
What Being on the Front Page of Hacker News Does to Your Indie App - burritofanatic
https://hackernewslater.com/posts/post-launch-front-page-hn/
======
TekMol
Wow, 17000 visitors and only 100 installs.

With a web app, and a link directly to it, all 17000 visitors would have tried
it. That's 170 times more. Staggering.

One of the reasons I prefer web apps and recently started adding the benefits
of progressive web apps to my sites.

~~~
kitsunesoba
Doubtful. For many types of apps, the moment I catch wind that it’s a web app,
I close the window. I have no need for anything that adds to my already sky
high pile of tabs.

~~~
jondubois
Yes, I've been prompted by Reddit to download the app many, many times (to the
point that it's basically brainwashing), yet I've closed it every single time.
It's annoying actually.

The web app is great, I don't know why they want me to fill up my phone's hard
drive with another useless app.

~~~
scarface74
The Reddit app for iOS is 55.8MB. Not exactly a bloated app.

~~~
masonic
For perspective, imagine installing such a low-utility program spanning _39_
high-density 1.44MB diskettes... and considering that _not_ bloated.

(Isn't that more than the entire original Linux distributions from the
copyfest era?)

~~~
scarface74
That reminds me, imagine installing it on my first Mac with an 80MB hard
drive. My entire SoftPC install with a disk image was only about 10MB.

And Windows 95 was only 55MB install.

[https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/1060820-how-big-were-
the-...](https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/1060820-how-big-were-the-
different-windows-versions-95-19-mb/)

------
greysteil
I had a similar experience getting Dependabot onto the front page of HN as a
"Show HN"[1], all be it with less attention than this post (congrats on
that!).

\- Made it to #10 or thereabouts, and hung around on the front page for ~2
hours

\- Got around 10 (free) signups directly from it on the day. At the time we
were averaging 10 signups a day, so it doubled that day's attention

\- Lots of encouraging feedback, which was great, and a good gauge of what
(very) prospective customers might be interested in. No substitute for the
learning from direct "sales", though (even when giving the product away for
free)

\- Harder to measure the long-term awareness effect, but people very rarely
mention they saw Dependabot on HN (they're much more likely to have seen it
working on an open source repo)

\- Getting onto the front page was hard work! You can see from my
submissions[2] how many times I tried!

Overall my advice to anyone with an indie app would be to do the hard work of
selling / building word-of-mouth referrals. Working on marketing-style blog
posts looks easy and effective when you see others doing it, but very few
people talk about the numbers that come out of it, and all of the "misses"
where your content isn't picked up at all.

\-----

[1] Original post:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15953694](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15953694)

[2] My submissions:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=greysteil](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=greysteil)

------
encoderer
I like sharing what I’ve learned from building Cronitor with the HN community
and have been fortunate to be on the front page a few times but honestly I
think this website has generated more clones than customers. I’m sticking with
it though and plan to make up my losses on volume.

------
jondubois
Hacker News is in a big part responsible for the success of my Open Source
project.

I posted a screenshot with a one line caption on Reddit one evening then went
to bed. The next morning, I noticed that my project had a lot of stars (it
went from like 10 to 500 overnight) and I noticed that the numbers kept going
up every time I refreshed the page. Then I found out that all the traffic was
coming from news.ycombinator.com (not Reddit as I was thinking).

When I got to work that morning, I asked my colleague what Hacker News was and
I told him about my GitHub stars. He was shocked when he saw my project on the
front page on HN. By his face I understood that it was like winning the
lottery.

My open source project is still doing well almost 5 years later so I can say
that it was a really big deal in my case. Getting all those GitHub stars
helped to create trust at the beginning and gain adoption.

------
minimaxir
A rule of thumb for Hacker News submissions used to be that when getting to
the front page, every score point translates to about 100 sessions/pageviews.
In this case (17000 sessions for a 315 point submission), it was only about
half that ratio.

That new ratio has been the case for a few of my recent submissions as well. I
wonder if something changed in the HN demo?

~~~
dec0dedab0de
If I had to guess I would say that the changes a while back that made
submissions linger on the front page have made the site less addictive. So
there are less users constantly checking to make sure they don't miss out on
something.

------
CM30
Hmm, 100 installs for 17,000 sessions. Seems kinda low, though it maps pretty
well to the old 1% rule, with 0.5% of those who visited seemingly installing
the app.

Still, I do wonder how it compares to other apps/sites advertised here.
Personally, I'd guess that targeting Hacker News users in particular will get
you more traffic/points/signups than advertising a normal app or startup here
might. That seems to be the rule with 'companion' sites and apps these days.

~~~
ben_jones
I'd love to see that in the context of mobile/desktop visitors. My hunch is
that HN has a disproportionately high number of desktop users (when compared
to other "news" sites) and that there is a very high bar for a desktop user to
pull out their phone and download a mobile app as opposed to a web app that
incorporates an oauth based registration option.

The mobile app experience of a) downloading the app and b) going through a
potentially lengthy registration process using a mobile keyboard - is a big
turnoff imo.

~~~
briandear
I might be an anomaly, but I only read HN on mobile, usually when I am waiting
for something. If I am at my desktop, I have real work to do while on mobile,
I am usually passing time waiting on something or another.

------
fhoffa
Related: I wrote this post showing the number of stars that GitHub projects
get after being featured on the HN front page:

\- [https://medium.com/google-cloud/big-data-stories-in-
seconds-...](https://medium.com/google-cloud/big-data-stories-in-seconds-
hacker-news-abe52bc5caad)

------
slashblake
Here were my results from being on the top of HackerNews for a day:
[https://imgur.com/a/CeOJ974](https://imgur.com/a/CeOJ974)

8% of visitors signed up (goal 1). Numbers before were fewer than 5 visitors a
day with ~0 signups.

------
mousebite
why not just use a text file?? or... paper

------
pwaai
I gave up trying to land the front page on HN. It just doesn't have the same
quality of traffic or discussions from 5~6 years ago when HN was at it's peak.

What's more there are a lot of false positives in the comment sections from a
demographic that isn't 100% representative of your target market.

~~~
gxs
That's quite a claim without numbers.

It looks like part of the point of this post is to illuminate/explore that
hypothesis. Or, is that how you're interpreting his findings?

~~~
pwaai
100 installs from 10,000 visitors for starters.

~~~
jenoer
I think most visitors, like myself, visit a lot of these posted links to read
up on the project/end-result, out of curiosity and for expanding my knowledge
on various subjects.

