4 Learnings from our first (and failed) Hacker News launch
Published in
2 min readJan 18, 2017
Well, that didn’t go so well…
We were just (trying to) launch our WorldBrain (Re)search-Engine on Hackernews, a website collecting interesting links that are up- and downvoted on a single list by the community.
With 200.000 daily visitors, mainly in the tech industry, not a bad place to promote the launch for your open-source software.
So what lands on the front page has a pretty good potential to get a lot of views — and we wanted to be on that front page sooo badly!
Well, thats possible, if you don’t make the mistakes we did.
- DONT ASK PEOPLE TO UPVOTE FOR YOU
It’s too much hassle and has too little effect. Just write a descriptive title and have something cool to show. The community will do the rest.
I would just say, Hacker News is far too long in the game of detecting voting rings…(Its just what happened to us, even though we were just 7 people) - Have someone with a lot of karma posting the link
if you have a clean account (guilty as charged) then your post will not get traction even with enough points to get to the front page.
We had 14 before they kicked us out and didn’t even make it there. Others landed there with just 6 upvotes from a person with 5000 karma points. - Don’t post the request to vote on social media
as nice as it is from your friends and followers to help you by signing up and voting, this is exactly leading to the voting ring detection, because your friends will vote with a totally fresh account. Pretty obvious…
(Sorry guys) - Use a skimmable and interesting title
Ours was initially:
Chrome Extension to full-text search your browsing history, bookmarks & PDFs
You probably finished a cigarette while reading this. Too long!
Some good resources to read to prepare your first launch:
