In addition to Product Hunt, there is another platform that is also the first choice for many overseas product launches, and that is Hacker News. In this article, the author combines overseas English strategies and his own practical experience, and summarizes the whole process of Hacker News release and the corresponding skills.
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In September 22, I wrote an article about Product Hunt's product release strategy "An article on Product Hunt product cold start", this article should be the earliest comprehensive introduction to Product Hunt's release strategy article in the Chinese area at that time, after all, the matter of going to sea at that time was far less popular than it is now, and there were not so many people who paid attention to going to sea, and even fewer talked about the strategy of going to sea. The effect of this article is also good, searching for Product Hunt keywords in Baidu, currently ranking first in addition to the official website, and many friends also learned about the circle of deep thought for the first time through this article.
Nowadays, the wave of going overseas has basically swept the entire Internet, and Product Hunt has also become the first stop for the cold start release of many overseas products. I recently found a very interesting thing, my article seems to have been "washed" at the end of '23, you can see the comparison chart below:
Of course, there have been a lot of changes in Product Hunt now, and there are many places in the September 22 article that need to be adjusted in a timely manner, including in the overall release idea, I am currently more inclined to operate a good account, accumulate my own ticket base, and then continue to send products, rather than just for a single ranking, because the current problem of Product Hunt ticket swiping is too serious, and there is no way to make full use of the traffic resources of this platform once it is sent. For more of the latest tips, you can see the Product Hunt part of my summary article "Deep Dry Goods|My Year's AI Product Going Overseas" in October last year, and I also plan to release the latest version of the Product Hunt operation guide in June.
In addition to Product Hunt, there is another platform that is also the first choice for many overseas product launches, especially for developer-oriented products, and this platform has more than twice the monthly traffic of Product Hunt, and that is – Hacker News.
In my previous article, "Is the Good Times of AI Wrapper Shell App Making Money Coming to an End?" and "What products are overseas independent developers doing? In the past six months or so, I have been mainly doing two things: one is to be a consultant for projects that have been financed and want to go overseas, helping them find PMF from 0 to 1 and build organic growth channels. The second is to cooperate with some independent developers, I am responsible for product selection and promotion and operation, they are responsible for development and maintenance, and make projects that directly make money overseas. ‘
In the past six months, I have done more than 10 overseas operational growth of different types of AI products, including some developer-oriented products, which are naturally inseparable from the release and promotion of Hacker News.
However, compared to Product Hunt, Hacker News' release strategy in the Chinese region is still very lacking until today, after learning many overseas English strategies and combining my own practical experience, I decided to write an article about the whole process of Hacker News release, which has a lot of skills and experience I have summarized, I hope it can help you.
1. Basic introduction and rules of the platform
First of all, let's understand what kind of platform Hacker News is and what platform rules it has.
Hacker News is a community launched in 2007 by Paul Graham, the founder of the famous incubator Y Combinator, for entrepreneurs and developers, and is currently owned by Y Combinator and managed by Daniel Gackle as an administrator.
Like Product Hunt, Hacker News has become the premier platform for people to publish their products. However, unlike the Product Hunt community, which is mainly focused on product people, Hacker News is mainly focused on developers, so the overall community atmosphere will be more serious, and the content of the community will mainly focus on technology and entrepreneurship, which will involve some social hot news, and the presentation form is only simple text and links.
The whole community is like a content gathering center, the links you submit are various information sources, and then everyone discusses based on these information sources, and the overall feeling of the website will be very similar to the domestic forums more than ten years ago, or even more rudimentary, because there is only text, not even pictures, let alone videos.
In terms of product release, Hacker News is also very different from Product Hunt, you only need to put a product link, a title and a paragraph as a comment to publish the product directly, unlike Product Hunt, which needs to prepare a lot of pictures and video materials.
This may also have a lot to do with the main demographics of both platforms, all the information on Hacker News is the most straightforward, and if you click on the title of any post in the community, it will jump directly to the submitted link instead of opening the post.
But in terms of overall traffic, according to the statistics of SimilarWeb, a data platform, the number of visits per month is about 12 million, which is more than twice that of Product Hunt.
