Ask HN: What do you do if you get crickets during launch day? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What do you do if you get crickets during launch day?

3 pointseranation6 comments

Hey fellow HNers,

We launched our product to public beta after 8 months of hard work, got lucky on product hunt, Reddit, LinkedIn, and we thought this will resonate well with the HN community, but obviously we screwed up the Show HN post… (our team was enthusiastic and probably violated the don’t let employees upvote or comment on your own Show HN other than reply to questions).

I’m leaving out the details as I don’t want this to be a self promotion in disguise.

But what is the right thing to do? Is it legitimate ti try in a few days? Saw other successful launches that had a few attempts (changed URL and content, not sure if it violates the rules…)

Thanks!

View on HN

I imagine you're going to try again regardless, so what people reply with is mostly irrelevant. Good luck for next time.

However...

It's probably worth noting that HN is a terrible fit for your product. It sounds ideal on paper, being security+behaviour+devops sort of thing (assuming the Show HN is about the thing you're CEO of), but if you look at the frontpage you won't see many threads about products like yours. There might be something in the more abstract sense, like applying behaviour to devops, but there's very little on HN about software products themselves. The focus is about running startups, things big SV and small YC companies are doing, interesting code-and-code-related things, and oddball science stuff. A Show HN about a product is very unlikely to go anywhere in the same way that it might on PH or LI.

Maybe post the "hacking hacker news" blog post instead. It's far more interesting than devops.

(There are far too many two letter acronyms in this comment.)

Thanks! You make some interesting points.

HN, might be too broad a community so there are not enough people that are interested in your product. Look for an audience that needs your product and focus your energy there.

Marketing a new product is hard. I would even say that it's harder than making the product. You'll just have to work hard at marketing your product. Identify all the places where it's relevant and point out your advantages over other similar products to your intendent audience.

People have found these 2 books extremely helpful when starting: "the startup owner's manual" and "the e myth". These 2 book will help you move forward.

You should see this recent post [1], it has good advice on getting traction on hacker news.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29002669

Hehe yeah, fair enough. We never said it guarantees success and also it does not address ethics of resubmitting :)

Talk to your users.

That's always a good choice.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com