7 ms·

How to get your startup on Hacker News

160 points by swombat 16y ago

mmelin 16y ago
I think this is good advice and HN would be better off if more people followed it. Besides, "Review my startup" posts are my favorite type of post and if this brings out more then I'm all for it.
- swombat 16y ago
  Agreed. You can learn a lot by reviewing other people's startups, and by seeing what points other people have about the startups being offered. Much like in other forms of "art" like writing or singing or painting, there's a lot to be gained from "critique groups".
- duck 16y ago
  I agree and click on a lot of them just to give feedback and see what others are working on. In my Hacker Newsletter I collect and share a lot of them each week, but the odd thing is they tend to have very low click through rates - which I haven't been able to figure out why yet.
edw519 16y ago
The most critical words are genuinely and disingenuous. You may be able to put something over on us every once in a while, but for the most part, this is a crowd that doesn't respond too well to posers and B.S. Be sincere and we'll tell you the truth. Be phony and we'll probably send you packing. Nice post, swombat.
scrrr 16y ago
In the article: "..their feedback is valuable. It's often thorough, honest, qualified, and sometimes unpleasant." I think many people here will act upon "if you don't have anything nice to say, say nothing." ...which is a pity. Sometimes somebody posts a webapp with very crappy design or the 100th clone of a mediocre idea. Yet most people will tell him how great it is. This is not helpful. Sometimes I wish people were a little bit more critical. Are they afraid about getting voted down? They shouldn't.
- alex_c 16y ago
  I doubt it's about downvotes. I think people want to be supportive, on the basis that making something mediocre is better than not making anything at all. I think the number of comments and upvotes is a good enough indicator - as you said, people who think it's stupid or (more likely) just don't care won't post anything. When asking for feedback it helps to be able to read between the lines - true excitement will show through, indifference will show as mainly technical advice (make your message clearer, move that to the left, a link is broken, etc.)
david_shaw 16y ago
This is great advice. When I created http://sleepyti.me http://sleepyti.me, the first place I posted it was here to HN for feedback. Using that feedback, I was able to make signficant improvements and bug fixes. Reddit's /r/web_design subreddit helped me out with the look of the page, and now my site--albeit not a startup--is earning almost enough money to pay my rent. It's not a $200M Heroku buyout, but it's not bad for a small, simple web app. As others have said in this thread, the most important part is to genuinely want help, feedback and discussion. Don't post to HN to argue with participants, or to try to spam your link enough to get noticed. The value of the HN homepage isn't necessarily the traffic, but the feedback.
- alex_c 16y ago
  "Sleepyti.me is provided as a free service" Curious about how it's earning money (unless you mean a different site)
  - danielh 16y ago
    Probably through the ads that are shown once you submit the form.
    - alex_c 16y ago
      Ah, wasn't seeing any ads (disabled AdBlock, and I still don't).
- fezzl 16y ago
  If the average human being takes 14 minutes to fall asleep, why don't you just bake that into your calculator, so we don't have to "plan accordingly?" On a side note, making enough cash to pay rent is really enviable, especially considering the nature of the web app. Good job.
DanielBMarkham 16y ago
Forgot one. Once you've been on a while, you can write the meta-post: "How to get your startup on Hacker News" or "Best times to post an article on HN" Nice post, swombat. The only thing I would add is that I have noticed that we all like charts, graphs, and details about stuff. So if you post about your income and traffic for a startup, be sure to include a chart and a bunch of nice, juicy details. People seem adverse to anything that's high-level or conceptual, and more friendly towards concrete and numerical information. Sometimes I think even if the details are tangential and not a directly necessary part of your thesis, folks like seeing them. So if you're doing a post on "When to log into HN to read the best comments" be sure to have some kind of graph. Don't just say 14:00GMT.
- swombat 16y ago
  Keep your eyes peeled! Next month, "How to write an article about posting something to Hacker News"... ;-) I just kept getting asked this in networking events, so I thought I'd rather have the answer written up. Glad everyone is finding it useful!
  - DanielBMarkham 16y ago
    I'm looking forward to it! The more metas you can throw in there and still keep it coherent? Love it. I might do something like "How to comment on articles about how to write articles on posting on Hacker News" But we must have a chart. Maybe two charts, for a nice two-level effect. :)
thewordpainter 16y ago
@swombat - really appreciate you addressing this subject. been wondering for a little while. what's the consensus: post it outside of the standard work day? maybe ~6p EST? when EST people are basically done with work & PST are winding down? when is HN most active in terms of content shared & comments? when is Ask HN most likely to get a look & response?
- icey 16y ago
