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14 Comments

The Hacker News effect

This is the last 7 days of traffic for thruhikes.net

Bit of a rollercoaster! I've never been featured on HN before, so didn't know what kind of traffic to expect. Sharing this as a reference for anybody else wondering :)

I always knew that even if I got a large number of users in one go, they would trail off pretty quickly. The website isn't very "sticky" and it's very much in its infancy, so that's understandable. That said, it's really nice to get this kind of interest so early on.

Anybody else get featured on HN? What kind of numbers did you see? Any long term effects?

  1. 2

    Congrats! Thruhikes is a great idea. Your traffic looks pretty much identical to what I experienced when I first launched on HN. I didn't find it to be very sticky either. It trailed off around a few hundred visitors a day, but I imagine it would have been much harder going without that launch spike.

    You might consider some kind of newsletter where you write up a bit about one new thruhike a week. Just a thought on how to get people to give you their email and keep them coming back.

    1. 2

      Thank you Gabe!

      I am thinking about the newsletter avenue at the moment. I know that it's an effective strategy, but I'm trying to figure out if it's the best thing that I can spend my (pretty limited) time on. Writing like that doesn't come naturally to me, and I know from past experience that if I'm not really enjoying the process, I probably won't succeed. The other thing that I'm considering is creating a slack channel / forum for thru-hiking enthusiasts. Being a big hiking fan myself, I really like the idea of connecting with and facilitating others who are also fans. I've given myself a couple of days to mull it over :)

      I really like what you've done with divjoy. I'll definitely be adding it to my list of resources :)

      1. 1

        Yeah totally understand that! I’m not that into writing either. I think the community idea is a much better focus.

  2. 1

    Interesting @oguzcanhuner - apart from traffic, what would you measure and how would you define the success of your project. Great project btw :)

    1. 1

      thanks felix :) for now, traffic is my main measure of success.

      I have an "email me suggestions" link near the top and so far I've received just over a 100 emails with hike suggestions. I messaged a small sample of those, asking whether they'd like to be part of a community and most replied saying that they would. So my next step will be to create some sort of community (still trying to decide what that'll look like). Once I do, I'll add community engagement (i.e. number of members + number of messages) as a success metric.

  3. 1

    Thank you for sharing with us, great to see some real data behind this.

    1. 1

      Thank you for checking it out!

  4. 1

    Congrats! Great results! I really need to start posting more on there.

    1. 1

      Thank you! I never usually do, so I was quite surprised by this!

  5. 1

    Same exact experience here. This post got me over 1K registrations for PMAlerts.com:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25161117

    But less than a third have clicked on links in the past two weeks, and only two folks are paying (and I don't think they came from HN).

    Congrats on the blip! And cheers to many more :)

    1. 2

      Thanks Mick! I love the UI and simplicity of PMAlerts. just signed up :)

      1. 1

        Oh awesome! Feel free to email if you want to brainstorm - an alert for "looking for a hike" or "hike recommendation" might reveal interesting conversations where you can drop suggestions, for example.

  6. 1

    Hi, thanks for sharing this.
    I do not have experience with HN.
    Can you share your featured post in HN to take a look?
    Br.
    Ricardo

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