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How I made first page of HN and earned 220+ stars

... on GitHub in just one day.

This short article is just a trial to analyse what happened and why, without giving any piece of advice.

Yesterday I wanted to create a post on HN and I did it but then it seemed to me I did something wrong and I deleted the post. When I recreated it again, I saw the message "Sorry, that story was previously submitted.". I wrote to moderators and they replied "The repost restriction lasts for 8 hours". Well, okay, not a problem.
Let's do it tomorrow.

Right before (or after?) I posted the link to my GitHub repo I saw this epic post https://www.indiehackers.com/product/reader-mode/-LwHtDRxHXMA9GpiSXWO and tried to figure out which title would be the best one. I noticed that the encouraging to some action would probably work better and name my post "Create your next SaaS with Python and ReactJS".

Suddenly, boom! - I had comments, point, stars on GitHub - I could hardly believe it happened!

I did my best result ever - #9 on HN - and then it started dropping at some point (right now the post has 93 points).
Now, I would like to understand, what was going on and why.

I'm asking this question because I already created open-source products (the same SaaS boilerplates) and posted info on HN but never gained such results. The maximal amount of point on HN I earned before was just... yes, 3! Against 64 today (Upd: 95 now). And it never led to so many stars on GitHub.

Okay, I think the reasons are:

  1. The title of the post was pretty "sexy" and intriguing (thanks Ryzal, again!) (until the moderators (?) changed it to boring "SaaS application boilerplate" what I think led to the dropping the post down.

  2. This product looks much better than all previous versions. I worked really hard on UI and design (I'm not designer at all) and should admit I'm proud of the result :)) (even there is still a lot of things to do :)

  3. I used ReactJS in this project for the front-end (previous version used Vue.js). Even although I still like Vue.js I should admit it's much less popular than ReactJS, may it makes the whole project to look a little bit more appealing.

HN stats is here: http://hnrankings.info/21818323/

That's it, for now, thanks for reading!

, Founder of Icon for SaaS Forge
SaaS Forge
on December 18, 2019
  1. 1

    Ok this is epic! So happy that the idea got validated very well. Massive congrats and keep up the good work! :D

    1. 1

      Thanks for your experience! What I forgot to mention, I never shared the link to my HN post (as you described in your article), I think it helped me a lot.

      1. 1

        No problem! And ah that's wonderful, another plus point! +1 :))

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