Another difference is the number of posts per day, because the posts on Hacker News are not only product releases, but also a large number of article information posts, and according to statistics, nearly half of the posts on the homepage of the list every day are actually posts that publish articles, not product launches. According to statistics, there are about 1,000 new posts on Hacker News every day.
But in terms of release rules, Hacker News is much stricter than Product Hunt, for example, from the perspective of vote counting rules, the same IP can only be counted as one vote, no matter how many accounts you have, but as long as it is the same IP address, you can count one vote. And if you send the link to the post directly to others or share it on social platforms such as Twitter or LinkedIn to canvass for votes, such votes are completely invalid.
Product HuntAfter the product is released, everyone often shares the release page on their various social platforms, so that everyone can directly click to vote, although there are rumors that it will affect the ranking, but basically the votes are counted.
However, Hacker News does not allow this behavior at all, as long as the vote is made through a direct link, it is not counted, and only the vote clicked in from the community can be counted. And in terms of treating new registered users, Hacker News is also more strict, and the usernames of new registered users who post and comment in the first 14 days will be deliberately marked in green, and voting and posting are most likely not counted.
In addition, like Product Hunt, Hacker News officially prohibits directly inviting people to vote, or even inviting others to comment. According to the official statement, users should take the initiative to find good content in the community, and then they voluntarily vote and comment, if you deliberately invite others to vote and comment, this is pure marketing.
In addition, in terms of duplicate releases, Hacker News does not give a specific interval like Product Hunt, but it is about 1 year, but if your content is exactly the same, it will still be considered a duplicate and deleted directly.
The entire community section of Hacker News is also very concise, mainly divided into new (the latest posts), past (the history of hot posts on the list), comments (the latest comments), ask (when submitting, posts with the title starting with Ask HN will appear in this section, which is the section where the issue is posted), show (when submitting, posts with titles starting with Show HN will appear in this section, which is the section where the product is released) and jobs (Y The Combinator incubator has a list of job postings, as well as hidden sections such as leaders (a list of users with the most points), launches (posts from startups in the YC incubator), noobstories (posts from newly registered users), and noobcomments (comments from newly registered users), among others.
There are only two buttons that can be operated on the page, namely the login button and the submit and publish button. When we submit a product with the Show HN tag, our post will first appear in the "shownew" section, which is a sub-section of show, and there is no link on the homepage, you need to go to the show section first, and then click new to enter. When your post has some likes and comments, it will enter the main section of the show to get more exposure and traffic, and if the post receives votes and comments and performs well, you will have the opportunity to go directly to the homepage, which is also the ultimate goal we want to pursue when publishing.
Let's talk about some basic rules of Hacker News, Hacker News also has a point system like Product Hunt, this point is called "Karma" points, but there are some differences in the calculation method, Hacker News's Karma score is the number of upvotes obtained minus the number of disadvantages, of course, there may be slight differences in the final score, because some upvotes will be judged invalid.
In addition, the ranking of posts is the same as that of Product Hunt, which is mainly based on the number of likes that the post gets, but if your post is flagged or suspected of cheating, it will be directly disranked. In addition to these two basic rules, there are some "unspoken rules" that Hacker News has not officially stated, but still exists, and I will talk about them based on my experience.
When you reach 30 points, you can flag posts or replies that violate the community rules, and if a post is flagged to a certain number, it will be lowered or even canceled, and then it will be tagged with "[flagged]". If your post is deemed problematic by the algorithm or an administrator, it will be tagged with "dead", both of which will cause others to not see your post.
When you reach 250 points, you can customize the color of the page header. When you post a post or comment, you have 2 hours to edit the content of the post, and during that time, you are free to delete the post or comment. Similarly, if you upvote a post, you can cancel the vote within 1 hour, but you can't vote after 1 hour.
