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In short, sales. Marketing and publicity don't really provide benefit unless you're offering a free service to end users. My own startup reached front page of HN. Total sales resulting from that: about $0 (or negative dollars if you count server costs). Every sale is because I directly approached clients I thought needed my software.

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Well said.

We're not doing helpareporter.com anymore for now (might later). The right publicity to the right market can work well, but this isn't focused enough for us yet. There's bottom of funnel work we can do better for now.

We got signups from the HN traffic. I totally understand that HN traffic doesn't covert in some cases - it's not been insane conversions for us, but it's working. That wasn't my goal from the post (I've never published to medium / haven't been active on HN), but cool surprise.

To clarify my above comment, I was referring to just my own experience and that focusing more on a traditional sales process worked better for me. And I liked your blog a lot because it talked about the sales side, which we don't hear enough about on HN sometimes (skews toward growth hacks and publicity).

Totally understand.

Have a cool post coming soon re: great process for building a solid prospect list (sounds bland, but there's some magic to it).

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