While I was gone, my post entered the top 3 and then hit the top spot. It stayed there for most of the rest of the day, and into the wee hours of the morning.
I happened to have been invited to a VC mixer that afternoon, and I remember everyone was super impressed that some random lawyer had posted a Show HN that was literally-at-that-moment the top post on HN. Some guy from Samsung introduced me to his boss' boss and said they should license it (the first of many leads I failed to convert on!) I left my legal job a while later to work on BeeLine full-time, and it's been 7 years since then.
We didn't go the traditional VC route, partly because we didn't have huge capital needs. Instead, I've mostly bootstrapped the thing, and we now have customers like Blackboard and Stanford (and a couple partnerships with HN/YCers, too! [2] [3]). There have been times where I considered going back to my legal career, but I would have kept BeeLine running in the background if so. I'm super appreciative to the community here, since it was what prompted me to make the transition to this very rewarding path!
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6335784
In a sense, I've intended for these projects to fail.
I throw something out there, see if it sticks, and is worth pursuing. Most things aren't worth pursuing. I get bored, distracted, and find something else "shiny" to do for a while. That "shiny" thing is usually my actual business. Sometimes one of my projects succeeds, and becomes an "actual" business. Other times, it sort-of hangs on for years on auto-pilot. Sometimes one of those auto-pilot things takes off. If not, that's fine.
Many of these projects can be thought of like R&D; most R&D, really, is a dead end, or something that quietly gets folded into a pre-existing project, or just gets turned into "useful knowledge" for the next bit of research.
Check out the Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20309255
I'm still actively working on that project, and a countless number of features have been added. Yeah, a few people here and there use it, and it is costing me about $100 a month to host on AWS, but I'm not bothered. I'm still very passionate about this space, and nothing else really interests me as much.
If anyone is interested in checking it out, the site is https://ampl.fi/
* Nobody uses product
* Person eventually retires product
* Person makes product, shares it
I'm starting to think the business books that say find the audience first might be onto something honestly. I still don't want to do it, but yeah
A few things happened after that:
- A startup took the open source code and put it up a day or so later and got a few million dollars in funding to do image sharing, which made me feel bad at the time, but they later disappeared so it's fine
- Larry Page got a bit annoyed that I didn't do it as a Google project, and Sundar/my boss had to explain that I was just a Chrome staff member who got a bit excited about a new API - both of them were correct
- I had to panic-build a content moderation system from the airport on my honeymoon in response to some unsavory content
- It eventually got to 3TB of stored data, which was fine until billing policy changes at my storage provider meant that my monthly costs would've gone from tens of dollars to hundreds or thousands of dollars
- My day job was more fulfilling, so after a few years I shut it down
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2010/11/22/dropmocks-chrome-designer/
The post resulted in a Fortune article (https://fortune.com/2014/01/22/meet-the-warby-parker-of-matt...) which helped to catalyze hockey stick growth and triggered a wave of vc money into the industry, we turned the interest down. The vc money resulted in new competitors for us (Casper/Purple/+200 others as barriers fell). This collectively caused massive change.
We grew to 250mm arr before we merged with serta simmons in 2018.. to disrupt within their brand portfolio. We’ve been working on their brands to mimic our model.
Our growth was 100% bootstrapped with no more than $6k. My co-founder and I seriously attribute our show HN as one of the reasons we were able to build our company the way we did and for spurring interest in our competitors to enter the market. The competition also accelerated our growth without the need of funding, their VC money fueled advertising raising awareness.
Anyways, one data point for you. Super grateful for this community.
Show HN threads are probably my favorite feature of this community. The "Show" sort at the top is great, but it feels like there used to be more threads on the main page and more participation years ago (perhaps I am imagining that?)
Most of the projects on Show HN don't have retention figured out, so most of the traffic from Show HN will not convert into useful numbers for them.
I also want to point out that many Show HN projects wrongly assume that HN is the niche for them, simply because they themself are a "hacker". But this is not a useful distinction. If you're looking for your niche, for product market fit, you want to slice into small concrete audiences, like maybe "developers at 10-50 employee startups in credit building fintech within the bay area". Posting a Show HN isn't a cure to not having a niche of users, unless you're specifically targeting this niche.
