You seem to place a lot of weight on hitting the HN homepage. What is your expectation for would have happened had you jumped to the top slot and stayed there

You seem to place a lot of weight on hitting the HN homepage. What is your expectation for would have happened had you jumped to the top slot and stayed there for several hours? Would you have signed thousands of new paying users? Ignited a media firestorm and suddenly found yourselves on the cover of Inc magazine? Would you be rolling in millions today? Or would you have had 10,000 visits to your homepage, a small handful of signups, a few dozen comments on the HN thread (half snarkilly dismissing it, the other half arguing about some completely separate issue that the first person to comment happened to mention in passing), and a traffic spike for a day or so followed by a return to your normal levels. Having occupied that top slot a few times, I'm sorry to inform you that it looks a lot more like the latter case. You still need to build and grow your business from square one, and a year later you'd have been exactly where you are today. A few Techcrunchings and HackerNewsings really aren't going to make a difference in the outcome of your thing. The real difference is made by the things you did on the other 364 days between then and now. Here's hoping you executed well.