My newsletter hit #2 on Hacker News

After submitting my latest newsletter article on HN, I quickly forgot about it and moved on to something else.

I never have success on HN and didn't have any expectations.

But 45 minutes later I saw signups coming in, and a couple hours later it hit #2 on the front page! I was still on the front page (around ~20-ish) about 12 hours after posting when I went to bed.

HN #2

I'm always curious about what kind of traffic the top slots of HN get, so I wanted to share my numbers here:

HN Growth funnel

I'm a bit disappointed by the conversion rate from readers to signups, but I don't know what a good benchmark would be. Does anyone have any feedback on that?

I'm on Substack, so there's only so much I can do to optimize for signups.

One tricky thing with Substack - the article title and email subject line have to be the same. I had a different title for my HN submission (until the mods changed it), which I think contributed to its success.