Autonews.io

I have been labelling the articles on the background for a long time now, so I have big enough database of categorised topics. I always wanted to do something with it and so I copied Twitter's trending. I run the reducer on the news tags in order to find the top 5. I them show them at the top of the page.

Also, the labels serve as filters, so for example if you are only interested in Formula 1, you simply click on the #f1 tag and only articles related to Formula 1 will be served to you.

After more than a year of running autonews.io I have always been underestimating marketing. I could see users coming back to my platform but there was no growth. As a trial, I have set up automated marketing posts for Twitter literally one month ago. It was not huge but I could have seen the number of users climbing up slowly.

Shortly after I've added the same functionality for LinkedIn and today I have finished the big 3 with Facebook.

The logic is that I pick up the top 5 most popular articles on my platform and schedule them as posts throughout the next day. I have used Firebase function CRON for schedule and posting is all done via APIs - Twitter APIv1, LinkedIn API and Facebook GraphAPI.

If you have any questions feel free to reach out.

I will update on growth regularly.

The advantage of my mildly popular portal is that user interactions generate ranking of popular articles. I've always wanted to automate posting the top 3 every day to Twitter to attract more automotive fans to autonews.io. Today I've achieved that.

This is the first automated tweet: https://twitter.com/autonewsio/status/1441396473518649346

I've used the npm package twitter and combined with my Twitter developer account's credentials I've set up a daily cronjob to get the 3 most popular articles from yesterday and tweet them out throughout the day!

Yay! 🎉

I have a 'secret' algorithm that sorts the articles based on popularity and the submission date. All the news default to this ordering. Today I've added options to order by default - ALL, order by latest - NEWEST and order by popularity. Simple top level buttons do the job. Also this moves makes the site much more powerful, because if you apply search it now defaults to results from past 7 days and especially ordering by latest or most popular is massive enhancement.

I submitted to HackerNews following the advice from Pieter Levels makebook.io - and stayed around to reply to the comments and because my project is literally "Hacker News for automotive industry" it created a lot of debate. I've stayed on the front page for 14 hours.

Achievements:

• 12k+ unique visitors in 24 hours
• 35 new registered users
• 62 new newsletter subscribers

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26866597

Today is the day. All the features are ready, that means the product is ready to be user tested. I've launched on couple of smaller automotive forums before and today I've submitted it to ProductHunt! Wish me good luck! 🤞

You can find it here https://www.producthunt.com/posts/autonews-io

I was trying to keep track of the articles people actually click on in my newsletter. So I've introduced a simple redirection endpoint, that would take you to the original article and increase click count + 1 in my DB. In order to make it fast, I've hashed the URLs with BASE64, but have forgotten to update the redirection endpoint to de-hash them, as the first version was fetching the URLs via article IDs, but that was too slow. The newsletter went out on Monday 7:00 AM and my mailbox just got full with error messages. 2 hours and 1 big coffee later the redirection was fixed and apology email went out to all subscribers. Felt urgent, felt important and felt good once resolved and apologised. Hope my subscribers trust was not affected too much.