We got close to 2000 app installs in 24 hours. Plus it was picked up by a gaming news website, which led to further marketing opportunities for us. I have since sold the project to my cofounder and he redirected the domain to his main webshop. So while it looks offline, the product is actually still alive and well.
As for why there are no new ones: I decided to up my game by doing a riskier and more challenging project next. Maybe others did the same and then you'd naturally expect to see more time in-between two Show HNs from the same person.
A breakdown of each one with how much $ I've made for each one:
1) Show HN: Pygooglenews – Python library for advanced Google News data mining [0]
Result: 165 HN points, 1k GH stars, some user flow to our website (later about this one)
2) Show HN: Nuntium – API to track the media presence of any organization or person [1]
Result: 2 HN points, a side project which gave 0 results because we were just coding instead of thinking about what users want.
3) Show HN: News Extract API – Pull structured data from online news articles [2]
Result: 130 HN points, 200 GH stars, one 29$ recurring customer
4) Show HN: Newscatcher API Beta – JSON API to search for relevant news data [3]
Result: 4 HN points, 6 digits ARR startup we're still running!
5) Show HN: Py package to collect normalized news from (almost) any website
Result: 26 HN points, 2.5k GH stars
6) Show HN: A simple RESTful API to extract structured data from news articles
Result: Nothing
7) Show HN: 100k+ labeled news dataset
Result: Nothing
CONCLUSION: it's fine to fail on HN: success here doesn't mean a successful business, and vice versa.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23701343
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22946676
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22924869
To answer why: these were all side projects. Over the years, I created at least a dozen, and I can't maintain them all. Most are obsolete. Their last update is many years old. The websites are usually not mobile-friendly. Some had links to sites like Google+ that do not exist anymore.
Every minute I spend on updating old sites is a minute I can't spend on the newer stuff I am working on.
I don't think it's terribly surprising that a high percentage of early projects demoed here don't make it to market.
This got acquired by Docker and became Docker Compose. Swarm was the attempt at making clustering work.
I wonder if it's because I created a new account to post it, or more likely I had a terrible/generic sounding post title.
It's also difficult to pick the right time of day to post. I thought I had it right - picking Monday morning west coast (US) time, but I guess there is a big difference between just before and just after people get to work!
I would have liked to hear what people think, even if it's "This is bad, and you should feel bad".
Edit: https://defaultcharacter.com/2021-09-bookmark-controller-int...
Now we've raised almost $20M, employ 30 people, and have a ton of happy customers.
(Thanks HN! :))
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28366991
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pranapps.h...
3 years ago, I had also created the iOS & MacOS client for my Hacker News app HACK:
https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/hack-for-hacker-news-developer...
It has all the awesome features - login with your HN account and swipe to vote, favourite, reply. You can submit new posts too.
I believe my app is the only HN client to have:
1. The app has a built in reader mode as well as text to speech for an article or comment.
2. Push Notifications for replies to your post or comment.
3. Easily access an article via archive.is or archive.org or google cache
4. Built in browser has an ad blocker.
5. All the endpoints of HN.
6. Updated often. I have been updating both the iOS and Android versions as often as needed to implement customer requests.
There's tons of customizations settings and colours, fonts, font size change etc available in the app.
The Android version is brand new, so any feedback is appreciated.
New products and startups will often pivot away to something else, so it you see a post highlighting www.fastchargers.io the company might well pivot into www.advancedknittedjumpers.io due to reasons - yes I am being a little cynical, but it really does happen.
I created a way to run GitHub actions on Jenkins.
Brought IDE completion to Jenkins pipelines.
Created a framework for testing AWS cloudformation without needing credentials or deploying resources.
Today it seems to need shadow accounts, or buy booster packs or some such. Suffice it to say when I announced ZimTik, noone noticed.
caveat: I could be generalizing based on a few personal experiences.
I'm sure there are a lot of lessons to learn in there.
The post got to the front page and brought in the first two sales. That got the ball rolling and I was able to focus full time on the project since then, building a small team and continuing improving and expanding the app.
Here is the story of our first year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8878381
And, I'll soon post another Show HN. This time for a side project created with my son.
