Now the third thing I want to talk about is Hacker News. 1
Now this is basically a really simple forum that's hosted by YCombinator. 2
And the thing that you realize about and the thing that you realize Hacker News is that it's incredibly 3
technical. 4
So the audience are people who work within tech and are not afraid of tech. 5
And what this means is that usually the things that do well on Hacker News are things that are a little bit more 6
technical than say for example Product Hunt or Beta list. But they do have the section which is called 7
show Hacker News. And this is showing what you've made or what you've created what you've coded up etc. 8
and the lure essentially is that if you do get to the front page of Hacker News i.e./news, if you 9
get up to the top over here, the top 10 even, there is a huge amount of traffic to be had. 10
And it is a huge audience to piggyback off. 11
But the problem with Hacker News is that you thought that trying to launch on Product Hunt with all of 12
the rules I mentioned was hard, 13
Hacker News is even harder. 14
The algorithm is incredibly-- the algorithm is incredibly geared 15
again it's like the sort of vote cartels. 16
So you have to really think very hard about how you're going to appear on there. 17
For example when you submit something new, you need quite a few of upvotes within the first hour to even 18
appear anywhere. 19
So basically if you don't get any of votes within the first hour you're essentially dead in the water. 20
But the other thing is that you can't get your upvotes from the same IP address because you can't get 21
everybody in your office to upvote your product. 22
So you're going to need people who are either geographically or VPNed and with different IP addresses to 23
upvote you. Additionally like the timing really matters. 24
Additionally the timing matters as well as how many comments you get matters. 25
So what I would say is that the algorithm is really difficult to game. 26
But if you do submit something and you get a couple of friends from you know across the world to upvote 27
within the first hour of the submission, then you have a decent chance of getting organic traction. 28
And if at that point then it still doesn't pick up because nobody is interested, then 29
not a lot else can help you. 30
But if it does gain traction and managed to stick up here, then again it's a massive load to traffic 31
and you can pretty much just sit back and watch your downloads grow.