  If the post is good (which is to say if your product is interesting), it will stay on the front page long enough that it doesn't matter when you post. One caveat, avoid the weekend since most popular news sites like HN slow down during that time period.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
Swizec 16y ago
Dear swombat, nice of you to post this now rather than three months earlier and letting me learn it on my own. :P
NathanC 16y ago
thank you. I just realized I did it wrong earlier this morning with this post. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2099538 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2099538 Do you think it would be ok to resubmit in a proper way next week ?
- swombat 16y ago
  I suspect you'll get a fair few more comments via this link, since it's at the top of HN. If I were you I'd wait a bit and improve the site some more before resubmitting, assuming you get at least 5 or so extra comments in the next few hours...
HeyLaughingBoy 16y ago
Good post, but this "not allergic to commercial offerings like many other popular forums on the web" is changing rapidly. I'm seeing a large influx of people who don't seem to realize that profit is not a bad word.
dclaysmith 16y ago
In the article: "Include the link in the body of your post. It won't be hotlinked, but don't worry about that. Do not include it as the "URL" part of your post, some people consider that bad form." Is that true? It seems that there are as many posts utilizing the URL field as without and I've never seen any chastising about the practice. Posts w/o a URL move off the site faster (right?) so there would be a definitely advantage to linking to the new site in question.
- pkamb 16y ago
  Moves off the site faster at the expense of not having an easy path back to the comments page. And unless you do a quick "description in the first post" I like the extra HN-tailored info that we get in the description, rather than a blind link to something.
foljs 16y ago
And most importantly "Why get your startup on Hacker News"? I don't know of any major (or medium) startup whose success had anything to do with appearing on Hacker News.
pg 16y ago
You should add one other point: don't do this if you're not already an established HN user. "Review my startup" posts from new accounts are usually killed. Otherwise anyone could use this format to promote any site, a fact spammers started to notice a few months ago.
- swombat 16y ago
  Oh. I didn't know that. I'll add a note at the bottom of the article. Thanks for letting us know!
  - robeastham 16y ago
    My account is about six months old, but I'm gonna have to get out the habit of just reading/lurking and contribute a little more I think. I was planning on submitting a rate my startup post next week but now having read pg's comment I'm not so sure whether that's a good idea. I really don't want to miss the opportunity to get invaluable feedback from the HN community. My app is aimed at HN users to some extent and so it's really important to me to get this right. I had considered that it might be a little rude for one of my first posts to be an ask type post. So I had already started to outline some articles to post around the same time, e.g. I've got a bunch of notes detailing which methods have helped me increased my productivity recently, I think some would find useful. I guess for anyone in the same position as me it can't hurt to try and submit helpful posts first. I guess that's the right thing to do anyway and so that'll be my plan going forward.
- mindcrime 16y ago
  What would be your definition of established? 3 months on HN? 6 months on HN? 1 year on HN? karma > 200? karma > 500? Some combination of the above? Something else? Not trying to be facetious, I'm genuinely interested to know what your criteria for this would be. Edit: I see that this whole issue received quite a bit of discussion a few months ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1861577 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1861577
  - geuis 16y ago
3am 16y ago
Write a blog post on some link-bait subject, submit it, talk about the subject for a few paragraphs, then interject a "the company I started, XYZ, solves this problem in a novel way...." about halfway through and spend the rest of your time talking about your company?
noahlt 16y ago
Why do some people consider it "bad form" to include your link in the URL portion of the HN submission form? I've been wondering this for a while, since I am always annoyed when I have to cut-and-paste a URL.
- alanfalcon 16y ago
  Chrome at least has the right click "Go to URL" contextual option... I'm constantly annoyed when other web browsers don't offer this obvious feature.
  - nborgo 16y ago
    There's always QuietURL for Firefox, which converts text to a link when you hover over it. It's nice to have.
    - noahlt 16y ago
      Yes, I certainly am aware of the technological solutions to this problem. Nevertheless, I am still baffled by the apparent stigma towards linking to your site in the URL field, which seems like the natural, obvious, and right thing to do. I would welcome an explanation!
      - alanfalcon 16y ago
        Here's my (noobish) understanding: On Hacker News when you submit you have the option to include a clickable URL -or- text. The preferred thing to do is to include some text rather than the URL.
yawza 16y ago
Nice post and update from Paul. Ill have to bookmark this for future reference.
yosho 16y ago
The one thing I really got out of this article is that HN has a IRC channel, that's awesome. http://webchat.freenode.net/ http://webchat.freenode.net/ join #startups I'm totally idling there from now on.

