Ask HN: How many companies has Hacker News spawned?

14 points·shubhamjain··2 comments

Freskdesk's blogged about how a simple Hacker News comment inspired him to create his business[1]. Are there many companies that were started because of Hacker News?

[1]: http://blog.freshdesk.com/the-freshdesk-story-how-a-simple-comment-on-h-0/

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There's me. No employees ;)

When I started working in 2011 at an awesome startup [1], my first performance review included "be more up to date with industry news, frameworks, practices".

I started reading HN all the time. I'm not so passionate with code so I didn't succeed to read /r/programming as much. About 5000 articles later, I've started my own company.

Thanks to common advice on HN/by pg, I've published my MVP when I was still ashamed of the product. Did things that didn't scale. Got revenue from month 3. Bootstrapped instead of raising funds. Heroku'ed instead of OVHing. Of course I didn't apply advice in an orderly manner, which caused me to build a product before finding customers, or targetting B2B instead of B2C-then-B2B, etc. but my startup is well alive.

Thank you, vibrant community!

[1] I don't write the name because their employment contract includes an evasive confidentiality clause.

Hacker News inspires many entrepreneurs because it's an active public forum where countless entrepreneurs share stories of failure and success. When my co-founders and I began working on www.campusbubble.com (8 employees), we often shared articles and discussion threads with each other.

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