How to get on Hacker News front page

An HN post title is of 80 characters. That’s the space you have to lure the reader. We spent more time coming up with the title, than to write the product launch blog. We sat down and listed all the posts that did well in the past few months. Later, we narrowed down on the ones that made sense to us and grouped them by the tone. Here are those:

a. Straightforward titles about the product Show HN: Meteor, a realtime JavaScript framework Show HN: Automatic weekly meal planner, also plans your leftovers Show HN: Ditch Black Text to Read Faster, Easier Show HN: Codecademy.com, the easiest way to learn to code Show HN: a web-based xkcd-style comix editor Show HN: Remove backgrounds from images online Show HN: Imagine a search engine that removed top million sites from its index Show HN: movies.io — torrent search like it should be Show HN: Hackershelf. Community curated collection of legally free books Show HN: Webflow - Design responsive websites visually Show HN: fontBomb - Stylishly destroy the web Show HN: Non-Confusing, Visually Correct Slider Toggle UI

b. Problem/Solution title Show HN: We got tired of asking ‘What browser are you using?’ and created this

c. Title by an individual Show HN: 6 months ago I quit my job to pursue indie dev. Here is our first game Show HN: Weekend project, Intro.js Show HN: I Created the Inverse of Angry Birds Show HN: My seven minute workout timer evening project Show HN: I hacked my microwave with a Raspberry Pi

d. Title by a group Show HN: We open sourced Lockitron’s crowdfunding app Show HN: We just built a site that saves lives We then came up with the titles that we could use for our product Show HN: Hosted Linux sar - SeaLion Show HN: We got tired of asking ‘Why Linux server went belly up’ & created this Show HN: We’re tired of asking ‘What’s wrong with our Linux servers’ & created this Show HN: Tired of asking “What’s wrong with our Linux servers?”, we built this Show HN: The Linux sys-admin story. Why did we create SeaLion? Show HN: Why did we create SeaLion? The Linux sys-admin story Show HN: A tool from sys-admins to sys-admins. The SeaLion story. Show HN: We wanted to simplify the tasks of a sys admin and created this Show HN: Dear god, save sys-admins. The SeaLion story. Show HN: A tool from sysadmins to sysadmins. Hosted Linux SAR. Show HN: Hosted Linux SAR. A tool from sysadmins to sysadmins.

Our product is a sysadmin tool. So we ran these titles by resident sysadmins on what would push their buttons and chose this:

Show HN: Tired of asking “What’s wrong with our Linux servers?”, we built this

This title did make the sysadmins tick. We got nearly 10K visits in a few hours and brought down our servers.

This is one of the many things we did. We have spoken about the whole exercise in the post.

I think this challenge, like any other in this space, is to know your product and your customers. In the case of a post on HN, the customer is HN readers and the product is a post. It's good to know that the good old principles of market research apply to this as well.