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!). -

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