24 hours after hitting #1 on HackerNews
Hi IndieHackers,
Yesterday, we were on the main page of HackerNews for more than 12 hours. 4 of those as #1.
We made a ShowHN for a Python package which is completely autonomous and does not depend on our main product. However, we keep the credits on the GitHub page. So, some people will end up on our website.
What is Newscatcher API?
It is an API to search for the news article's data. Like Google that allows really complex filtering, and returns a normalized data feed in JSON.
Our top use cases:
#1 Your Own News Aggregator
#2 Data Science Projects
#3 Algotrading
#4 Market Research & Analysis
#5 Media Monitoring
At the moment we made a post on HackerNews we already had 450 subscribers/beta testers. We got those from the same Python library (when it got released) and my Medium blog
How hitting HackerNews #1 changed the situation
First of all, let me explain once again that we got #1 with an open-sourced library that was made by our team, not with our product that is in the pre-release stage.
That means that for the end-user to appear in our email list the following should happen:
- HackerNews --> 2. GitHub --> 3. Website --> 4. Email Form
The results are as follows:
🛠 Github: 900 ⭐️ --> 1800 ⭐️
👓 Website views: 20-40/day --> 1300/day
✏️ Signups: 170
❤️ Follow us on IndieHackers! We are releasing our paid plan on the 1st of June! Special discounts for IndieHackers and early adopters.
How did you get to #1 or why do you think you did on hacker news?
I just posted it. I don't know. I did pretty much the same post 3 months ago. 26 upvotes. Sometimes it just works out.
If you remember, what time of the day did you post?
Judging from his screenshot, it was around 12:36 pm (Friday 22nd)
Kyiv (Ukraine) tomezone
hey great marketing/evaluation trick!
im looking and searching for API only bootstrap resources
can you share from where did you learn about API bootstrapping?
I do not get your question.
Looks cool! Btw are you using any machine learning to rank news stories/outlets?
Hey, not at the moment. It sounds like a "cool" thing but in reality, it's a huge waste of resources (comparing to the value it provides).