marketing

What does number 6 on the HN Front Page look like?

What does number 6 on the HN Front Page look like?

I hit Number 6 on Hacker News today.

It was...in short, fucking awesome. Seriously, this is a drug I didn't know I needed.

I made my girlfriend take a picture to commemorate the moment. Then I ate some tacos and poured up a bourbon mule. This was better than $5k hitting my bank account. If I smoked, I'd have lit up a cigarette after to take the edge off.

Earlier today, I wrote a Blog Post on a SaaS business I'd launched a year ago.

I don't even know why I did this. I'd wanted to write about my SaaS business for a while – plus Ghost makes writing fun and easy.

After writing it up, I posted it to a few SaaS Facebook groups, my twitter, LinkedIn and finally Hacker News. I didn't know what to title it so I off-the-cuff wrote: "I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich".

I sat around and watched Google Analytics climb to 30 or so users, then 80, then 10's of users a minute. 150. 160. 200. 220. It spiked at 260. wtf. I learned it was a HN rush around 150 and went to maintain the post and reply to comments.

HN didn't love that Copywriting works:

I did change my destination title because clearly it performed better! Fucking engineers can't understand optimization, smh.

EarlyBrd.io was up and running but got squeezed pretty hard because of some stupid stuff I was doing with Docker containers and Flask...

So I made a site via Carrd.co (affiliate link, I get carrd credit if you buy. Thanks, FTC) and redirected my domain on Cloudflare towards a Mailchimp signup instead. Maybe I could salvage a bit of the traffic.

But then I fucked up the Mailchimp integration on Carrd. ☠️

Oops.

The Fake Out

A few hours after creating my post, things died down a bit. Users dropped to 20 or so and I thought I was done, so I arrogantly made this blog post.

I thought my front page status was gone around 8 pm. But then it climbed back up. Live Users sustained around 80-120 overnight and into the morning. Finally my rank started to drop around 11 am to the second page, third, etc.

All in all, my site received ~15k users.

I tweeted about the event and picked up a few followers and engagements too 😎

Learnings

  • Flex your copywriting skills early on in your title so HN doesn't make fun of you. Or just use descriptive titles, I guess.
  • Test EVERYTHING before sending traffic to it. Really.
  • Make sure your stuff is reliable and fix that funny thing you are doing that could bite you in the ass when you get a hit of traffic
  • Use Cloudflare :-)
  • Use Ghost. This blog runs it and took the spike noooo problem. I imagine it could take more easily.
  • Test everything again. I thought my Carrd.co mailchimp integration worked but then it didn't. I'm dumb sometimes.

I'm going to post this to Hacker News now, maybe it will see the same fate as my prior post. Or maybe I'll get roasted again. I bet either is fun.