In addition, like Reddit, it is also possible to be banned by Shadowbanning on Hacker News, and this ban may be for your account or even the product domain, once you are shadowbanning, all posts made by your account, or posts appearing on the banned domain will be directly tagged with [dead] by the algorithm, and then no one else will be able to see the post. How do I verify that I am being shadowbanned? You need to use another account, turn on the "showdead" function in the settings, and then go back to the list of corresponding sections.
2. Content and Publishing Skills
After introducing the platform and some ground rules of Hacker News, the next step is the most important part of content publishing. First of all, as mentioned in the previous section, Hacker News has almost 1,000 new posts every day, but these posts are not just product releases, it can be said that product releases account for only a small part, and most of them are posts with links to articles. Therefore, there are actually two types of publishing on Hacker News, one is publishing articles, for example, if you write a technical article on the official website blog of the product, you can publish it on Hacker News, and the second is directly publishing products similar to Product Hunt. root
According to statistics, nearly half of the posts that can finally reach the homepage every day are still related to the article, and it is very difficult to directly publish the product to the homepage, so when we choose the type of release, we can consider using an official website blog, and this article is a more dry technical content, and at the same time, the article mentions its own product in the form of curve release.
So how to write such a dry type of article, and at the same time play a role in promoting the product? Here I recommend a writing framework: first start with a problem, then talk about what are the more common solutions to this problem, and then talk about what defects and disadvantages there are in this solution, then you can naturally lead to your product, and then talk about how your product solves this problem.
This is actually a typical process of how we find the direction of the product, and writing such an article is also a best practice to sort out the Product-Market Fit of your product. However, it is important to note that when writing articles according to the above framework, you must write in depth, not just for the sake of framing, the people at Hacker News have a very high ability to distinguish between good and bad content, and they will be more inclined to express themselves directly when commenting, including criticism of you, and there is a clear difference in the community atmosphere from Product Hunt's product release, which is full of encouragement and praise.
Also, it's important to note that you're targeting a developer and that's where Hacker News posts are different, and it's generally recommended to write as plainly as possible on other social media, preferably to your grandparents. But when writing to the developer community, there's a lot of jargon and jargon that should be reflected in the article as much as possible so that they feel like you're one of their own.
In the overall tone of the article, focus on explaining and sharing your own personal experience, such as what problems I encountered, why I made this product and how I made it, instead of using promotional words to say what you can get with my product, or how good the product is, which will only have the opposite effect.
The best way to do this is to show the necessity and benefits of the product through your own personal experience, real cases, and real problems. And here's another very interesting point, because the people you're targeting are developers, and the developers themselves have the ability to develop, so one of the problems you need to face is how to convince developers not to develop themselves, but to choose to use your product directly.
Starting from such a logic, there is a type of article that may have an unexpected effect, that is, a complete description of the whole process of developing the product, especially the technical part, reflecting the difficulty and complexity, on the one hand, you show enough "open source spirit", but at the same time, let other developers know that it is not necessary to develop such a product, this kind of article can have a good effect.
Let's talk about the tips in the process of publishing a post, which is also the most important part. Because unlike Product Hunt, you can showcase your products in all directions through images, videos, and even interactive presentations. Everything on Hacker News is text-only, so you'll have to use the power of words to get people to vote for you. Here's another tip, if you want to attract more comments, you can deliberately leave a small error in the article or the text of the post (i.e., the first comment), and users on Hacker News will immediately leave a comment to correct it, and you can also get more comments from the side.
First of all, according to the characteristics of the crowd to determine the style of your writing, in the previous section we also said, Hacker News main user group is mainly developers, so our style should be simple and direct, remove some decorative and promotional words, especially in the title, many times we send promotional posts always like to use the title to attract everyone to click, which is very effective on Twitter, LinkedIn and some other social media, but must be avoided on Hacker News. Officially, it is even stated in the instruction manual that it is better not to appear in the title even numbers, such as "10 Ways To Do X" should be replaced by "How To Do X", and "14 Amazing Xs" should be replaced by "Xs".
It is also recommended not to mention the name of the website in the title, because the name of the website will be displayed after the title after the publication. If your title has any of the above problems, it may be flagged or even deleted directly, all in all, the core point is simple and direct, don't be afraid to not tell the whole story. The following picture is the title of the 5 best-performing product launch posts in 2023, which can be seen to be very concise and clear for your reference.