Thank you HN :)
It's an app that aggregates book mentions on HN. Dev costs (server, gpu training etc) would be one concern going forward. I can't monetize the app to cover the cost due to my current visa status (even donations are tricky to handle). Nevertheless, I'm more than happy to maintain the site up given that many people on HN find it useful. :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1494362
That said, I think most of them die because of a lack of time and/or other interests come along. I can't even count how many folks have reached out about starting a similar newsletter and only one or two kept going for more than year. With side-project especially, it is hard to find users, and that can be pretty discouraging.
* Genewarrior.com: A DNA sequence manipulation tool for Biologist. A handful of upvotes, almost no feedback. But the website is still up and running, mainly because I am using it from time to time and I still believe it's one of the most accessible tools of its kind on the web.
* Sunlocator.com: an Android app for interactive Sun position calculations. A couple dozen upvotes and some good comments. My most successful project, the free version has more than half a million downloads and it generates some nice pocket money. Definitely still up and running.
* Touch Remove: an Android app to remove objects from pictures. A fewv upvotes, almost no interest. It's still in the app store but retired. There are much better apps out there that do the same job.
* Nuftu.com: the most recent one, a NFT minter for people without any crypto expertise. No upvotes, no feedback on HN. On the other hand I've received good feedback and some paying customers from Producthunt. So I'm still considering on how to continue (ramp up marketing?)
Every project I've started includes some sort of technical challenge that I need to figure out. For example, one of my projects was a clone of an arcade game called Killer Queen (this was before Killer Queen Black came out for PC and Switch). I wanted to make an online PC clone, so I needed to figure out how to keep all the game clients in sync, account for latency, while also preventing cheating.
And I figured it out. Clients stayed in sync, cheating was impossible, and I could even handle clients disconnecting mid-game and could re-join and continue.
...but then I got bored and never actually implemented the game mechanics. Two years later, Killer Queen Black came out, making my clone obsolete, since I didn't have any features planned beyond what the original developer had done.
I've had other games I've written where the core mechanics and game loop are implemented, but I got bored and didn't want to do the tedious polishing to make it look and feel nice enough to be marketable.
Unlike many online resume builders which uses an "image" of the resume embedded in the PDF making it impossible for your resume to be read by many company's resume reading software, the PDF my site generates has actual text. Also my site does not collect your resume data and it NEVER leaves your device. The entire resume editing and PDF generation occurs locally on your device. The service DOES NOT contain ads, trackers and other such garbage.
Privacy Policy:
I think these factors help the survival of a Show HN submission. Been running https://cinetrii.com for years.
Sure, it may not reveal all of them, but if that post indexed before, it should be seen.
The show HN did bring a big traffic spike for maybe a week, which brought a lot of dopamine. At this point I thought that I got the ball rolling, but the traffic faded away. After this, promoting the project became more difficult because every other channel brings much less traffic than what you see during the Show HN.
Maybe there is always something like a post-Show-HN depression, either because you got no upvote or because the traffic spike fades away.
The company's gone on to do better than we could have dreamed. We're profitable, paying ourselves well, have hired two people, and have a pretty calm existence (during the pandemic we averaged 25 hours per week).
Three things that helped:
1. Self-funding meant we needed to get to profitability as quick as possible.
2. We targeted a market we understood, where there was demonstrated demand. We weren't trying to invent a new category.
3. Having a co-founder (Jon). We had complimentary strengths (full stack dev for him, marketing and sales for me) that really helped us run fast.
There are many excellent projects posted in Show HN that get no traction (upvotes) at all. And then there a few lucky ones that suddenly take-off and make it to the HN front page.
There's no "wisdom of the crowds" moment that propels one Show HN entry to success over another because it's more worthy or excellent. In many cases it's simply down to random luck: capturing the attention of HN readers at a fortunate moment. Or not.
I checked ten in the most popular and all resolved correctly. When sorting by date, I see a ton of Show HNs posted recently.
I was surprised to see so many Show HNs posted recently, I personally don't see them hardly ever on the front page anymore. Are they no longer shown as much?
Maybe I am overthinking this because I resent advertising disguised as something else.