I’ve actually had the exact opposite happen: my ShowHN posts got nowhere, but the product itself became successful. I’m sure that the opposite is also true as well, but figured folks needed to hear that, just because your ShowHN post got nowhere, doesn’t mean there’s not a market fit for what you’re building. It just might not be interesting enough for the HN crowd, or you don’t have any name-recognition.
Even if the type of person who browses HN religiously is your exact target market, just posting at a bad time or being unlucky enough to post right before other relevant big news comes out is enough to get buried.
This is a good point. My lessons from this are to pick a time when traffic isn't as high so you have a chance of gaining some visibility. Getting on the frontpage during non-peak hours is better than getting on page 2 during peak hours.
My counter-example of a "successful" post with a failed product.
I did more than a couple of Show HNs. The most upvoted one (49 upvotes) was one of the first ones with a mostly crappy product [0].
I was just starting to learn to code, it was an ugly, amateurish CRUD, lacking a lot of basic features.
Unsurprisingly, it went no where. Not because of the software quality, but the product itself.
It was an idea of organizing sales prospects info based on my own experience as a salesperson and the way I organized myself using Excel sheets. It was a neat idea and I believe that's why it was upvoted.
I even had one of those "why should I use this product if I can do it myself with excel?" comments [1]. Turned out this one was right, as it was an excel sheet turned - unnecessarily - into a web app.
The evidence is that I got only one or two signups, who never came back after the first visit.
It could be the way it's presented too. What does "headless Chrome as a service" even mean?
When I look at the Github link, I actually understand what it does: "Severless Chrome on your own infrastructure. Each session gets its own clean Chrome context for total isolation. After the session is complete Chrome is shutdown. You can also think of it like a database connection where your app connects to browserless, runs some work, and gets results back."
But it's fair. Titles are hard and HN shuns clickbait.
Heh. I recall that ShowHN actually... and while I have no need for it, when it was posted I thought "Neat. Someone will want that"
--
So, I guess it would be a good-faith action to simply encourage others who are ShowingHN something and tell them what you think, regardless of that product being something you want/need.
I try to do this frequently, actually, I try things out and then give feedback.
On several I've noticed simple typos that can be fixed, and in those cases it is typically where you just need fresh eyes to see something to have it stand-out - because the creators stare at it constantly and thus small things can blind them.
That's a good question. We've been doing this for ~year, whereas Chrome on App Engine/Functions has _just_ recently come out. So we've got a bit of a head-start and our infrastructure is pretty hardened at this point. Also a few other points:
- We've got some REST-based API's that make it dead-simple to interact with Chrome for the majority of the use-cases out there. Plus you're not restricted to having to maintain node-based infra if that's not your stack.
- A lot of good tooling has been developed, for instance a live-debugging tool that lets you visually see the browser (located here: https://chrome.browserless.io/).
- The nature of a lot of folks' business restricts them from using big cloud providers like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. Just because one of them pivots into your market doesn't mean that they're going to squash you.
- Finally, I've written a driver + am actively involved in puppeteer's repos (plus others). So, in a way, when you sign up for an account you get support from me as well, which has a _ton_ of value if you've never done headless work.
Can vouch for this. Joel is a machine. Not sure how he’s able to do all of this single handed but Browserless is one of those niches where someone who legit listens to their customer does a much better job than a ~trillion dollar company.
It’s simple. This is browserless’s bread and butter. For GCP, it’s just another feature for someone to get a promo.
One feature that's not available or easy to use is audio from the chrome session. Browser page navigation works well in most places, sound not always. We've been having issues with pulseaudio s/w channels just going bad.
The first comment on that thread is a typical funny HN comment: “if you’re a Linux user and do x, y, z and connect the flux capacitor to the warp drive you can emulate Dropbox no problem”
BrandonM: It's funny how often that comment—which I made as a 22-year-old undergrad—resurfaces. Someone even reached out to me 2 weeks ago because they wanted to use it in an article as an example of "the disconnect between the way users and engineers see software"!
I like to think that I've gained a lot of perspective over the last 11 years; it's pretty clear to me that point #1 was short-sighted and exhibited a lot of tunnel vision. Looking back, though, I still think that thread was a reasonable exchange. My 2nd and 3rd points were fair, and I conceded much of point 1 to you after your reply (which was very high quality).
Obviously, we have the benefit of hindsight now in seeing how well you were able to execute. Kudos on that!
Congrats on your success! I wish you nothing but the best going forward!
