Interesting that HN is missing, I've seen sites launched (not always voluntarily!) by a single posting to HN, and I've seen how much coverage you can get from here when announcing my 'two week' project reocities.com .
I thought the same. I posted cakesy.com last night and have already received over 10k uniques via HN. Even if it hadn't made it past top 10, it would still be 500+ uniques. Wouldn't compare against 80k hits via TechCrunch but it might end up a better plan if your potential users are hackers.
[as usual, you are both correct and wrong at the same time - seems to be becoming my motto]
HN will generate similar traffic to a techcrunch post, if you look at the raw numbers. The big difference is that the TechCrunch traffic is from a readship of a million, and those who click are genuinely interested in your service, that they just read about.
HN will also give you a pretty large boost of traffic, but more are just interested in checking you as a startup, not as an end-user.
TC has never delivered anywhere close to 80k uniques for any of the projects I have been involved with.
3-4 years ago (first time I had a project covered by TC) it delivered ~3x more traffic compared to what I see nowadays (probably because the volume of daily posts has skyrocketed over those years).
I'm sure controversial topics (Angelgate, etc) still drive traffic, but if HN is creating 10k uniques for top stories then the "HN effect" is greater than what average TC coverage provides.
Plus, I've seen a lot of early adopters and tastemakers have moved to HN for finding things more on the cutting edge.
As much as I hate to say it, planning an effective HN marketing campaign may end up being more useful than trying to pitch the bloggers...
That's definitely news to me. I was quoting figures from 2007 and 2008 when two of my sites got covered. I was expecting 80k to actually be a conservative figure by now, seeing as how TC has grown.
Chime.TV & Sched.org. For Chime.TV, we had http://www.reinvigorate.net/ setup with real-time audio feedback. Every time a new user hit the site, my PC made a ding sound. Before the TC post, it made a sound once every few minutes and I would run into my computer room to see which country the visitor was from. It was such an exciting feeling. The minute TC published the post, the computer just went crazy. I think we had 40k or so uniques within the first 3 hours and another 35-45k over the next 12 hours, all from the TC post.
I just posted my project earlier tonight, and got essentially nothing. I'm fairly certain my site is relevant for hackers, so I'm assuming it just got overlooked.
The sites on the list have a pretty low chance of your site getting "overlooked" as easily as it happens on HN on a fairly frequent basis. There are just so many stories submitted here that they can't all possibly be upvoted. The sites listed are blog-like and guarantee your site gets visibility for some amount of time.
Your timing is terrible. Best time to post something on HN is 8:30 eastern time, that way you get the best chance of being noticed. Evening is almost certainly going to miss the majority of the visitors to the site and by morning your post will be gone.
What didn't help is that you posted it as 'self post', so one without a link (those are penalized).
Better to wait until 8:30 tomorrow morning, post it as a linked article and put your explanatory text in the first comment.
If you post an article on HN that has text instead of a link (that's the two options you've got, read the 'submit' page, it literally says "Leave url blank to submit a question for discussion. If there is no url, the text (if any) will appear at the top of the comments page. If there is a url, the text will be ignored.") then your post will be ranked differently from the posts that contain just a link to a URL pointing elsewhere.
The 'self' presumably refers to the article being HN only.
To avoid meta-discussion and 'Ask HN' style posts clogging up the new page they are penalized, so they'll typically drop off faster even if they do receive a lot of votes. And if they don't receive a lot of votes then they're gone even faster.
So if you want your 'rate my startup' post to be seen best just post the link, and add any extra info as the first comment in the thread.
That depends on the website. When I posted http://insiderstalk.com on HN it was in the top-10 for like 2 days, received a lot of cool comments, but barely any coverage even on twitter.
Oh yeah, I remember seeing this. How's is going for you? Getting much traffic?
I launched http://www.moreofit.com awhile ago and was on the frontpage for awhile too. Got 4k uniques, which trickled down to 100 in about 24 hours. Since then, I get about 200 uniques a day :(
Comments
Interesting that HN is missing, I've seen sites launched (not always voluntarily!) by a single posting to HN, and I've seen how much coverage you can get from here when announcing my 'two week' project reocities.com .
That seems like an oversight.
I thought the same. I posted cakesy.com last night and have already received over 10k uniques via HN. Even if it hadn't made it past top 10, it would still be 500+ uniques. Wouldn't compare against 80k hits via TechCrunch but it might end up a better plan if your potential users are hackers.
