From Show HN to Series A in One Year: Reflections from Our Founder | Hacker News Reader

From Show HN to Series A in One Year: Reflections from Our Founder

rudderstack.com

50 pointssoumyadeb15 comments

This is misleading. It sounds like when they say ‘From Show HN to Series A’, the implication is that the Show HN was the beginning of the company. Turns out, it’s the moment where they had 30+ integrations already, a mature company.

I guess HN is well known enough now that even marketers know about it.

Founder here. We open-sourced our GitHub repo on Oct 2019 and someone posted on HN. The product wasn't ready/stable then (though you are right - we had a few integrations)

We did a formal Show HN in March 2020 when the product was ready to be used.

Orig HN Post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21081756 Show HN : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22637302

I'm a marketer and I know about HN, and actively participate, for many years.

With that said, even before when I was just lurking that I've seen HN being used for marketing purposes, daily.

Some more obvious, others less, and certainly some that weren't aware they were doing marketing.

I don't get why marketing gets such bad rep here.

Because it decreases the SNR

Only for people who don't understand startups. Anyone who's done the whole startup thing knows that marketing is hugely important for getting traction, and thus revenue, and thus profit. If you think that marketing and sales are just noise then your startup is pretty much guaranteed to fail. Show HN posts can be a great place to start if HN readers are a likely source of customers.

The OP is talking about the SNR received by the readers of HN, not the potential value of the HN customer base and their importance to businesses.

Please for the love of all things marketing stop using acronyms on your homepage..

I literally still cant figure out what you do.

Yes, we are a Segment alternative. Thanks for the feedback on positioning. This is something we are still figuring out (and will probably do for a long time).

CDP (Customer Data Platform) is a more widely known space but it's too broad.

CDI (Customer Data Infrastructure) is more relevant but very few people know about it

I agree with you, though perhaps if you don't know what "CDP" stands for ("customer data platform"), you're maybe not in the market for one. The only company I've really heard of in this space is Segment, and their homepage does a better job of explaining what these sorts of things do.

I read it as "Cloudera Data Platform", which is part of the ecosystem it's replacing, and left me doubly confused :) But the real customer may be VCs, so not a high-priority problem, esp if they spell it out instead of abbreviating for end-users.

Lytics.com is another one. It's a new space, but growing

The cynic in me suspects that this is intentionally obfuscated to the readers not already in the know.

Whereaa few of the general public are likely the target user of a CDP (customer data platform), they are likely the actual target of the product: they will have their data and interactions detailely stored and processed via this platform. However well done this may be, it is more comfortable not to be too aware about it.

Founder here.

We wouldn't have had reached here if not for the Hacker News community. Wanted to take this opportunity to pass on deepest gratitude to the community.

love your product :)

Congrats!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com