I hope BrandonM isn't haunted by his comment or anything. It's not really a big deal right? Can't we just have a chuckle about it and move on? Besides, his comment was the top voted one (simultaneously my comment has a lot of upvotes too). We all get things wrong from time to time, especially at a young age. Big deal. He's probably been right a million times but nobody remembers those.
Actually, that comment by BrandonM is occasionally referenced as a good example of how YC startups have an unhealthy advantage on the forum, as YC startups can have their posts deleted but regular users such as BrandonM can not, hence their comments live for an eternity (which in this case seems to be a good thing).
True, though it's definitely nice to see how that discussion didn't descend into poo-flinging. The poster replied to the criticism and the critic conceded that it would indeed be useful, even for linux users :-)
Not one to support rants normally but this irritates me too, especially when encountered in billion-dollar businesses (not only Dropbox). It's like they can't afford investing a part-time developer and a few extra db queries in customer experience and retention, which indicates that they are in it for the fast buck, right or wrong. This type of customer indifference should have a special, and tarnishing, name.
I think it’s more a problem with most companies of any size.
It’s not the devs. The owners likely become sufficiently detached from the end product and experience and sales/marketing teams are left to squeeze every bit of fiscal value from the thing. That usually results in battles for new analytics or new features that usually look like background software/network bloat, and judging the client to increase their spend no matter what. Those teams always have to post higher numbers regardless of the market.
Paypal's post login page comes to mind.
I want to see the dashboard after login, not a uninformative ad that probably took time and money to put there.
My PayPal was put on freeze a few weeks ago. When I called to get unlocked I was told the verification lock was put in place because perhaps (they couldnot say exactly) because I had started some Capital Loan process they have. Really, what had happened was I clicked that damned interstitial ad post-login.
The forced ad, accidentally clicked, locked my account, had to spend an hour cleaning it up.
There's a chance that's there because some split test showed it increases conversions to their (presumably) more lucrative business payment plan.
Probably got tests running to see what exactly keeps people around when they get onto the plan.
When you've got that many users, I think it becomes norm. I remember a funny story about how Google tested hundreds of shades of blue to see which exact shade lifted click through rates the most. The standard default blue won.
I can't agree that the impact on UX is worthwhile in the long run but I can see how such things can be attractive when you haven't got the, I dunno the right word for it, "clout" to look past the immediate bottom line like Amazon or Apple had when people were betting on them.
There is value in being able to ask hard questions without being condescending. It is a rare skill these days to be able to handle those questions with tact.
I reference this when I talk about HackerNews in general. I remember reading this post back then. I remember them slowly growing huge. It's kind of funny to look back and think I knew about their project from the very beginning.
From what I can tell, the first HN post referencing Bitcoin is this one from February 3, 2009, about a month after its initial release: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=463793
The product’s now delivering family photos in the mail for hundreds of grandparents every month. They might not be making millions of dollars yet, but they are making some money and doing lots of good in the world by helping with elder loneliness. That’s a success to me.
I think I got 1 or 2 customers from the ShowHN post. To date, I'd estimate 15-20 customers have been from Hacker News. Those 15-20 have been enormously helpful with customer feedback. In fact, I'm deep on some improvements one of our vocal HN customers suggested the other day. Back to the code cave now.
Thanks! I've stepped away from initially working on the project in my spare time, but my brother @aacook is still going strong. Will pass your positive vibes along to him.
Please turn off the intercom intro when I first land on your page. It distracted me from learning about your project and blocks important text that I was reading with a generic Hello! message
Contentful is the first developer-oriented CMS that actually appeals to businesses and marketers. I've had more than a few nightmares with the Adobe Marketing Cloud but most big businesses just automatically gravitate to those kind of products. Developers always want simple, easy to deploy and configure and something API-driven. Business wants drag and drop, dashboards, analytics and workflows and other nonsense. Contentful is the first CMS I've seen that is extremely developer-friendly, but is pretty enough to give the business folks confidence. You guys just need more of a spiel on your landing page to appeal to the marketers.
I like DDG but still don't like the name. When telling people about it I heard several times that it sounds like a hobby project and not very trustworthy.
I don't think changing the name would make sense for them at this stage but I'd say they are successful despite the name, not because of it.
I'm interested in how Quiver is going? It looks like this is your main revenue stream? I've looked at it before and been unsure what it does, and trying it now it doesn't seem to work for us (no requests ever reach quiver with the GraphQLQuiverCloudBackend). Is it production ready, or is it in preview at the moment?
Edit: so the issue was that we had an extraneous trailing comma, which was turning a string (deprecation reason) into a 1-element tuple, which was then failing an assertion in the AST serialisation within graphql-core, however this assertion was being silenced by one of the backends - either the decider or the Quiver backend.
