Founders: Don't Give Up

When I initially launched my startup on HN, one of my posts made it to the front page at around 1am Mountain Time and stayed there for 1-2 hours before it got flagged because the comment section was a flame war.

The comment section was extremely discouraging to me. My signup conversion rate was abysmal, too --- more than 15,000 views for "free" and only 8 sign ups. My conversion rate from HN today is still 0.2%. Terrible. I almost gave up at this point.

This morning, I ran my simple analytics script against my nginx logs. It shows signup conversions from four sources: 1) HN 2) Reddit 3) Google 4) itch.io.

Reddit is garbage at 2% on a good day. Google is meh, at ~4.5%. These are traditional ad campaigns with hyperspecific subreddit and keyword targeting (I'm trying to avoid drawing users for related topics who won't actually want to pay).

Itch.io, however, is what convinces me I'm on to something. Conversion rate close to 20% with so much positive feedback.

TL;DR: Don't let HN's or Reddit's negativity about everything dissuade you from building something you love. Other people might love it too.