I also had my hacker news frontpage
I was just playing around and shared an article I've written on Hacker News. It is a community in which I don't participate, but apparently the subject of what I was sharing "How to write a programming book" managed to gather quite a lot of upvotes. To my surprise, upvotes came with an instantaneous spike in visits, and some after-shocks thanks to people tweeting the link (presumably found thanks to HN).
Now, I can put into my list of achievements to be on the frontpage of HN. For what it was worth, I got around 10 newsletter subscribers and around 0 new Twitter followers ;-)
Trending on Indie Hackers
Congrats!
Thanks!
Nice! Congrats. It feels amazing to get so many people looking at your creation. Bad thing about HN is you get so many traffic all at once but unless some potential customers saw your post and clicked, all the hype means basically nothing. (I'm being realistic here, not pessimistic.)
I had very close numbers to yours in terms of clicks and unique visitors, but all I actually got was about 170 registers with ~100 fake emails, many unsubscribes right after they got their first newsletter mail, and no one ever replied to my personally written "thank you" email. The only ever purchase came from someone who registered the day I was featured on HN, though.
Yes, there are is an almost infinite number of bots crawling hacker news. In my case, I shared a link to my personal blog, out of which I was not expecting to extract any value. I have a form for signing up to my newsletter because that is my standard setup for blogs, but I was not trying to achieve anything specific. At least I know now there is interest on that topic. On a personal article I shared earlier, I was called a failure, so I was still exploring the overall behavior of that community.
It would have been interesting to have a link to a paid product, to see how many people would have gone through, but well, it's a thing for another time, I guess.
For content creators, I believe the number of visits is the wrong parameter to look at. The time spent on each article, however, is a completely different story. For you to have an idea, out of the ~10k visits to the article, only 1k stayed more than 20s, but of those, the average visit length was ~10minutes, which means they actually read what I wrote. But yeak, 1k visits is not a sexy number compared to the 10k that HN generated ;-)
You don't have to sell anything. A subscriber is still a gain!
1k actual readers from 10k traffic sounds awesome to be honest. Congrats!
... to add to that, I hope some potential customers did notice you and hope the hype brings way more value to you than it did to me. 🤘
Well, as I wrote earlier, I had no target in mind before sharing. So, couple of mentions on Twitter was good enough, I guess. It also helped me realized I don't have an
og:imageset up. And, if I could write 1 article like that per month, I would get a blog with 1000 subscribers in around 10 years ;-)This HN curve looks exactly like mine! :)
This was the biggest shock for me - what are the long lasting effects on being on HN? None. ;)
I guess it depends on how you market your product on there and if the niche you're serving actually congregates there. If you're marketing a new innovative dog whistle (for example, lol) the odds of getting 100 new users are lower than marketing on a pet care forum :)
Or maybe it's just a proof that my idea sucks and no one gives a f***. ;)
Indeed, no lasting effects. But it helps with the motiviation to keep creating content, even if for no monetary gain.
Definitely!
Well done! Mind sharing the link here too? Curious about the article now. Good luck!
Sure! I actually shared it here before, but without much interest, apparently:
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-to-write-a-programming-book-a-practical-but-not-technical-guide-1d0e100c0b