I announced the creation of a class here on HN ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5862102 -- This was a Show HN, but then it was edited for some reason; link is dead now, but it was a blog post describing the class and had a payment link), which went on to sell out in the first day, then eventually I posted on HN that I wanted to sell it ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14933206 ), and was acquired because of the post.
My project didn't get much attention on Show HN (or anywhere else), but I sent a cold email to Mark Cuban and offered to invest pretty quickly. So don't get too disheartened if your project gets a tepid response.
By most definitions we've pivoted from tech startup to "profitable small tech business", staying at 4-6 people. We're no dropbox, but at a solid cohort paying customers for our reasonably well-loved consumer product we've turned into a successful (by our personal definitions) company, if not a successful startup.
Show HN traffic can definitely have an impact but I'd also urge keeping in mind the causation vs correlation fallacy.
Also the Show HN posts are not as organic as they appear, in other words I don't believe you just prepend Show HN to a post and see it go boom...they won't admit it but there is more happening behind the scene.
Successful is a broad term, but we have tens of thousands of apps on our platform and our SDK is running on over a billion devices. We did YC and raised multiple rounds after.
I'm curious to see how insomnia is doing as a non-traditional startup in that he didn't "grow" the company (as far as I know). It's one of the best applications we use in our day-to-day workflow.
I've switched to Insomnia from Postman some time ago, out of frustration, and though I don't use it heavily (a few minutes every week) I really like Insomnia. There are a number of design decisions in the app that I really appreciate.
Not a successful startup but a successful product. I launched https://www.ghostnoteapp.com in 2015 and it's going really well. Releasing a new version 2.0 and expanding with chrome extensions to allow you to annotate even more specific items.
>Not a successful startup but a successful product.
What does that mean exactly? Lots of downloads/customers but not enough to be profitable (or not profitable enough to where it was worth the time and energy)?
Or is it profitable, but you just don't view your single product as a "start-up", because maybe it is a one-man-show, and not something you do full time?
The latter. It's profitable but I don't consider it a startup as it's "just a product" perhaps at one point when I have expanded the product line enough I would consider it a startup but for now it's just a nice relatively profitable product.
To get feedback on the platform, we paid developers to use it to make apps for our clients, which brought in some revenue. However, we failed to get people to pay for the service itself, even though we had a couple of thousand developers signed up and a few hundred apps in production. So we put Akshell on hold, but stayed in touch.
Now we're building a tech recruitment platform. We've been profitable since day one and have been growing 50% each year. So, in a somewhat roundabout way, that first Show HN post did result in a startup that's still around.
I announced BugMuncher here (since been renamed to Saber Feedback - https://www.saberfeedback.com), not sure if it counts as a successful startup, but it's been profitably paying my wages for a couple of years :)
Thanks! I'm not aiming for explosive growth or a huge exit, so it's probably more of a 'life-style business' rather than a startup, but that suits me just fine :)
Not sure if "successful", but https://newbusinessmonitor.co.uk/ makes me some pocket money — not nothing; half-way to "Ramen Profitable" — and was also accepted into the Advisory Track of this year's YCombinator Startup School which I'm quite proud of. I did a Show HN in May last year, and I can't believe how ugly and crappy the service was back then in comparison with how it is now.
This reminds me that I should document the history of projects I work on.
Not as far as I'm aware, but people have started asking for the same thing for US and Australian companies. I might end up expanding NBM to include other countries, provided I can reliably source the data.
We'd been building the tech (realtime GraphQL on Postgres) for a while, but the HN launch gave us the initial visibility and a tremendous number of users, reviews. And within the last few weeks we have several users in production and enterprise clients too. :)
Somehow I was unaware of Hashnode. Just checked it out, and it's really neat! It's a lot like dev.to or Coderwall, but seems to be more like a traditional social network than those two, in terms of people hanging out and posting memes and stuff.
My time tracking app[1] was bootstrapped with over $15k in sales from Show HN[2]. Without a launch like this, it would be much harder to work on it in the first year when organic sales were low.
Yes. I did a Show HN for https://geocode.xyz about a year ago, revenue is up over 1000% YTY - although there could also be other factors at play.
HN is where I got the best criticism though. The key to success is being able to know where you suck early on.
I did a Show HN for my React book two years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13170837 Since then I transitioned from being employed at a startup to being self-employed where I split my time doing 50% consulting work (which is passively generated through my blog) and the other 50% for educational platform/books https://roadtoreact.com Hacker News gave me one of the initial feedbacks which made me follow this passion :)
Our Show HN post didn't get much attention, but we also didn't have our marketing hopes set on that. We did turn into a successful startup, not in terms of raising money but instead in terms of growing off of revenue.
