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7 Comments

What is your experience with posting to Show HN?

A couple of hours ago I posted the product I've been working on the past months to Show HN.

It's looking like it will slide off the "Show HN: New" page anytime now without enough upvotes even though I think the HN audience would love to discuss the idea behind the product, I wonder why that is.

Did anyone have a similar experience? Does it come down to luck, or are there techniques to increase your chances of getting some more exposure?

  1. 5

    I was really happy with how my Show HN went.

    I think your title and introductory comment are solid. My only other tip would be to try to ensure a good discussion gets going by asking a few people you know to add a sincere question in the comments. My hunch is that people are much more likely to upvote if there's an interesting discussion to read.

    But sometimes it's just luck of the draw 🤷‍♂️

    1. 2

      Thanks for the tip! will keep that in mind for my upcoming Show HN :)

    2. 2

      That's a great tip, thank you!

      Divjoy is a great product, that definitely helped too :)

  2. 3

    I got an upvote or two. It did send me about 150 visitors that first day and I beleive the person who hunted Neatly on PH.

    I've never been able to predict what does well on HN and what doesn't.

  3. 1

    The things I leaned from my Show HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24007687) are:

    • It starts out at /shownew (2 clicks from the home page), then goes to /show (1 click from the home page) if you are lucky, and then the home page itself if you are luckier.
    • It doesn't seem to be the just number of points that moves it from a lower page to a higher page. If you look closely you will often see posts with fewer points (at least initially) moving up while ones with more points don't. Not quite clear what the rules are, and but lots of possibities.
    • Your headline is the main thing to attract people, and after that your home page needs to make it clear what people are expected to do if you want any interaction beyond jusst a click on the home page.
    • It doesn't seem like seeding it with an initial comment helps much (in my case nobody performed the search I suggested in my comment to get details of the tech stack, so I suspect few people if any actually read the comment).
  4. 1

    My Show HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867313) didn't go so well but then I published this blog post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22870667 and it was on the front page for half a day.

  5. 1

    My Show HN experience has been largely similar to @billyattar's. One thing worth noting is that the visit->sign up conversion rate from Show HN has been very high for me. So even an unpopular post would sometimes get me ~20 sign ups.

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