
How to get your startup on Hacker News - swombat
http://swombat.com/2011/1/13/how-to-get-your-startup-on-hacker-news
======
edw519
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.

------
pg
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.

~~~
mindcrime
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>

~~~
geuis
I don't think you can put hard definitions on it. HN is more like a village
where people come and go, and some people of a certain mindset decide to
settle. Anyone is welcome to move in, but acceptance into the village is based
on your interactions. Being a nice neighbor, as it were. Lots of communication
in the form of quality submissions and comments are principle. Karma score
isn't as important.

~~~
mindcrime
Sure, and I should have said that I would only have expected a "ballpark
range" answer. I think something like this is always going to have some
fuzziness to it, especially if pg (or whoever else has power to kill posts) is
making a kill/no-kill decision on a one off basis, as opposed to having it
done by an algorithm.

Just curious to get a rough feel, that's all. I mean, take myself... my
account is 1013 days old, and my karma is > 500, but subjectively, I still
think of myself as being a newb around here. I'd probably post a "Rate my
Startup" thread if I had something ready to go, but I'd probably say that I
feel just barely qualified to do so.

------
DanielBMarkham
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
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
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. :)

------
mmelin
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.

~~~
duck
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.

------
scrrr
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
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
This is great advice.

When I created <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
"Sleepyti.me is provided as a free service"

Curious about how it's earning money (unless you mean a different site)

~~~
danielh
Probably through the ads that are shown once you submit the form.

~~~
alex_c
Ah, wasn't seeing any ads (disabled AdBlock, and I still don't).

------
noahlt
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
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
There's always QuietURL for Firefox, which converts text to a link when you
hover over it.

It's nice to have.

~~~
noahlt
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
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.

------
HeyLaughingBoy
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
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
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.

------
thewordpainter
@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
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.

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

------
3am
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?

------
yosho
The one thing I really got out of this article is that HN has a IRC channel,
that's awesome.

<http://webchat.freenode.net/> join #startups

I'm totally idling there from now on.

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

------
NathanC
thank you.

I just realized I did it wrong earlier this morning with this post.
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2099538>

Do you think it would be ok to resubmit in a proper way next week ?

~~~
swombat
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...

------
foljs
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.