Not much traction on our Shown HN post, but we've had a lot of growth through our standup bots in Slack and Microsoft Teams. Still very much a startup, but we've re-branded to https://jell.com, have 4 employees, and a growing customer list!
I did a Show HN on my side project, AutoMicroFarm, two years ago (although I have been working on it and posting to HN about it much longer than that).
Thanks to HN, I was able to get into the YC fellowship program. After launching and not getting any traction, I almost quit. However, I realized I did not know how to do marketing, sales, or customer dev (the "people want" part of "Make something people want"). It wouldn't be fair to the idea of AutoMicroFarm, or to myself, to quit without trying to learn marketing/sales/customer dev and applying it to AutoMicroFarm.
So this year, I hired a business coach (https://solacelessons.com/) and continued working on AutoMicroFarm. I can't claim it's successful in any meaning of the word yet, but I have a solid framework in place for my social media/email/blog outreach, I am talking to people to figure out what they want, and starting to make revenue--all while having a day job, a side gig (both related to web dev), and a family. I've been really happy to make this progress while keeping the hours spent on AutoMicroFarm to 5-10 hours per week.
The fact that solacelessons created an account and replied less than a half hour after this comment plus the fact that the business coach's site was directly linked makes this seem to me like a less-than-genuine endorsement.
I'm not going to specifically make that assertion (because, well, I could easily be wrong); I'm just saying how it comes across to me-the-reader. :/
It’s an interesting point. I thought it was nice that my client let me know he shared about me on HN and I inturn am supporting him. When comments popped up about my site, I felt the need to acknowledge what people were saying. How is this “less than genuine”?
Yes, after I made the comment, I let me coach know, who registered on HN and answered some questions.
How is this less than genuine? Would a disclaimer help? Perhaps something like, "This post may contain a direct link to providers of products and services that I personally have found helpful. I was not prompted to add the link, and receive no financial renumeration for adding the link. However, I may do so in the future."
No offense, but your website is just as ugly as your business coaches pink shadow on dark blue text is just... like really? I'm getting nausea just looking at your coaches site
There are so many great wordpress themes and premade static page templates you could use, why are the fonts on your site so terrible? The vertical spacing and kerning make my eyes bleed, especially on the FAQ.
Are you sure your business coach actually knows what they are doing? Even the font on your logo is terrible too Federant, serif...?, the font is extremely dispropionate to the logo. There is simply too much crap going on in your logo as well, the roots are distracting and don't scale well for small image sizes. Doesn't YC fellowship recommend business coaches already as part of their program?
Maybe design isn't your thing, but you should seriously consider paying a professional to redo your entire branding and website. Its hard to have a social media / email / blog outreach strategy when these essential requirements aren't met yet. Its a oneclick install in many instances, adding a few images, and some text and that's it
I don't know how long you've had your business coach either, or what things she has outlined and actionable steps moving forward. Nor do I know what things you have gained since then. So I don't really know either way. But if website / logo redesign wasn't one of the lowest hanging fruits / highest priorities on that list then I question the coaches' effectiveness. Its cheap, fast, and easy to get a nice site done these days with existing templates.
Also, why do I get the feeling this comment's intention is just to solicit traffic to your coaches site. Well for one, why does she already know about this comment on hackernews?
Thanks for the feedback. I am starting to redo the website, I haven't updated the design for a while.
However, your comment comes across as really mean and unnecessary. I really doubt someone would come across it and think, "I really like the concept and would even be willing to pay for the products and/or services, but the logo font is Federant serif, and the FAQ spacing and kerning literally made my eyes bleed, so I can't see anything now."
Your reply to my coach is much more constructive and actionable. Please refrain from making comments like the one I am replying to, and strive to keep your comments constructive and actionable.
Fair enough, I am sorry I offended you. You are right that comment was unnecessary and uncalled for. Design is a very particularly touchy subject to me. Sometimes I get in the heat of the moment and write down all my thoughts down unfiltered. I feel very strongly about every piece of information presented to me, and I feel even more strongly about lost potential
If you want constructive critcism, I suggest adjusting your line-height properties and font-family to something like Arial or roboto. If you want a quickfix, just add these 3 lines in your `body` tag https://i.imgur.com/33lI25Z.png
For your font-logo I suggest simplifying it and removing some of the finer details. This is a quickdraft I made following the same guidelines that your logo emphasizes. Remove 2 fish, and just focus on one fish with bubbles to emphasize a complete cycle. https://i.imgur.com/fSWf2fJ.png
Thank you so much for your apology, change of tone, and helpful hints! <3
Do you have any suggestions about which font to pick? I like Federant because it seems rustic/"farmy" yet modern at the same time.
