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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

That's something I've been wrestling with lately. LiberWriter has started to turn a profit, and I'm wondering if I should copy Balsamiq's transparency / blog posts about early success. In some ways I'd like to, because publicity should help a bit in any case, but getting on HN really isn't going to get us any new customers.

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If SEO is a meaningful part of your marketing strategy, then you should invest time in getting links. Linkbait on HN and elsewhere is a good path for this... Though you'd obviously be better served getting links from places where your customers spend their time, that's not always available/easy.

I would say don't do it. I'm in a similar position (profitable company with an interesting back-story) and it seems like a bad idea to start giving out your personal financial details to the world.

But there's probably an interesting middle ground.

What would that be, though? Either you're talking about your company and making some information public, or you aren't. If you're going to go down that route, granted you may not want to reveal everything, but you should probably do enough to get some attention, if that's the point. Otherwise you're just revealing information for no benefit.

I find Rand Fishkin incredible in sharing all the details of SeoMoz. It takes guts to do that. Balsamiq, Bingo Card creator and a few others on HN are transparent when it is not a great deal of money.

(I haven't seen Balsamiq post detailed revenue and their breakup lately.)

I would say do what feels comfortable to you. Most likely, it is to keep revenues etc. secret. Revealing those details might get some eyeballs in the short term but not customers.

I think the distinction is between getting some eyeballs who are easy to convert into customers, like Balsamiq or SEOMoz, and something like BCC, where the publicity is less obviously useful, because no one at HN would buy it. LiberWriter is definitely in the latter category.

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