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16 Comments

A single comment on Hacker News sent more traffic than the front-page of Product Hunt 🤯

Yesterday a Hacker News user posted a thread entitled: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021?

I happened to see the thread shortly after it was posted, dropped a comment about my startup, and was lucky enough to end up as the top voted comment.

The results (my daily traffic ending with the last two days):
Traffic to Divjoy

Over the past two days that single comment has sent me 8,142 visitors and $891 in sales. For reference, being on the front of Product Hunt for a day sent me around 5k.

Lesson: HN is big. Really big.

  1. 11

    Congratulations @Gabe!

    Both PH and HN are great awareness platforms but not sales channels. That's why your conversion rate is low for HN traffic. The traffic will obviously die down in a few days. But there are other long term gains, aside from $$:

    1. You will get some high quality backlinks as some of these visitors will link to your site from their blogs/sites
    2. Adding PH Product of the Day brings credibility which in turn will get you more sales
    3. You will find it easier to get backlinks if you run a link campaign
    4. Easier to get press/HARO pitches accepted, gain due to credibility
  2. 3

    Nice. I visit the thread yesterday and recognize divjoy was the 1st comment too. Congrats!

    1. 3

      Was about to say the same. noticed it too! I was one of the people in your stats @gabe.

    2. 2

      That's awesome to hear. Thanks!

  3. 2

    it's all about timing! awesome, happy for you

  4. 2

    I mean your product is truly good, I remember sharing some feedback early on when it was still in its infancy (there were 1-2 things that didnt work).

    But yeah, that's so cool to see how word of mouth works! Maybe when you re-launch on PH with your v2 you'll make even more traffic :)

    p.s. another splitbee user :O Dope!

    1. 1

      Oh yeah, really appreciate that early feedback! Hoping the PH launch goes well 🤞

      And yeah Splitbee is really nice :)

  5. 2

    Wow. That’s actually really interesting. Would love to see how effective this is for other people. Might do some research.

  6. 2

    Nice! I think this says a lot to the alignment of a post to the audience - even when I saw your comment there I felt a very positive feeling feeling from it cos it didn't feel like marketing or spin at all it was so genuine! It seems hard to replicate that level of matching what the visitor was expecting to see on PH.

  7. 2

    I actually read your comment yesterday by chance. I read hackernews everyday, quality of the posts is very high.

    1. 2

      Yeah I spend way too much time on Hacker News. My biggest time waster, but once in awhile it pays off haha.

  8. 2

    How did Product Hunt fare in terms of conversions? $693 from HN seems low relative to the amount of traffic generated.

    1. 3

      When I was on PH I wasn't yet charging, so it’s hard to compare. $891 from 8,142 visitors is a definitely a low conversion rate, but I expect some more of those visitors to convert over the next 1-2 months. A lot of people find Divjoy, don't need it, then later decide to do a project and come back.

      I'm launching v2 of Divjoy on PH in a few weeks so I should have some data to compare if all goes well.

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