8 ms·

What Being on the Front Page of Hacker News Does to Your Indie App

124 points by burritofanatic 8y ago

CM30 8y ago
Hmm, 100 installs for 17,000 sessions. Seems kinda low, though it maps pretty well to the old 1% rule, with 0.5% of those who visited seemingly installing the app. Still, I do wonder how it compares to other apps/sites advertised here. Personally, I'd guess that targeting Hacker News users in particular will get you more traffic/points/signups than advertising a normal app or startup here might. That seems to be the rule with 'companion' sites and apps these days.
- ben_jones 8y ago
  I'd love to see that in the context of mobile/desktop visitors. My hunch is that HN has a disproportionately high number of desktop users (when compared to other "news" sites) and that there is a very high bar for a desktop user to pull out their phone and download a mobile app as opposed to a web app that incorporates an oauth based registration option. The mobile app experience of a) downloading the app and b) going through a potentially lengthy registration process using a mobile keyboard - is a big turnoff imo.
  - briandear 8y ago
    I might be an anomaly, but I only read HN on mobile, usually when I am waiting for something. If I am at my desktop, I have real work to do while on mobile, I am usually passing time waiting on something or another.
encoderer 8y ago
I like sharing what I’ve learned from building Cronitor with the HN community and have been fortunate to be on the front page a few times but honestly I think this website has generated more clones than customers. I’m sticking with it though and plan to make up my losses on volume.
TekMol 8y ago
Wow, 17000 visitors and only 100 installs. With a web app, and a link directly to it, all 17000 visitors would have tried it. That's 170 times more. Staggering. One of the reasons I prefer web apps and recently started adding the benefits of progressive web apps to my sites.
- txcwpalpha 8y ago
  To be fair, I find the linked writeup (the original one that talks about the app launch) to be a pretty poor 'advertisement' or 'announcement' of the app. You have to scroll all the way to the near-bottom before the app is even mentioned, and even then it is hidden behind a very non-obvious link. And even after reading the entire post, I'm still not even sure what exactly this app does differently than the other HN apps out there, and thus I'm pretty unconvinced that it's worth trying it out. If the intention of the writeup was to discuss the process behind building the app, it apparently was successful in getting attention and generating discussion. If the intention was to get app installs, then this is a case that really could've benefited from a TLDR at the top, or at least a more direct, more obvious link to the app. And I'm not convinced that it being a web app would have solved the issue, either. A writeup like this that linked to the webapp would face the same issues as described above. A direct link to the webapp would probably have me open it, spend 3-5 seconds looking at the splash page, and unless that splash page gives me a TLDR hook and a reason to actually stick around, I'd probably close it. In that case, your user engagement metric might include that as me having "tried" the app, but in reality all I did was open the splash page and then close it.
  - TekMol 8y ago
    all I did was open the splash page and then close it I would not link to a splash page but to the actual app where your next step would be to mark posts for later. (As that seems to be the main function of the app in question). I would expect over 50% of users to take that first step. That is what I saw in similar scenarios.
    - txcwpalpha 8y ago
greysteil 8y ago
I had a similar experience getting Dependabot onto the front page of HN as a "Show HN"[1], all be it with less attention than this post (congrats on that!). - Made it to #10 or thereabouts, and hung around on the front page for ~2 hours - Got around 10 (free) signups directly from it on the day. At the time we were averaging 10 signups a day, so it doubled that day's attention - Lots of encouraging feedback, which was great, and a good gauge of what (very) prospective customers might be interested in. No substitute for the learning from direct "sales", though (even when giving the product away for free) - Harder to measure the long-term awareness effect, but people very rarely mention they saw Dependabot on HN (they're much more likely to have seen it working on an open source repo) - Getting onto the front page was hard work! You can see from my submissions[2] how many times I tried! Overall my advice to anyone with an indie app would be to do the hard work of selling / building word-of-mouth referrals. Working on marketing-style blog posts looks easy and effective when you see others doing it, but very few people talk about the numbers that come out of it, and all of the "misses" where your content isn't picked up at all. ----- [1] Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15953694 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15953694 [2] My submissions: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=greysteil https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=greysteil
minimaxir 8y ago
A rule of thumb for Hacker News submissions used to be that when getting to the front page, every score point translates to about 100 sessions/pageviews. In this case (17000 sessions for a 315 point submission), it was only about half that ratio. That new ratio has been the case for a few of my recent submissions as well. I wonder if something changed in the HN demo?
- dec0dedab0de 8y ago
  If I had to guess I would say that the changes a while back that made submissions linger on the front page have made the site less addictive. So there are less users constantly checking to make sure they don't miss out on something.
fhoffa 8y ago
Related: I wrote this post showing the number of stars that GitHub projects get after being featured on the HN front page: - https://medium.com/google-cloud/big-data-stories-in-seconds-hacker-news-abe52bc5caad https://medium.com/google-cloud/big-data-stories-in-seconds-...
mousebite 8y ago
why not just use a text file?? or... paper
pwaai 8y ago
I gave up trying to land the front page on HN. It just doesn't have the same quality of traffic or discussions from 5~6 years ago when HN was at it's peak. What's more there are a lot of false positives in the comment sections from a demographic that isn't 100% representative of your target market.
- gxs 8y ago
  That's quite a claim without numbers. It looks like part of the point of this post is to illuminate/explore that hypothesis. Or, is that how you're interpreting his findings?
  - pwaai 8y ago
    100 installs from 10,000 visitors for starters.
    - jenoer 8y ago
      I think most visitors, like myself, visit a lot of these posted links to read up on the project/end-result, out of curiosity and for expanding my knowledge on various subjects.
jondubois 8y ago
Hacker News is in a big part responsible for the success of my Open Source project. I posted a screenshot with a one line caption on Reddit one evening then went to bed. The next morning, I noticed that my project had a lot of stars (it went from like 10 to 500 overnight) and I noticed that the numbers kept going up every time I refreshed the page. Then I found out that all the traffic was coming from news.ycombinator.com (not Reddit as I was thinking). When I got to work that morning, I asked my colleague what Hacker News was and I told him about my GitHub stars. He was shocked when he saw my project on the front page on HN. By his face I understood that it was like winning the lottery. My open source project is still doing well almost 5 years later so I can say that it was a really big deal in my case. Getting all those GitHub stars helped to create trust at the beginning and gain adoption.
slashblake 8y ago
Here were my results from being on the top of HackerNews for a day: https://imgur.com/a/CeOJ974 https://imgur.com/a/CeOJ974 8% of visitors signed up (goal 1). Numbers before were fewer than 5 visitors a day with ~0 signups.

