the same time as OP and their only action was that comment). Two days later this is on front - I hope OP did not use even more fake accounts for vote manipulation this time.

Is this against TOS? I think this is called growth hacking.

This is not growth hacking, it’s faking and tricking people to force entry to another worthless website crated by “neomakers”.

Link to the "Show HN" post (now "[flagged] [dead]") with the two fake comments in case anyone is interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24939625

There is a good book on this called “Traction” by Gabriel Weinberg (the founder of DuckDuckGo) where he outlines 19 “channels” for getting traction [1]. I’ve also seen the guy from FPU [2] do a good job at extending this list.

Also, why is nobody focusing on unsuccessful “growth strategies”? I’ve often learned more from people who failed at something and told me 10 things to be aware of vs. someone who succeeded and didn’t recognize the role luck played in their success.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Traction-Startup-Achieve-Explosive-Cu...

[2] https://firstpayingusers.com

Unsuccessful "growth strategies"? I will look into that !

The very first case I opened was this: https://www.growthunt.com/record/recs0zRzWCwBB1AB1/from-laun...

It links to a post by a Roger Swannell, which is actually empty besides a link to a deleted IndieHackers post by Danny Postma.

The summary said they made $15875 in 48h with the 'LandingFolio' product, but checking out the archived page [1] you'll see that they boast the exact same figure for a completely different project: Headlime - a "ProductHunt headline generator", if anything could be more self-accusatory...

Looks like both this site and IndieHackers are being owned by online marketing folks from Bali. And I get the feeling this site itself is an attempt at building a mailing list. Kinda depressing.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200812145155if_/https://www.in...

Hi thanks for the heads up. Will remove this article then.

This site is owned by me and I ain't no marketing folks from Bali. I just like to curates articles like this for other founders to learn from.

And no, not depressing at all. I'm having a lot of fun doing this. :)

Hey, founder of both Landingfolio & Headlime here. I'm from the Netherlands, currently living in Bali.

The Indiehacker post was about the revenue for Headlime. I've taken the post down since 9 companies decided to steal my content based on the post..

Hallo! That's awkward, was just playing off the stereotype. I owe you an apology then, didn't consider that possibility and also got the purpose of Headlime wrong.

Note that the article at https://www.growthunt.com/record/recs0zRzWCwBB1AB1/from-laun... is still up with a reference to Landingfolio as of now.

This is a nice start, but I think you should also try to summarize them all. I did this with acquisition channels from reading 482 founder interviews [1]. The thing is, not many people have 20+ hours to spend reading through these articles.

Also, some categories are overlapping (AppSumo & Lifetime deals, for example, isn't AppSumo a lifetime deals website)?

[1] https://firstpayingusers.com

I up vote that. Just like there was real estate investing advice to go and visit 100 units firs and then buy your first one. Now you are talking about serious time investment before doing anything.

I think law of diminishing returns hits after around 20 units, because you still will buy something with issues, there are no units without some kind of issues. The same with going through all those articles. Summary would help or just not going through all of them.

First few articles I checked - all are about SaaS businesses. As a co-owner of a small comoany that builds embedded hardware devices, I’d like to see something that isn’t SaaS.

Yes this is one of those slightly annoying biases on HN. 90% of the time Product = SaaS. I'd like to hear some stories from folks who have adapted the techniques from this space to work in other markets. Iterating on hardware, embedded software, small number but high value customer markets etc.

See StarterStory, they do founder interviews with hardware/e-commerce founders.

Sure, I will work on it

Business Suggestion: fix your name.

A valid nitpick actually.

It's either about growing thunts or about growth of unts.

Names made out of two words overlapping with a single letter are next to impossible to pull off. They are confusing at best and comical at worst. They might be memorable because of that, but ultimately they leave a negative impression.

Other classics include: expertsExchange, penIsland.

therapist.com

Pardon the LQ comment but LOL

How is this example not simply fraudulent / lying?

https://www.growthunt.com/record/rec2WipWzOnr06ODF/getting- 400-signups-with-a-video-of-a-product-that-didn-t-exist

... leading to:

https://www.lunadio.com/blog/i-got-400-signups-with-a-video-...

"Hi, we created plugin for generating ads in Photoshop" ... after faking a video to make it look like this what had been done.

If this is the kind of crap that goes on to 'create a business', damn glad I'm not involved with it.

Yeah, especially if you end up not actually building the product as it was in the video.

> Showing a “fake” video is powerful for sharing a vision and testing if there is a need for a solution. On the other hand, if the video is too ambitious, people will take it as a norm and will base their expectations on the video. If the real product doesn’t match the video afterward, they will probably be unsatisfied because the product is incomplete.

> This thing happened to me when I had a call with a user during beta testing. She expected that the complete product should work as it was on the video.

On one hand, it's nice to be able to gauge the interest of something before going ahead and building it, but it is borderline fraud if you show something that is not the real thing, and launch something that doesn't work the same way. That's just selling smoke and mirrors.

Its called validation. A lot of successful companies are doing it. Zappos by Tony Hsieh is one example that comes to mind.

With the linked example, there is no successful 'company', just someone lying.

Offtopic, but I found this interesting tidbit from the how to get on hn frontpage article:

  To get to the front page, you only need 5 or 6 upvotes, within the first five to ten minutes

Is hn really this easy to game? I wonder what all has changed on the backend since 2013... I'm sure quite a bit, given the increased presents of sockpuppetry/bots on the net.

edit: A quote of dang that evokes great irony given the source:

  Articles that try to make a system out of how they succeeded on HN always miss this point.

Will posting on HN be part of your own business strat/case study if growthunt is successful?

Yes definitely!

Why do we need a website to store a collection of URLs to other sites' articles?

That's how search engines present their information. :-)

This site offers a quick summary of the major points mentioned in an article that might take you 10 mins to read. And also it curates all business articles written by founders on one site.

So yeah. Plenty of people needed it :)

I'm not at all clear how your 2nd paragraph follows from the first.

I really don’t like when businesses contract two words because of a conjoining letter, but this seems like a cool set of case studies.

Here it particularly doesn't work because th is effectively a unit, distinct from the letter h.

E.g. growthree is more grokkable than growthunt.

The Art of Profitability by Adrian Slywotzky: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Art-Profitability-Adrian-Slywotzky/...

It seems a lot of these ideas are marketing tools. Like email distribution mailing lists. I guess something like Constant Contact or SurveyMonkey doesn’t really have a monopoly on such services for small to medium businesses, that you can build your own little marketing platform to compete with them.

I see you're taking inspiration from Marketing Examples with the layout of the site.

It is a poor version of MExamples because of the lack of content.

More content are coming! I will work hard on it

Tldr for business strategies wouldn't work for anyone.. strategies must be read in-depth and a lot of it. I wouldn't scratch the surface for strategies.

It offers a summary of the main points to maybe a 10mins read.

So if you're interested in the strategies used, there is also a link to the main article.

Explore more than 2000 hacking articles saved over time as PDF https://github.com/blaCCkHatHacEEkr/PENTESTING-BIBLE

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