Once you've decided on a title, you can also write a piece of text that will serve as the first comment on your post. Generally, if you're posting a blog post, you can leave this text blank. But if you're releasing a product, it's a good idea to follow the framework of writing an article mentioned above: start with the problem, then explain what you did to solve the problem, and then you can further mention what your product is like and how you can solve the problem. Of course, remember to add a brief introduction of your individual or team at the beginning of this main content, and remember to add a sentence at the end to seek everyone's feedback.
Now that we've talked about posting, let's talk about some tips for publishing.
The first is the timing of the release, which is generally recommended to be launched on Tuesday or Thursday morning, but generally speaking, it is not necessary to release at a certain time like Product Hunt. The reason is that as mentioned earlier, Hacker News has more than 1,000 posts a day, and the overall community form is also in the form of forums, and the core key is your content itself.
Once you've published your post, it's time to take the next steps. Generally, I would recommend finding some accounts with higher points in advance to vote and comment at the first time, but remember not to post links directly, and don't switch accounts at the same IP address to vote and comment by yourself, these will be recognized by the algorithm, and then cancel the votes or even delete the post directly.
The way to circumvent this is to ask you to contact the good people in advance, click through to the shownew section, and then find your post to vote and comment. According to my experience, at this stage, you generally need 20~30 people to help like and comment, and then you will enter the new section, continue the operation just now, do not directly post the link, but send the link to this section, and then let you contact the good people to click on the post in the section to vote and comment.
After doing the above, if your articles and posts are good enough and interesting enough, the rest will be left to organic traffic, and the other things you can do are relatively limited. This is very different from the product hunt release day, which requires active canvassing all day, of course, one thing is similar, that is, the comments in the comment area must be actively replied to, and if there are questions, you must also actively interact, which can help improve the activity of the post and attract more people to vote.
Finally, I will share two things that I personally think are very important, one is to increase the points of your account as much as possible, although the official does not clearly state that the score is directly related to whether the post can be on the homepage, but since there is such a mechanism, and the high score is also a trust endorsement for readers who see your post, prompting them to vote.
So how do you accumulate points as quickly as possible? Here is a little trick, remember what we mentioned at the beginning, the Hacker News community is equivalent to an information gathering center, in addition to the articles written by everyone, there are also a large number of the latest hot news, especially technology emergencies, such as a cloud vendor down, a software has been exposed to what vulnerabilities, etc., once there is this kind of news, you can submit a link as soon as possible, and the title can even directly use the title of the news. These kinds of posts are especially easy to get voted on and get on the front page, and you can quickly accumulate points this way.
The second point is that in addition to posting, you can also promote your product through comments, and in the comments, you are allowed to put external links that directly link to your product's homepage. Generally speaking, you can monitor posts related to your product topic in real time by searching for keywords or using some keyword monitoring tools, because as with other social platforms, the newer the post, the earlier the comment, the better the exposure and conversion. There are also certain skills in the content of the review, first of all, it must be based on the content of the post, give your own in-depth thinking, or answer the questions raised in the post, and then bring your own product or related official website blog post at the end.
The above is a summary of the whole process and skills of launching a product on Hacker News, in general, although there are some skills, but in order to achieve a good publicity effect on Hacker News, you still have to rely on the content itself. The skills mentioned in this article are more of a "technique" level, which can help you verify the effect of this channel faster, if you think the effect is good, you still need to really spend time in this community, actively participate in interaction and posting, and slowly you will have a feeling, and there will be an accumulation of relationships, at this time, it is natural to want to be on the homepage, which is a long-term solution.
Columnist
Deep Thinking Circle, Official Account: Deep Thinking Circle, everyone is a product manager columnist. Author of "Fifteen Cool Apps to Play Raspberry Pi", serial entrepreneur. He has worked in education, tools and SaaS and other industries, focusing on the fields of going overseas, SaaS and AIGC, and is good at product, marketing and growth.
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