The impact of appearing on HN’s front page and the secret of getting there

My latest blog post (about developing apps for iOS 7 only) has been quite popular, probably my most read post ever. It is definitely not the best I’ve written.

I posted it to Hacker News and two hours laters it got 39 upvotes and 17 comments and went straight to the HN first page ranked at number 4.

Wow! That we awesome! I fired Google Analytics to see what the impact of it will be:

That was 339 people reading my blog post Right Now! That’s amazing! I usually open the real-time analytics to find 6-7 people at a time.

I waited to get the full statistics on the number of Unique Visitors to my blog post:

As you can see, most of the time my blog isn’t very popular, but this blog post on HN managed to bring more than 20,000 different people to read it (in both days it was popular).

Only 10 readers signed up for the site’s newsletter (Thanks guys!), which is pretty small, but I still enjoyed any reader who read and commented on it.

The Secret

If you made it this far, you probably are wondering what’s the secret of making it on HN and ranking on the first page.

The secret is… Unknown.

Yes. I have no idea what made this post popular and why other stuff I write didn’t attract the HN folks.

I did no gaming of HN, didn’t ask friends to upvote or anything special. Just posted it and the HN community liked it and upvoted it.

One thing I did do is edit the title of the post to sound more interesting than it initially was. The original name was “Porting iOS 3 app to iOS 7” — which probably sounds boring. The post was finally named “iOS 7 only is the only sane thing to do” which is one of the quotes I used in the blog post.

As always, the secret is to write great content, use a good title, mix in some luck and keep refreshing HN to see what happens.