Any tips about posting on HackerNews?

Reply when someone mentions a competing product, that's the most high value opportunity.

You can use syften.com for the notifications.

Definitely hit or miss. If you sort by new (https://news.ycombinator.com/newest) you'll see there's a post every minute or so. The only way to hit the front page (AFAIK) is if the post gets enough traction (comments and upvotes) in its ~30 minutes on the /newest page to get promoted to the general list. You're also not meant to canvas for support and might be in for some hate if its clear thats whats happening.

That said if you hit the front page its a lot of eyeballs and there isn't really a downside. Personally I've posted a few times and each time the post has just slowly sunk off the bottom of the feed :-(

Someone posted here before (can't find it now) to observe that you can get good results by being an early commenter on popular posts, so one thing to try is to monitor for relevant trending posts and jump in early.

If there's a secret to ranking I'd sure love to hear it!

PS YC alumni also seem to get special treatment and reach the front page with low point scores.

Try it, if you think that audience will like your thing. Sometimes it works, sometimes it don't. A bit of a hit or miss.

Feel free to get inspired by my most successful post which brought me 100+ sales in one day and 50+ in the next one. I really didn't overthink it and neither had any real strategy except I waited for my project to be more well known before posting. Then I sat down and spent 2 hours writing my intro comment.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29540808

I posted an small app I built on HN last year and had some moderate success - near the top of the Show HN page for most of a day and the bottom of the main page for a while too.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26035551

It led to about 5000 page loads, a lot of testing of the app and some good feedback that helped me fix a few things. No repeat users though -- they tested, talked a little and then left.

My overall take is that if you're up front and humble, you can get a lot of solid feedback. But it's not a useful place to post an app if you're looking to drum up customers for it - unless your app is aimed at devs.

One thing to note is that originally when I posted it dropped off the page quickly with no upvotes. I messaged Dang directly and asked if he could push the post a little and he responded positively (and did something behind the scenes that gave the submission a second chance.) Again with the being humble, not demanding or cocky!

I wrote a blog post about the whole thing if anyone's interested:

https://darrendevitt.com/2021/02/10/from-idea-to-mvp-to-hacker-news-in-44-hours/

Two of my posts had moderate success on HN, and each of them had brought about 3000 visitors to my newsletter. I have a hunch that the HN audience like a particular kind of vocabulary - a bit uncommon and intriguing. But yes, there would be more to it.

For anybody who has had success, what is different about the posting format there for successful posts?

Asking so that people can optimize their post to go viral from the start. Thanks in advance!

hn.devss.io