TechCrunch won't deliver 80k uniques. If you got 10k via HN then that's a lot more than TC has been sending these days.
[as usual, you are both correct and wrong at the same time - seems to be becoming my motto]
HN will generate similar traffic to a techcrunch post, if you look at the raw numbers. The big difference is that the TechCrunch traffic is from a readship of a million, and those who click are genuinely interested in your service, that they just read about.
HN will also give you a pretty large boost of traffic, but more are just interested in checking you as a startup, not as an end-user.
You think end-users read TechCrunch? :/
TC has never delivered anywhere close to 80k uniques for any of the projects I have been involved with.
3-4 years ago (first time I had a project covered by TC) it delivered ~3x more traffic compared to what I see nowadays (probably because the volume of daily posts has skyrocketed over those years).
I'm sure controversial topics (Angelgate, etc) still drive traffic, but if HN is creating 10k uniques for top stories then the "HN effect" is greater than what average TC coverage provides.
Plus, I've seen a lot of early adopters and tastemakers have moved to HN for finding things more on the cutting edge.
As much as I hate to say it, planning an effective HN marketing campaign may end up being more useful than trying to pitch the bloggers...
That's definitely news to me. I was quoting figures from 2007 and 2008 when two of my sites got covered. I was expecting 80k to actually be a conservative figure by now, seeing as how TC has grown.
Which two sites? I've had coverage on TC for 4 times since 2006 and never got anywhere NEAR 80k. Was 80k the total bump or just TC traffic?
Chime.TV & Sched.org. For Chime.TV, we had http://www.reinvigorate.net/ setup with real-time audio feedback. Every time a new user hit the site, my PC made a ding sound. Before the TC post, it made a sound once every few minutes and I would run into my computer room to see which country the visitor was from. It was such an exciting feeling. The minute TC published the post, the computer just went crazy. I think we had 40k or so uniques within the first 3 hours and another 35-45k over the next 12 hours, all from the TC post.
Speaking of which, my colleague had her birthday today and I sent her a Cakesy image. She liked it. Thanks!
:)
Thank you for sharing it. Gives me more encouragement for future projects.
I just posted my project earlier tonight, and got essentially nothing. I'm fairly certain my site is relevant for hackers, so I'm assuming it just got overlooked.
The sites on the list have a pretty low chance of your site getting "overlooked" as easily as it happens on HN on a fairly frequent basis. There are just so many stories submitted here that they can't all possibly be upvoted. The sites listed are blog-like and guarantee your site gets visibility for some amount of time.
Your timing is terrible. Best time to post something on HN is 8:30 eastern time, that way you get the best chance of being noticed. Evening is almost certainly going to miss the majority of the visitors to the site and by morning your post will be gone.
What didn't help is that you posted it as 'self post', so one without a link (those are penalized).
Better to wait until 8:30 tomorrow morning, post it as a linked article and put your explanatory text in the first comment.
Good luck!
Hey, thanks a lot for the feedback. Now I understand why you have 40k karma ;)
I put a lot of work into this site and to have it only get 3 comments and 2 points was kind of a let down, and also kind of confusing.
The karma is mostly because I spend too much time here ;)
Sorry to be a n00b, what is, "What didn't help is that you posted it as 'self post', so one without a link (those are penalized)?"
If you post an article on HN that has text instead of a link (that's the two options you've got, read the 'submit' page, it literally says "Leave url blank to submit a question for discussion. If there is no url, the text (if any) will appear at the top of the comments page. If there is a url, the text will be ignored.") then your post will be ranked differently from the posts that contain just a link to a URL pointing elsewhere.
The 'self' presumably refers to the article being HN only.
To avoid meta-discussion and 'Ask HN' style posts clogging up the new page they are penalized, so they'll typically drop off faster even if they do receive a lot of votes. And if they don't receive a lot of votes then they're gone even faster.
So if you want your 'rate my startup' post to be seen best just post the link, and add any extra info as the first comment in the thread.
Got it, thanks.
What was your site?
Thanks for pointing this out, indeed we did not think of HN at the time, but I'll add it to the list.
That depends on the website. When I posted http://insiderstalk.com on HN it was in the top-10 for like 2 days, received a lot of cool comments, but barely any coverage even on twitter.
Oh yeah, I remember seeing this. How's is going for you? Getting much traffic?
I launched http://www.moreofit.com awhile ago and was on the frontpage for awhile too. Got 4k uniques, which trickled down to 100 in about 24 hours. Since then, I get about 200 uniques a day :(