Aren't Show HNs supposed to link to the actual product for people to play with, not a blog post about making money? There's nothing wrong with sharing wins here, or new products. But it feels 'off' to me to see a Show HN next to a braggy blog title (I'm used to seeing plenty of either on their own, though!).
In this case, I want to show the journey and the story more than the product, and want to let people know I'm available for any questions like other Show HN posts.
(I don't think the product itself is very interesting for the HN crowd)
IMHO, "Show HN" is to show your creations. You should put the title without "Show HN" when you're linking to a blog post, even if it is about a product that you've created.
On the "Show HN" page that shows all the Show HNs, there is a link in the top to the rules for Show HN, in case you've missed it. It's pointing to https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
TLDR is:
> Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread.
> Off topic: blog posts, sign-up pages, newsletters, lists, and other reading material. Those can't be tried out, so can't be Show HNs. Make a regular submission instead.
I see another post sharing their success micro startups today on HN so I thought I should share mine.
I started working on this browser extension for Twitter 8 months ago.
It took 3 months to reach $60/mo, 3 more to reach $400/mo, and 2 more to reach $3K/mo – where I am now.
When I start, I had 0 followers on Twitter. When it reaches $400/mo, I quit my job. I now live freely from corporate drama and travel as much as I can while building products I love.
I share my entire journey publicly on Twitter and my newsletter, including revenue, stats, product launch process, and marketing strategies, etc.
I just want to say that opportunities are everywhere, and it's never easier to start a profitable micro startup to sustain yourself and live an independent life.
Good question!! - there is definitely a market for a product for automatically capturing UI screenshots and demos on every UI release, with a permalink usable in documentation that will always show the latest image / video. Could be driven by an existing automated test framework. I know this as a web UI product owner with several years experience in enterprise software doing documentation updates after new features are added.
Hate to be the party pooper, but the fact that you could talk about nothing but marketing and money and never spend a single word telling us what the software even does, speaks volumes on where your priorities lie. I am left with the impression that the software probably does nothing special, or even useful, and if I ever have any issues with it or suggestions for improvement, I will probably be completely ignored unless I come up with a way it would make you more money. I find it strange that this type of personality even calls themselves a hacker.
I do have some links in the post that link to the product, but yeah I agree the context is a bit vague for the HN crowd. I added a small notice to the post hopefully to fix it.
FYI, I'm not trying to promote the product, it's the story I want to share.
I really appreciate you taking your chances and building something for yourself and being able the live off of it is even better. I'd call it "hack your life" ;) and find Timwi's reaction overly negative.
I also share the feeling it could have been a Tell HN instead of a Show HN.
But let's be honest, of course you want to promote your product. It's not a bad thing to admit that.
I'm a little suspicious that this could be marketing by one of those guys that message extension authors to sell their user's data. Kind of a, hey look, you could be making money. Why don't you say yes the next time I message you.
Something I’ve noticed in many of these threads showcasing successful products is that they all focus on marketing. Advertising software, analytics software, etc. I rarely (never?) see any one post about their successful non marketing solution.
Selling more sales (aka marketing) is the ultimate value proposition. Google and FB print money because they call up business and say “Pay us $$ and we’ll give you $$$”.
I wonder how much of it is a zero sum game. Some amount of advertising would induce impulse purchase but surely some of it like marketing for a plumber just causes sales to be redirected to the one who spent the most on marketing rather than actually creating new sales.
Maybe people who think about marketing problems, tend to have more marketing knowledge and are better at marketing their own products and are people more likely to post on websites like this promoting their products.
I know I have folders and folders of unmarketed products.
I don't think it's about marketing. I think it's because it solves an immediate problem or gives people something that they want and as it happens, the opportunities for the folks at HN or Producthunt are in that area because it's not a solved problem unlike things like developer tools, messaging or e-mail.
Think about it, what makes you funny inside? Knowing more about people or sending messages through slightly different UI?
Maybe a wild guess, but anything thats not related to ads/marketing/analytics etc., are too difficult to monetize by a solo founder ? Or maybe the other areas too difficult to get into not just in terms of software complexity, but in terms of support requirement , availability SLAs etc ?
It's an interesting platform approach - create a browser extension aimed at enhancing / integrating into a single page - there must be a large number of individual targets - every enterprise saas?
Readit News
In this case, I want to show the journey and the story more than the product, and want to let people know I'm available for any questions like other Show HN posts.
(I don't think the product itself is very interesting for the HN crowd)
TLDR is:
> Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread.
> Off topic: blog posts, sign-up pages, newsletters, lists, and other reading material. Those can't be tried out, so can't be Show HNs. Make a regular submission instead.
Dead Comment
Maybe the title is misleading but totally deserves the upvotes, comments and attention. Just one more click away from the product is not a big deal...
I see another post sharing their success micro startups today on HN so I thought I should share mine.
I started working on this browser extension for Twitter 8 months ago.
It took 3 months to reach $60/mo, 3 more to reach $400/mo, and 2 more to reach $3K/mo – where I am now.
When I start, I had 0 followers on Twitter. When it reaches $400/mo, I quit my job. I now live freely from corporate drama and travel as much as I can while building products I love.
I share my entire journey publicly on Twitter and my newsletter, including revenue, stats, product launch process, and marketing strategies, etc.
I just want to say that opportunities are everywhere, and it's never easier to start a profitable micro startup to sustain yourself and live an independent life.
Cheers!
Good luck!
Congrats on the early growth and best of luck. What a great product - I’ll be looking out for your post on how you built your 13.9k audience!
I used to work on frontend/backend/mobile/devops, so I have the advantage of doing everything on my own.
Thanks for the kind words! I'll write another piece about my audience building journey soon!
How do you generate those and keep them up to date though ?
Congrats for your success
I recorded every single feature with LICECap and update them manually.
More details here: https://tdinh.notion.site/Every-pricing-page-should-have-GIF...
On average, I send 3 requests/minute/user to Twitter API.
> I finally have the confidence to take things a bit slowly, take care more of myself, and go on this vacation I really need.
On top of that we don't know what else the money will help with (maybe they have an aging parent to take care of, we don't know).
Your comment reads in a very overyly negative tone to me when the article seems to purposely exist to go over the financial aspect of the product.
I do have some links in the post that link to the product, but yeah I agree the context is a bit vague for the HN crowd. I added a small notice to the post hopefully to fix it.
FYI, I'm not trying to promote the product, it's the story I want to share.
Cheers!
I also share the feeling it could have been a Tell HN instead of a Show HN.
But let's be honest, of course you want to promote your product. It's not a bad thing to admit that.
There may be some wizards (or con-men) that can multiply a zero in a greater value, but that's not the norm for sure.
At the end you can have a great product even without marketing, but usually not the other way around.
I know I have folders and folders of unmarketed products.
Think about it, what makes you funny inside? Knowing more about people or sending messages through slightly different UI?
I don't care what others tell you. All it takes is 1 more click to check out your whole product.
You are providing value to those who use twitter heavily and don't get enough data from twitter to take meaningful action.
Similarly I find Instagram to provide very basic analytics / data, do you want to collab on creating something similar for Instagram or snap?
This post should really link to the product, not the blog post.
And it may even work for cross site integration?