Front Page of Hacker News on the 1st Try

I submitted my first blog post to Hacker News last night before I went to bed. When I woke up this morning I was blown away :)

• 14.7k total page views
• 12.4k unique visitors
• 153 points
• 111 comments
• 21 email signups
• 20 new Twitter followers

But it wasn't all luck.

I've been coding for 25 years. Building software is what I do. I do it all day at work and come home to work on my side projects every night.

Finding a market and marketing on the other hand doesn't come naturally.

Then, a few weeks ago I joined Nugget Startup Academy and started to fill those gaps in my knowledge. After spending some time coming up with a marketing strategy I decided to try blogging again.

My first attempt wasn't great. After discussing it with a few people I decided not to publish and started over.

Then I came up with another idea. I wanted to write about my previously failed project. I dug deep and tried to tell the story as honestly as possible. It took a couple of days to write and a few more days of editing with the help of feedback from the group.

We iterated on the title a lot.

Anxiously I pushed the final version and submitted it to HN. For a few moments I watched it float down the new page until it got one upvote. Happy enough, I went to bed.

The next morning I woke up to a screenshot of my post at number 5 on the front page.

I frantically started checking analytics and email signups. Then I noticed a stream of new twitter followers. Being a parent, I still had to get the kids to school before I sat down at the computer.

Living in Australia I'd already been asleep during most of the peak traffic but we wanted to make the most of the rest. So I pushed a few more changes to the email sign up form and doubled conversion (It's still only 0.4% but that's better than nothing I guess).

The rest of the day I was working my day job while responding to the incoming comments.

Here's the blog post if you'd like to have a read.

What I Learned About Failing from my 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project

I'm still not entirely sure what I'm going to do for my next project but I'm excited for this new beginning. I'd love to have you on the mailing list so please sign up if you'd like to see what happens next.