$19.30 MRR after 16 extensions: what I learned from pausing HN

Three weeks ago I was convinced HN was my channel. 21 Show HN posts in. All 1 point. Most recent flagged.

Here's the audit I did on my account ktg0215:

• 21 Show HN submissions across 10 months
• ZERO front page reach
• ZERO MRR attribution
• Karma 637 (cumulative, mostly from comments years back)

I was treating my account like a self-promotion megaphone. Post product → ghost the comments → next product. The 90/10 rule isn't a guideline — it's gravity. Took me 21 failed posts to figure that out.

Here's what I'm doing differently for the next 30 days:

1. Pausing HN entirely — May 10 to June 10. No new submissions, no reply farming. Reset cooldown.
2. Daily replies on IH — 5/day, focused on technical questions in chrome-extensions/freemium/saas. This journey post is the first product mention I'm allowing myself here. The 90/10 ratio is the entire experiment.
3. Bluesky daily build-in-public — with real numbers. Already tested last week: a post saying "$1 of revenue today" got 4x the engagement of a feature-list product post.
4. Product Hunt launch — one product (PaletteGrab) on May 27. One launch, properly prepared. Not the "ship all my extensions to PH and pray" approach I tried last year.

Where I actually am right now, honestly:

• MRR: $19.30 — This is the subscription-only figure (direct debit customer identified). Stripe shows ¥6,047 total income but that includes one-time transactions. The recurring subscription baseline is $19.30/mo. Either way, somewhere in [$19, $40]/mo range is where I am.
• Extensions live: 17 — across Chrome Web Store and Edge. Main focus right now is on five: Procshot (auto-screenshot guides from clicks), CookieJar (one-click cookie management), PaletteGrab (MV3-native color picker with CSS/Tailwind/Figma export), Japanese Font Finder (font identifier with 150+ Japanese fonts), and DataPick (point-and-click web scraper to CSV). The rest covers productivity (focus blockers, scroll position memory), developer tools, and Japan-specific compliance (advertising law, invoice OCR).
• DAU: ~215 combined — meaning the average extension has 12-13 DAU. Most of the install→DAU drop happens in the first 30 seconds. Working on the onboarding flow now.
• Free→Paid conversion: unmeasurable — paywall_shown events are too sparse across most extensions. Two of my biggest (DataPick at DAU 37, PromptStash at DAU 55) had paywall_shown = 0 and 6 respectively over 30 days. That's the next engineering ticket.
• Channels: Bluesky 35 followers, Dev.to 30 posts at 406 cumulative PV (~13/post — switching titles to "How to/Free/Best" pattern only, since that pattern carries my top 3 posts), Zenn 46 articles at 97 likes total.

Target: $670/mo MRR by May 2027 (≈¥100,000/mo). That's 17x growth from where I am. The math says I need ~+25-30% growth/month compounded. The math also says HN at 1 point per post can't get me there.

Three things I'm watching as the early-warning signal that this pivot is wrong:

1. If IH front page reach is also zero by end of June, HN wasn't the channel problem — I was.
2. If PaletteGrab PH launch hits <50 upvotes despite 50-name Squad and prepared Q&A, the issue is the products, not the channels.
3. If MRR doesn't move by +$10 in the next 30 days, the bottleneck is paywall design, not distribution.

Posting an update here on June 3 with the actual numbers. Replies welcome — especially from anyone who has made the IH-over-HN switch and has data on whether it actually compounds. The cumulative replies thing is supposed to be magic, but I've never seen it work for myself.

Follow my journey:

• Bluesky: @ktg0215.bsky.social (https://bsky.app/profile/ktg0215.bsky.social)
• Website: https://dev-tools-hub.xyz

Cheers.