I made it to the first page of Hacker News, here are the numbers
I have been building side projects since a decade now, but never really marketed them heavily before. All I did was wait for the SEO traffic to kick in over time and make some money. That changed after Google killed thousands (if not millions) of websites by scraping their content and feeding it into their AI overviews, which made users never click the search results anymore. That made me change my strategy and I started to look for ways to be a value-add in communities and forums like Hacker News to drive traffic.
Yesterday, I launched on Hacker News [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48586631] and to my surprise not only hit the first page but the first spot for about 4 hours of the day. During that time, I received about 7K visits. Throughout the day, that number went on to be more than 10K. It felt so good even though it was only for a short time. Attaching my Analytics screenshot for you to see how the number looks for founders thinking how hitting the first spot on Hacker News might look like. Happy building!
The most useful numbers are what happened after the traffic spike: qualified signups, activation, retention, and conversations with the target buyer. Front-page traffic is exciting, but the downstream behavior tells you whether the audience matched the product.
What stood out to me wasn't the traffic.
It was how quickly a result like this can start answering a much larger strategic question underneath it.
Sometimes that's warranted.
Sometimes a strong outcome ends up carrying more explanatory weight than it should.
That's the part I'd be most curious about.
Website I submitted to Hacker News was: https://www.submission.directory