As far as the logo itself, I meant to play around with making it a responsive SVG (https://tympanus.net/codrops/2014/08/19/making-svgs-responsi...), but it would take me quite some time to climb the learning curve to do so. Unfortunately, the designer who made it for me did not provide an SVG file.
I wouldn't worry about SVGs. The vast majority of logos are usually made in adobe illustrator / affinitydesigner/similar in vector .eps/.ai format.
When it gets exported its almost always a .png file. The logo you have doesn't benefit from SVG. The only ones that really benefit from it are things like gitlab's animated logo https://i.imgur.com/FuxVepX.gif. SVG tends to overcomplex things, sometimes designers circumvent it using embedded font-families instead. https://fontawesome.com/icons?d=gallery
I tend to think of "barber shop fonts" when I think of old rustic "farmy" feel, because farmers would cut their own hair. And barbershops are still one of the few places that still use old traditions of knife shaving. Other good examples would be "speakeasy" bars, cowboy style.
The font you have is more castle/medieval/serfdom font instead of old farmy rustic. Technically, its not actually a bad font though for what you are going for, actually I looked through it is one of the better options. The logos font height needs to be the same size as the logos height though. Example https://i.imgur.com/NEMKnhT.png . Change the size font-size here to 2.5rem. https://i.imgur.com/KJGAlxe.png
I wouldn't suggest using federant for your actual paragraph text tags though. Keep that part simple and use Arial or Google Roboto
If you want to do a quickfix on your site, just change these things:
"You’ve been told to TALK to your audience, but it’s NOT WORKING" → change it as a background color div
"Hell YES I Want It!!!" → remove the pink shadow as well
I get that pink and blue are your colors, but those colors don't pair well together used that way. Either that just reduce the pink shadows by a large margin.
It still has the correct callout to action but doesn't induce any nausea to your users. I made the fix very quickly, but you should get the general idea. There might be minor tweaks you can make from the suggestions I indicated
If you want to implement these changes on your wordpress site, you can simply just copy paste everything I've written and paste it in your css file, or forward this whole message to your developer.
These are just my personal opinions though, your free to do whatever you want
I really appreciate this. Thank you. A developer friend made similar suggestions. I just haven’t had the time to implement. You’ve made it extremely easy for me, however. Thank you.
Idk, I think people seem to care about having a good looking website more than having a website that is practical. It conveys all the information you need on it right on the home page which imo is more important than being pretty. Though, the person who made the website forgot to make a landing page for the redirect on the "I want it!!!" button lol.
As I am getting older that's exactly my take on how to achieve something useful. As software devs we sometimes try to outhink the problem by solving every non existent problem that might occur down the road and also doing it in an as elegant way as possible. But the fact is that "down the road" will never come if you never leave the garage.
One example is a little fun halloween project I did last year. It's nothing more than a simple servo that opens a box after a voice command through amazon Alexa. I a don't do much in the way of motors and electronics. So I tried to find a way to elegantly mount the servo in the box and build something that pushes the lid upwards.
In the end I thought what the heck I'll just glue it down with endless amounts of hot glue hoping that it will stick.
A year later when I wanted to retire my box to save some space it turns out that the glue stuck so well that I had to cut it out. So even if it is not elegant and could gave been done in a much more elegant way it worked and nobody cared how it was done.
No matter how elegant your solution, most of the time you are judged by the result not the how.
Winfify, the company which made the successful A/B testing SaaS product Visual Website Optimizer(VWO) is bootstrapped and successful with $18 millions in revenue.
Not sure what the underlying intent is with this question, but great question and love reading the answers.. Also, I always thought that the main purpose of the “Show HN” posts weren’t about some big user generating promotion, but rather to solicit feedback from friendly fellow entrepreneurs and business people.?
Posted a Show HN about 6 years ago. On the front page for about half a day. We hold our cards close to our chest because ours is a competitive industry, so pardon the anonymity, but we are bootstrapped and did $10m+ in revenue last year with a healthy profit. Much love, HN :)
I would imagine that every successful/not-successful startup would post on Show HN. There are entire lists of places to post stuff, and I'm sure Show HN must be in the top 10.
For those who are curious the product is browserless.io. Rev chart is here: https://www.indiehackers.com/product/browserless/revenue
EDIT: here’s my ShowHN post for posterity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15722617