How to promote an open source project on Hacker News - Lessons learned from our failure
I worked hard during two weeks preparing our launch on Hacker News and got up at 5am to submit the link to "Show HN". Result: we got 12 upvotes but the post NEVER showed up on the main page, despite that it was ranked Top3 in the Show HN category and stayed Top5 for 5 hours (8am
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I hit the front page of HN 3 or 4 times and this was the approach:
That's all I got.
Wow. Thanks a lot for sharing the tips. I didn't know the 1 hour thing. Do you mind if I ask how many karma you have? I had only one karma when I posted. Then my post was delayed for 2 hours before appearing even on the Show HN category, but never on the front page. That's why I think I may need more karma before next posting.
Similar with product hunt there seems to be also a very big factor of just plain luck. I've seen some people post the same link and title 3 times with different accounts and the first 2 only got around 5 up-votes and the 3rd one got to the top of the front-page.
This could be due to random timing, the other links on the front-page or someone with a lot of reach seeing your post and sharing it. I doubt that there's any solid formula for success without trying to cheat the system.
Thanks for sharing your insights Felix. Yes. I will definitely re-post! Knowing some of the patterns and trying to avoid the mistakes that I made will help increase the chance of success. (Hope so!)
Karma really doesn't matter. If a mod says it doesn't matter, they are probably telling the truth. I just depends on who sees and upvotes it. Just because your post didn't and the higher karma users did doesn't mean it made it 'because' of the karma. Could be post time, title, random etc.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Interesting! Agree that there are probably a lot of variants. They may not prioritize based on Karma. But they may add additional restrictions on posts from users with lower karma. For instance, my post was delayed for 2 hours to appear. The takeaway is - try to have more karma before promoting your product (you may not need a lot but don't do it like me with only 1 karma)