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17 Comments

I built a list of Open Startups and it hit the first page of HN - Stats inside

I have read several success stories of HN posts that made it to the top of the HN front page.

After a decent success with listing 1000+ APIs at https://listt.xyz (wrote about it here) and posting on PH and receiving close to 500+ votes, I made another list - "Biggest list of 100+ Open startups making profits in 12-24 months"

One of the main reasons I built Listt is to show the capabilities of Siteoly - A Nocode tool to build websites from Google sheets data to validate ideas.

So, I made this list of 100+ Startups making more than $1K ARR and posted on Twitter yesterday.

OpenStartups

Some people liked it. So, I randomly went to HN (this is my 4th post on HN) and posted this link. HN link -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25036526

This is my past experience with HN by the way.
HN-Previous

What happened next is something that I would have never imagined.

I was just having my food and I constantly heard my phone beeping with notifications. That's about 15-20 notifications on mobile and surprisingly the notifications from substack and Twitter. Quickly I understood that something happened on HN and I went to see HN page and to my surprise, it's on HN front page with 12 votes. I quickly made a post on IH and it went unnoticed except for one like from our very own @rosiesherry

I immediately recollected that I read somewhere - "Make sure you reply to every comment on HN as fast as you can to keep the momentum"
But believe me, if you are HN front page and when you are getting a hundred comments, it isn't easy. It took me about 2-3 hours to reply to the comments. (I still have a lot of comments that I have to reply)
Meanwhile, my notifications never stopped from Substack and Twitter.

The reason why I am getting notifications from Twitter - I added my Twitter link on the home page and suggested people follow me. About 50 people joined me in the last 12 hours on Twitter.

The reason why I am getting notifications from Substack - I recently started writing on Substack with 1 new idea/inspiration delivered at https://nextidea.substack.com/p/what-is-the-next-idea-about

[On a side note, I did a rough draft of this new substack series that I am launching and shared with a few people from IH - Thankyou @akhilmk @yaroslawbagriy @Wyeem for your suggestions on this. Without your confidence, I wouldn't have added it to this homepage.]

It was only a random thought to add the substack link there and this is what happened in the next 5-6 hours

Image-Substack

Stats from GA from the last 24 hours.

Image-GA

You can build similar lists and follow the same pattern using Siteoly without writing code. I did it twice, once 500+ upvotes on PH for listing APIs and now with this startup list that gave about 10K visits, 130 subscribers, 40 Twitter followers in 12 hours without writing a single line of code.

If you would like to receive 1 new idea delivered to you every week with detailed data-backed analysis signup at https://nextidea.substack.com/p/what-is-the-next-idea-about and join about 130 subscribers.

If you find this post useful and inspires a bit to try different things, an upvote would help.

One more thing, @dvassallo also replied on one of comments. Thankyou Dan if you see this.

Image-Dan1
Image-Dan2

At the moment, thats 150+ points on HN
HN-150

Total stats summary

  • Total HN votes : 150+ votes
  • New Twitter followers added : 50+
  • New Substack subscribers : 130+
  • Total number of visitors in last 16 hours : 4K visits
  • HN Karma : 100+ points (Not sure how this helps though)

What next?

  1. 2

    I love this. Next month I will start using Siteoly most likely for a project of mine. It indeed is a good use case to show of its capabilities.

    I ssee you use referral links on the openstartups site, I'm curious how much traffic the site gets and if this results in referrals for you?

    Anyways, thanks for the inspiration and creating Siteoly.

    1. 1

      Thankyou.

      For the stats, apparently the site drove lot of traffic for other sites. I have a few people getting in touch on Twitter and confirmed. As far as Openstartups stats, on the launch day alone I got about 5K hits and people posted on other forums, social media and I am still getting decent traffic. For example, I added a newsletter on the homepage and that alone drove 200 subscribers. So, its huge. Then, a lot of people asked to keep them posted about this kind of data and any ideas aroud micro saas. Thats when I started the Pro subscription at https://gumroad.com/l/the-next-idea-pro
      (I have a few paid subscribers too for the newsletter at the introductory price before I launch it this week)

      Here is a sample post that blew up reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/julqvg/how_to_start_finding_saas_niche_and_implement/

      And above all, I made good friends too :)

      Thanks for your comments on Siteoly. We have some happy paying customers for Siteoly.

      https://siteoly.com/usecases
      https://siteoly.com/sample-templates

      If you are technical, you may like this as well https://medium.com/@upen946/why-i-built-sheet2site-alternative-4e1b96b5ef38

      On a side note, we are launching the biggest and most asked feature for Siteoly - "Embed cards on external sites" - You can embed cards like https://content.siteoly.com (from Google sheets data) into your own websites, Wordpress, Shopify, Wix, Dorik, Carrd sites as well

      1. 2

        This is awesome, I use carrd very often, embedding siteoly on carrd = yes yes yes!

        I started following you on Twitter, I like what you're creating and the way you do it. Keep creating!

  2. 2

    Well done! — I remember the first time my phone started buzzing with notifications all of a sudden. A surreal feeling :)

    It's very common to spend hours replying to comments. For my most recent post on reddit, I spent 14 hours straight without even noticing. But when the opportunity comes, it's important to pounce. Getting to the frontpage of HN doesn't happen every day.

    1. 1

      Thankyou Dan. Agreed that the frontpage of HN doesn't happen every day.

      I did my best in answering every comment.

  3. 2

    @upenv you should post to the IndieStack community too! Quite useful :)

    1. 2

      Would love to post. Will post shortly.

      1. 2

        Awesome! The community will find this super useful :)

  4. 2

    This is great! Congratulations! Do you think you did anything differently this time on HN that made a difference?

    1. 2

      Thankyou. Apparently, there are some patterns that HN folks love - Stats, Numbers, Complex Tech implementation, Simple automations.

      In this case, looks like they liked the stats/numbers.

      But what might have helped to stay on the top is "replaying to each and every comment"

  5. 1

    Do you think this is possible to get the same impact for 2 agreagators I made ?
    https://hopenbeauty.glideapp.io/ free haircut
    & get a virtual visit on the last auction house market https://meilleuroffre.spread.name/

    1. 1

      These don't sound like something that interests HN audience.

      HN is more interested at numbers, stats, complex tech stuff, simple automations etc.

      But you can always try and see how that works. Keep us all posted. We are all learning together here at IH.

  6. 1

    What was the 1.5k peak in the start on Google Analytics?

    1. 1

      The first peak was for https://listt.xyz (did a PH launch at that time)

  7. 0

    Came here just to say I do not like your clickbaity title.

    1. 1

      Hey, sorry about that. It wasn't actually a clickbaity title. It was only a small fun title.

      But point taken and modified the title. 👍

      1. 2

        Oh thanks! Appreciate your consideration :)

        Your article looks much more informative now!

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