How I got 70 signups from a single HN _comment_ (not even a main post!)
I was positively shocked this week at how strong a response I got from writing a single comment on Hacker News (Hacker News).
Basically I was taking a breather from coding and saw someone had just posted a question Ask HN: How do you learn to build substantial, real world apps?.
Considering this is my business, I simply chimed in the following comment, basically saying "THIS IS WHAT I DO" and expecting MAX 2-3 signups:
This is exactly what I'm covering with my Semicolon&Sons screencasts.
Basically I've run a profitable production web app for 10 years (~14k LOC, 200k monthlies, revenue higher than any day-job I could get) as well as a few Android/IOS apps.
Now I'm creating videos where I show various real-world aspects of writing software in the context of my own production code - e.g.
architecture
rapid response systems to production errors
dependency choices
data integrity guarantees
integration testing systems
softer stuff, like optimizing for SEO and on-page conversion.
There's not enough non-beginner material out there and I hope to help fill that gap in resources.
They're all available on my website (same as my username)
The comment got upvoted 20 times on HN and I netted about 70 signups.
This makes me think that monitoring HN/reddit/Twitter for ideal opportunities to chime in a very valuable marketing tool.
I agree that monitoring HN/reddit/Twitter is very important. I do this for indiehackers, starting to watching twitter.
But how to manage all that, like, every day you have to check HN, reddit, twitter, indie hackers, facebook etc.
I guess there are some marketing tools for this, or maybe some super big control panel for monitoring everything? Or you just manually made a habit of checking these sites every day?
It's something I'm gonna look into. Maybe some sort of alerts on keywords.
I'm scared of browsing the sites manually cause I tend to spend way too long reading random content.
I think https://syften.com/ does exactly this.
I wonder if the founders of Syften were notified about this thread 🤔
Always :)
Thank you so much. This looks very helpful.
Indeed, and even if you don't read a lot (like wasting your time), you still have to read a lot in order to find relevant topics =(
If you find something drop me a line :) Drop everyone here a line :D
I use this for mentions, is not a big thing but it helps.
I have done this for around a year or so if I see a chance to let them know that colorsandfonts.com could help them, I just drop it.
Sometimes, when the site is dropped somewhere, I get a big influx of subscribers,...and traffic grows a lot, mostly on Twitter and Facebook.
This has made me grow the subscribers' list pretty much, by now is 1020
Subscribe to HN via RSS in an RSS reader, it makes it much easier to scan and also reduces the bias to only look at the top posts.
To reply with another great resource, you can check out https://mention.com/. It's actually pretty powerful, having used it myself for previous projects.
I agree completely that even though you may get some very strong traction in certain social threads, it takes a lot of time to sift through them.
What is LOC in "~14k LOC"?
LOC = lines of code
Exactly
I found your site precisely based on your comment that I stumbled upon on HN. Great resource.
Fortunately, HN allows everybody to promote their business!
woo, nice. Do u think everyone who tries this will get a positive result as u did?
Depends on the match between your business and the thread. Other times I've commented, I got nada.
And a lot of people browse through the comments in a thread only once, so you have to get there early.
VERY true
I see. Good tip man!
I don’t quite understand it. How should I match it then?
A better word than match might be "relevance" - i.e. are the people who would pay attention to that thread ALSO the people in your target market. If yes, there's a match and you win.
i see.