CM30 8y ago

Hmm, 100 installs for 17,000 sessions. Seems kinda low, though it maps pretty well to the old 1% rule, with 0.5% of those who visited seemingly installing the app. Still, I do wonder how it compares to other apps/sites advertised here. Personally, I'd guess that targeting Hacker News users in particular will get you more traffic/points/signups than advertising a normal app or startup here might. That seems to be the rule with 'companion' sites and apps these days.

ben_jones 8y ago
I'd love to see that in the context of mobile/desktop visitors. My hunch is that HN has a disproportionately high number of desktop users (when compared to other "news" sites) and that there is a very high bar for a desktop user to pull out their phone and download a mobile app as opposed to a web app that incorporates an oauth based registration option. The mobile app experience of a) downloading the app and b) going through a potentially lengthy registration process using a mobile keyboard - is a big turnoff imo.
- briandear 8y ago
  I might be an anomaly, but I only read HN on mobile, usually when I am waiting for something. If I am at my desktop, I have real work to do while on mobile, I am usually passing time waiting on something or another.

encoderer 8y ago

I like sharing what I’ve learned from building Cronitor with the HN community and have been fortunate to be on the front page a few times but honestly I think this website has generated more clones than customers. I’m sticking with it though and plan to make up my losses on volume.

TekMol 8y ago

Wow, 17000 visitors and only 100 installs. With a web app, and a link directly to it, all 17000 visitors would have tried it. That's 170 times more. Staggering. One of the reasons I prefer web apps and recently started adding the benefits of progressive web apps to my sites.

