
Behind the scenes of a failed Hacker News launch - martin-adams
https://meda.io/blog/startup/2016/05/22/behind-the-scenes-of-a-failed-hacker-news-launch.html
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brudgers
Looking at the previous submission, I found the text more compelling than the
video: unsurprising me because editing is really hard and very time consuming
relative to editing text or even audio. Video is linear and text with headings
is more of tree and hence can surface an explicit hierarchy for conceptual
importance, summaries, etc to the user/reader.

My take on launching via Hacker News is that for a vlog or even a blog,
there's high impedance. Recognition is fickle; one popular submission poorly
correlates to the popularity of the next and subsequent submissions; and even
the most popular items fade quickly.

My intuition is that serial content, like many things, tends to obtain
overnight success "after ten years of hard work" and that blogs and vlogs
become successful one reader/viewer at a time.

It might be worth looking at Jeff Meyerson's softwareengineeringdaily as a
peer study in the space. It's a fairly recent enterprise based on regular
content that might be of interest to the Hacker News community. That said,
he's focused promotion efforts mostly elsewhere. My impression is that over
the years, Hacker News has fewer and fewer sources where every piece of new
content stands a high chance of popularity.

Anyway, good luck.

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martin-adams
Thank you, I really appreciate you taking the time to respond.

Your observation over text and video is really great. You're absolutely right
that video is too linear. I will consider carefully the use of video.

I will definitely check out softwareengineerdaily. You're right that building
and audience happens one at a time. This is reassuring to me as it means I can
focus on the long term.

All in all, this is a valuable learning exercise, and it's feedback like this
which is invaluable.

Thank you.

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e-sushi
I like this… turning a (let’s just call it) “fail” into the “breeding ground
of something new”.

