Our first blog post reached 50k people in 48 hours, but that's not the point.
Last week I wrote a short post on indiehackers about how my cofounder and I decided to not worry about whether we were creating content that converted people, but instead focus on discussing topics that we find interesting or worthy of debate. If it finds us new users great, but if it doesn't then it doesn't really matter.
A few days later I decided to drop our first article on hackernews...and it blew up 🤭 I'd forgotten how much the the HN community loves a good firestorm, but that's fine. It was a topic we care about and we really loved seeing a lively conversation on the subject.
We wrote about something we cared about, and shared it with a community that we knew valued conversation on these sorts of topics, it was super enjoyable to write, discuss and to follow.
I'll try and write the obligatory post about the insane traffic volumes from hitting #1 on HN at a later date, but really I just wanted to say again: writing about whatever you're interested in is easier, and more rewarding. Maybe not financially, but emotionally and spiritually. How many of your favourite blogs or newsletters are content marketing keyword-fests? I reckon few-to-none. The writing we all enjoy most comes from people talking about subjects they are passionate about that are eager to strike up a conversation, generate new ideas, or just inform or entertain likeminded people.
Haha, great job!
People are stocked by conflict, so I'm not surprised your post went crazy on HN!
In all case, I totally agree with you. Fun is underrated (I wrote a post about it too), and I'm sure this will pay off on the longer run!
Good luck!
Congratulations. For about a year I was completely dry of ideas because I worried too much. Then I decided on something similar, and I am not lacking inspiration anymore, to be honest. So if I am correct it all comes down to 2 things:
Am I correct?
haha, well everything's polarising on the internet 😅 though it's probably an even more likely outcome if you're writing about a topic you're already actively debating with people/friends...but yeah, just write about stuff you find interesting, at least that's enjoyable!
Other than the fact that your article is a killer one, the subject line attracts everyone.
Everyone uses a staging environment, so writing about not having one is a perfect strategy to impact everyone's decisions.
Great work!
haha, thanks!
Well, this is a very good result, the HN audience is pretty picky. The question is if the HN audience is your target audience? What changes on visitor#/conversion rate/paid accounts did you see? Thanks!
The whole point I'm making is that we didn't post it there for conversion with a 'target audience'. We posted it because we wanted to share an interesting subject we'd been discussing internally with other people who find the same sort of topics worthy of discussion 😊
There have been upsides for the business too, but that's just more of an added bonus! I won't lie though, naturally I'd love to have a blog post that was explicitly promoting our business go viral, but that wasn't the goal in this instance and overall we're really happy with the conversation we started.