160 points by swombat 16y ago

I think this is good advice and HN would be better off if more people followed it. Besides, "Review my startup" posts are my favorite type of post and if this brings out more then I'm all for it.

swombat 16y ago
Agreed. You can learn a lot by reviewing other people's startups, and by seeing what points other people have about the startups being offered. Much like in other forms of "art" like writing or singing or painting, there's a lot to be gained from "critique groups".
duck 16y ago
I agree and click on a lot of them just to give feedback and see what others are working on. In my Hacker Newsletter I collect and share a lot of them each week, but the odd thing is they tend to have very low click through rates - which I haven't been able to figure out why yet.

edw519 16y ago

The most critical words are genuinely and disingenuous. You may be able to put something over on us every once in a while, but for the most part, this is a crowd that doesn't respond too well to posers and B.S. Be sincere and we'll tell you the truth. Be phony and we'll probably send you packing. Nice post, swombat.

scrrr 16y ago

In the article: "..their feedback is valuable. It's often thorough, honest, qualified, and sometimes unpleasant." I think many people here will act upon "if you don't have anything nice to say, say nothing." ...which is a pity. Sometimes somebody posts a webapp with very crappy design or the 100th clone of a mediocre idea. Yet most people will tell him how great it is. This is not helpful. Sometimes I wish people were a little bit more critical. Are they afraid about getting voted down? They shouldn't.

alex_c 16y ago
I doubt it's about downvotes. I think people want to be supportive, on the basis that making something mediocre is better than not making anything at all. I think the number of comments and upvotes is a good enough indicator - as you said, people who think it's stupid or (more likely) just don't care won't post anything. When asking for feedback it helps to be able to read between the lines - true excitement will show through, indifference will show as mainly technical advice (make your message clearer, move that to the left, a link is broken, etc.)

david_shaw 16y ago

This is great advice. When I created http://sleepyti.me http://sleepyti.me, the first place I posted it was here to HN for feedback. Using that feedback, I was able to make signficant improvements and bug fixes. Reddit's /r/web_design subreddit helped me out with the look of the page, and now my site--albeit not a startup--is earning almost enough money to pay my rent. It's not a $200M Heroku buyout, but it's not bad for a small, simple web app. As others have said in this thread, the most important part is to genuinely want help, feedback and discussion. Don't post to HN to argue with participants, or to try to spam your link enough to get noticed. The value of the HN homepage isn't necessarily the traffic, but the feedback.

alex_c 16y ago
"Sleepyti.me is provided as a free service" Curious about how it's earning money (unless you mean a different site)
- danielh 16y ago
  Probably through the ads that are shown once you submit the form.
  - alex_c 16y ago
    Ah, wasn't seeing any ads (disabled AdBlock, and I still don't).
fezzl 16y ago
If the average human being takes 14 minutes to fall asleep, why don't you just bake that into your calculator, so we don't have to "plan accordingly?" On a side note, making enough cash to pay rent is really enviable, especially considering the nature of the web app. Good job.

DanielBMarkham 16y ago

Forgot one. Once you've been on a while, you can write the meta-post: "How to get your startup on Hacker News" or "Best times to post an article on HN" Nice post, swombat. The only thing I would add is that I have noticed that we all like charts, graphs, and details about stuff. So if you post about your income and traffic for a startup, be sure to include a chart and a bunch of nice, juicy details. People seem adverse to anything that's high-level or conceptual, and more friendly towards concrete and numerical information. Sometimes I think even if the details are tangential and not a directly necessary part of your thesis, folks like seeing them. So if you're doing a post on "When to log into HN to read the best comments" be sure to have some kind of graph. Don't just say 14:00GMT.

swombat 16y ago
Keep your eyes peeled! Next month, "How to write an article about posting something to Hacker News"... ;-) I just kept getting asked this in networking events, so I thought I'd rather have the answer written up. Glad everyone is finding it useful!
- DanielBMarkham 16y ago
  I'm looking forward to it! The more metas you can throw in there and still keep it coherent? Love it. I might do something like "How to comment on articles about how to write articles on posting on Hacker News" But we must have a chart. Maybe two charts, for a nice two-level effect. :)

thewordpainter 16y ago

@swombat - really appreciate you addressing this subject. been wondering for a little while. what's the consensus: post it outside of the standard work day? maybe ~6p EST? when EST people are basically done with work & PST are winding down? when is HN most active in terms of content shared & comments? when is Ask HN most likely to get a look & response?

