Wow, 17000 visitors and only 100 installs.<p>With a web app, and a link directly to it, all 17000 visitors would have tried it. That's 170 times more. Staggering.<p>One of the reasons I prefer web apps and recently started adding the benefits of progressive web apps to my sites.
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!).<p>- Made it to #10 or thereabouts, and hung around on the front page for ~2 hours<p>- 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<p>- 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)<p>- 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)<p>- Getting onto the front page was hard work! You can see from my submissions[2] how many times I tried!<p>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.<p>-----<p>[1] Original post: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15953694" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15953694</a><p>[2] My submissions: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=greysteil" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=greysteil</a>
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.
Hacker News is in a big part responsible for the success of my Open Source project.<p>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).<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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?
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.<p>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.
Related: I wrote this post showing the number of stars that GitHub projects get after being featured on the HN front page:<p>- <a href="https://medium.com/google-cloud/big-data-stories-in-seconds-hacker-news-abe52bc5caad" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/google-cloud/big-data-stories-in-seconds-...</a>
Here were my results from being on the top of HackerNews for a day: <a href="https://imgur.com/a/CeOJ974" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/CeOJ974</a><p>8% of visitors signed up (goal 1). Numbers before were fewer than 5 visitors a day with ~0 signups.
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.<p>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.