Sharing my "Show" HackerNews experience

I know people prefer to read about success stories and how to get on the front page of HN, but in the spirit of building in the open, I'm sharing my "failed" experience on launching on HN.

After completing what felt like MVP, I decided to post on HackerNews first for a soft launch. I knew that this is not the proper audience for my budgeting app InstaBudget but wanted to try things out.

I went with a post highlighting the fact that I built this myself using many different stacks and made sure it didn't feel like an ad.

I posted around 10 AM Pacific Time on a Wednesday. I had a handful of votes come from friends and family (I know this against the HN rules but I apparently was lucky and flew under the radar). That was enough to bring me to the 'show' front page on top of being on the 'shownew' page.

My post stayed on both pages for roughly 22 hours each.

This yielded 155 visits and 3 signups, and 0 active users or subscriptions.

I had a few interesting comment which were constructive, mostly around pricing and trial period which I have since incorporated.