icey 16y ago
If the post is good (which is to say if your product is interesting), it will stay on the front page long enough that it doesn't matter when you post. One caveat, avoid the weekend since most popular news sites like HN slow down during that time period.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

Swizec 16y ago

Dear swombat, nice of you to post this now rather than three months earlier and letting me learn it on my own. :P

NathanC 16y ago

thank you. I just realized I did it wrong earlier this morning with this post. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2099538 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2099538 Do you think it would be ok to resubmit in a proper way next week ?

swombat 16y ago
I suspect you'll get a fair few more comments via this link, since it's at the top of HN. If I were you I'd wait a bit and improve the site some more before resubmitting, assuming you get at least 5 or so extra comments in the next few hours...

HeyLaughingBoy 16y ago

Good post, but this "not allergic to commercial offerings like many other popular forums on the web" is changing rapidly. I'm seeing a large influx of people who don't seem to realize that profit is not a bad word.

dclaysmith 16y ago

In the article: "Include the link in the body of your post. It won't be hotlinked, but don't worry about that. Do not include it as the "URL" part of your post, some people consider that bad form." Is that true? It seems that there are as many posts utilizing the URL field as without and I've never seen any chastising about the practice. Posts w/o a URL move off the site faster (right?) so there would be a definitely advantage to linking to the new site in question.

pkamb 16y ago
Moves off the site faster at the expense of not having an easy path back to the comments page. And unless you do a quick "description in the first post" I like the extra HN-tailored info that we get in the description, rather than a blind link to something.

foljs 16y ago

And most importantly "Why get your startup on Hacker News"? I don't know of any major (or medium) startup whose success had anything to do with appearing on Hacker News.

pg 16y ago

You should add one other point: don't do this if you're not already an established HN user. "Review my startup" posts from new accounts are usually killed. Otherwise anyone could use this format to promote any site, a fact spammers started to notice a few months ago.

swombat 16y ago
Oh. I didn't know that. I'll add a note at the bottom of the article. Thanks for letting us know!
- robeastham 16y ago
  My account is about six months old, but I'm gonna have to get out the habit of just reading/lurking and contribute a little more I think. I was planning on submitting a rate my startup post next week but now having read pg's comment I'm not so sure whether that's a good idea. I really don't want to miss the opportunity to get invaluable feedback from the HN community. My app is aimed at HN users to some extent and so it's really important to me to get this right. I had considered that it might be a little rude for one of my first posts to be an ask type post. So I had already started to outline some articles to post around the same time, e.g. I've got a bunch of notes detailing which methods have helped me increased my productivity recently, I think some would find useful. I guess for anyone in the same position as me it can't hurt to try and submit helpful posts first. I guess that's the right thing to do anyway and so that'll be my plan going forward.
mindcrime 16y ago
What would be your definition of established? 3 months on HN? 6 months on HN? 1 year on HN? karma > 200? karma > 500? Some combination of the above? Something else? Not trying to be facetious, I'm genuinely interested to know what your criteria for this would be. Edit: I see that this whole issue received quite a bit of discussion a few months ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1861577 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1861577
- geuis 16y ago

3am 16y ago

Write a blog post on some link-bait subject, submit it, talk about the subject for a few paragraphs, then interject a "the company I started, XYZ, solves this problem in a novel way...." about halfway through and spend the rest of your time talking about your company?

noahlt 16y ago

Why do some people consider it "bad form" to include your link in the URL portion of the HN submission form? I've been wondering this for a while, since I am always annoyed when I have to cut-and-paste a URL.

alanfalcon 16y ago
Chrome at least has the right click "Go to URL" contextual option... I'm constantly annoyed when other web browsers don't offer this obvious feature.
- nborgo 16y ago
  There's always QuietURL for Firefox, which converts text to a link when you hover over it. It's nice to have.
  - noahlt 16y ago
    Yes, I certainly am aware of the technological solutions to this problem. Nevertheless, I am still baffled by the apparent stigma towards linking to your site in the URL field, which seems like the natural, obvious, and right thing to do. I would welcome an explanation!
    - alanfalcon 16y ago
      Here's my (noobish) understanding: On Hacker News when you submit you have the option to include a clickable URL -or- text. The preferred thing to do is to include some text rather than the URL.

yawza 16y ago

Nice post and update from Paul. Ill have to bookmark this for future reference.

yosho 16y ago

The one thing I really got out of this article is that HN has a IRC channel, that's awesome. http://webchat.freenode.net/ http://webchat.freenode.net/ join #startups I'm totally idling there from now on.