Front page of HN: the full postmortem (traffic, lessons, surprises)
I wanted to share a quick postmortem of our recent Show HN, which hit the front page.
We’re building Aidlab, a wearable that streams gold-standard physiological data. We're mostly B2B / B2G selling to research team, and government health programs. Consumer sales happen occasionally, but that’s not our core.
What we did:
This was actually our second Show HN.
The first one (~5 years ago) got buried quickly. This time, it finally worked. Here is why:
- We made it more personal. Adding your co-founders, when you started, or even a small anecdote helps people connect.
- tightened the SDK pitch with some code examples. Showing how something works > saying that it works.
- shared more of the real tech story, our edge-first design, talked on some details like on-device ML (secret sauce), and what broke along the way. We also framed it as a lesson, not a launch,
- added a timeline. We tightened it up and made it punchier.
- at the end, we shared something people could do without the device: free health datasets. Give readers a way to engage / call-to-action.
That shift made all the difference.
Timeline:
Oct 13 (launch day): ~468 active users (350 from HN and GitHub)
Oct 14-16: around 100-150 (~30 from HN)
Then a slow decline to a long tail of a few dozen daily visits for about a week
So roughly a day and a half of some traffic, then steady curiosity for a few days.
Overall:
~6k page views in total
~500+ unique visitors directly from HN
Avg. session duration: 2 min+
Bounce rate on launch day: ~20% (which is super low for HN)
Who came:
Top countries:
🇺🇸 USA (28%), 🇩🇪 Germany (8%), 🇵🇱 Poland (8%), 🇬🇧 UK (6%), 🇨🇦 Canada (5%), 🇦🇺 Australia (4%)
What people did:
The typical HN curiosity kicked in.
Top viewed pages:
- /aidlab-2 – ~700 page views
- /datasets – ~450 page views
- /validation – ~280 page views
Shop visits were surprisingly high: around 170+ unique visitors explored the product pages.
Sadly, no direct conversions, though, just a lot of curiosity.
Side effects:
- 4 inbound inquiries (mostly from research teams)
- 8 new LinkedIn invites (3 of them were from VCs)
Feedback:
Zero. Literally none.
I was actually expecting someone to call out our SDK docs or UX, but all feedback was positive (mostly along the lines of "love the edge-first approach" or "commendable privacy model").
Takeaways:
The title ("Health Data for Devs") mattered more than I thought: our first Show HN failed because it sounded too “producty.”
Hacker News traffic behaves like a controlled explosion: massive 24h spike -> gentle decline -> long tail.
A 20% bounce rate from HN is gold: it means the audience genuinely explored the site.
Anyway, that’s the story. You decide if it was worth it.
