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Sharing my HN launch (Show HN) stats

Hi everyone!

I did a Show HN from the rebrand I did to my project and it was the first time I ever had an impact on Hackernews.

So I thought it would be nice to share how I did it and the stats from the launch.

I had done a few launches and content sharing on HN before, but the biggest ones got 5 upvotes. I had read a lot about it, but now I understand why.

I think that the key point is not to do a marketing post, the HN community has a very good flair for the slightest marketing/promotion feel.

So I wrote the post as if I was explaining my project to a friend that would not be a user, and the result was amazing.

Some of the stats up until now:

I created the post last Friday morning Pacific Time.

It stayed on the front page for about 4 hours, got ~100 upvotes from there, and ~60 comments, it was amazing to see the engagement.

After the front page, it went to the show tab, and it's been there for almost two days already. In the show tab, I got 40 extra upvotes and ~20 more comments.

So, I think the main idea is to have the goal of sharing and getting feedback from the community, marketing being only a side-effect of that.

On the product side, besides the amazing feedback from the comments, I got 110 sign-ups for early access, it was fantastic!

The post is still in the show tab, so feel free to join in the discussion and let me know if the project helps you in any way :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/show
Title: Show HN: An API to store balances and transactions

Thanks for reading!

  1. 1

    That's amazing, your post now has 150+ votes, congrats!

    One thing about your landing page, I tried running the snippet on the site but it results in an error: Error: Cannot find module 'decimals'

    1. 1

      Thanks! I'm working on that, thanks for letting me know :)

  2. 1

    As a newbie to HN, it's great to see what went into a successful post. Thanks for sharing this, I hope Decimals does amazing!

  3. 1

    Hi Robert, and congratulations on the successful HN launch! Really appreciate the transparency around this strategy. Two questions, if you don't mind:

    What exactly prompted you to make this (non-promotional) style of post?
    Which tool did you use to build the "with decimals" diagram on your landing page?

    Thank you, and best of luck with Decimals!

    1. 1

      Thanks! I guess I've failed multiple times and went with genuine learning goals, instead of a promotion. I shared more of the tech side instead of the product itself, and only if people got interested they would go to the website see the product.

      I used miro.com to build the diagrams :)

      1. 1

        That makes sense. And thanks!

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