🚀 Landed on HackerNews Homepage: The Results
Yesterday, I posted ChromeExtensionKit on HackerNews on a whim. I've posted it before (I think it got about 5 votes at most), so I didn't really have any expectations beyond maybe a couple votes. I also didn't put any thought into when or how to post, I sort of just...posted and hoped for the best.
After about 30min, I saw it had 27 upvotes and it kept getting more every time I checked. Before long, it found its way to the homepage (~15th or so) and was towards the top of the Show HN portion as well.
After sitting there for the day, here are the results (over roughly 20-25 hours):
👤 ~1,800 pageviews
💵 ~45 sales
Interestingly enough, that one day it spent on the homepage for HackerNews had much better results than the day it spent on the homepage for Product Hunt. In both cases, they were roughly the same distance down the homepage (between 10th and 15th). My best guess is that HackerNews tends to cater to a little more technical crowd so it's probably more likely that people stumbling across it there would find value in a development kit.
Unlike the Product Hunt launch, I don't really have any "Lessons learned" from this one since it seemed to be largely random with some luck involved.
Awesome, Ryan. Yeah, I have launch couple of times in HN. And I can't agree more about the luck.
In a certain week it got 3 upvotes. When I re-share it 3 weeks later, It got 60 upvotes. And I don't even know why.
Basically, if you are lucky and drawn attention in first hour. You're playing to top. If not, you're basically death.
Delete it, and try later.
Haha, I'm glad I'm not alone in experiencing this! I think what you said is key: if it doesn't do well fairly early on, remove it and give it a couple weeks before you try again. The first hour definitely seems to be make or break it for HackerNews.