txcwpalpha 8y ago
To be fair, I find the linked writeup (the original one that talks about the app launch) to be a pretty poor 'advertisement' or 'announcement' of the app. You have to scroll all the way to the near-bottom before the app is even mentioned, and even then it is hidden behind a very non-obvious link. And even after reading the entire post, I'm still not even sure what exactly this app does differently than the other HN apps out there, and thus I'm pretty unconvinced that it's worth trying it out. If the intention of the writeup was to discuss the process behind building the app, it apparently was successful in getting attention and generating discussion. If the intention was to get app installs, then this is a case that really could've benefited from a TLDR at the top, or at least a more direct, more obvious link to the app. And I'm not convinced that it being a web app would have solved the issue, either. A writeup like this that linked to the webapp would face the same issues as described above. A direct link to the webapp would probably have me open it, spend 3-5 seconds looking at the splash page, and unless that splash page gives me a TLDR hook and a reason to actually stick around, I'd probably close it. In that case, your user engagement metric might include that as me having "tried" the app, but in reality all I did was open the splash page and then close it.
- TekMol 8y ago
  all I did was open the splash page and then close it I would not link to a splash page but to the actual app where your next step would be to mark posts for later. (As that seems to be the main function of the app in question). I would expect over 50% of users to take that first step. That is what I saw in similar scenarios.
  - txcwpalpha 8y ago

greysteil 8y ago

I had a similar experience getting Dependabot onto the front page of HN as a "Show HN"[1], all be it with less attention than this post (congrats on that!). - Made it to #10 or thereabouts, and hung around on the front page for ~2 hours - Got around 10 (free) signups directly from it on the day. At the time we were averaging 10 signups a day, so it doubled that day's attention - Lots of encouraging feedback, which was great, and a good gauge of what (very) prospective customers might be interested in. No substitute for the learning from direct "sales", though (even when giving the product away for free) - Harder to measure the long-term awareness effect, but people very rarely mention they saw Dependabot on HN (they're much more likely to have seen it working on an open source repo) - Getting onto the front page was hard work! You can see from my submissions[2] how many times I tried! Overall my advice to anyone with an indie app would be to do the hard work of selling / building word-of-mouth referrals. Working on marketing-style blog posts looks easy and effective when you see others doing it, but very few people talk about the numbers that come out of it, and all of the "misses" where your content isn't picked up at all. ----- [1] Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15953694 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15953694 [2] My submissions: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=greysteil https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=greysteil

minimaxir 8y ago

A rule of thumb for Hacker News submissions used to be that when getting to the front page, every score point translates to about 100 sessions/pageviews. In this case (17000 sessions for a 315 point submission), it was only about half that ratio. That new ratio has been the case for a few of my recent submissions as well. I wonder if something changed in the HN demo?

dec0dedab0de 8y ago
If I had to guess I would say that the changes a while back that made submissions linger on the front page have made the site less addictive. So there are less users constantly checking to make sure they don't miss out on something.

fhoffa 8y ago

Related: I wrote this post showing the number of stars that GitHub projects get after being featured on the HN front page: - https://medium.com/google-cloud/big-data-stories-in-seconds-hacker-news-abe52bc5caad https://medium.com/google-cloud/big-data-stories-in-seconds-...

mousebite 8y ago

why not just use a text file?? or... paper

pwaai 8y ago

I gave up trying to land the front page on HN. It just doesn't have the same quality of traffic or discussions from 5~6 years ago when HN was at it's peak. What's more there are a lot of false positives in the comment sections from a demographic that isn't 100% representative of your target market.

gxs 8y ago
That's quite a claim without numbers. It looks like part of the point of this post is to illuminate/explore that hypothesis. Or, is that how you're interpreting his findings?
- pwaai 8y ago
  100 installs from 10,000 visitors for starters.
  - jenoer 8y ago
    I think most visitors, like myself, visit a lot of these posted links to read up on the project/end-result, out of curiosity and for expanding my knowledge on various subjects.

jondubois 8y ago

Hacker News is in a big part responsible for the success of my Open Source project. I posted a screenshot with a one line caption on Reddit one evening then went to bed. The next morning, I noticed that my project had a lot of stars (it went from like 10 to 500 overnight) and I noticed that the numbers kept going up every time I refreshed the page. Then I found out that all the traffic was coming from news.ycombinator.com (not Reddit as I was thinking). When I got to work that morning, I asked my colleague what Hacker News was and I told him about my GitHub stars. He was shocked when he saw my project on the front page on HN. By his face I understood that it was like winning the lottery. My open source project is still doing well almost 5 years later so I can say that it was a really big deal in my case. Getting all those GitHub stars helped to create trust at the beginning and gain adoption.

slashblake 8y ago

Here were my results from being on the top of HackerNews for a day: https://imgur.com/a/CeOJ974 https://imgur.com/a/CeOJ974 8% of visitors signed up (goal 1). Numbers before were fewer than 5 visitors a day with ~0 signups.