How to get to the top .3% of Show HN

We recently decided to do a Show HN to share Flowglad with the Hacker News community.

It went better than expected. We ended up at nearly 397 points, and 200+ comments. Our post was at various points the top of the front page, and then sat high up on the Show HN charts for much of the next few days. By back of the envelope math, it was among the top .3% of Show HN posts of the past year [0].

We want to share what worked, what didn’t, and what we’d change if we got to do it all over again.

TL;DR

• Read the official tips + rules for Show HN

• Stay on top of comments using hnreplies.com. Embrace feedback with charitable, open arms

• If you’re OSS, include your license(s) in the body of the post to clear up any confusion

• Record a demo video. Seriously ask yourself: if you were a stranger on the internet, would you understand it and want to watch it to the end?

• Study past successful Show / Launch HNs (see list we drew on for inspiration below)

The Results

It went better than we could have imagined. Our Github stars almost tripled, from ~470 to ~1350.

We had our biggest week of signups yet, by far.

But most valuably, we sparked a discussion that spanned 200+ comments. In it we watched as the most famously critical forum of engineers on the internet tear into our value proposition.

Some really clear feedback came in - the exact kind we were looking for:

• We needed to more clearly explain how we moved money, and how we were more than a wrapper of an existing payment processor

• We needed to tell our license story up front. Multiple people thought we weren’t actually open source until we showed them our licenses are AGPL

Studying Past Successful Show HNs

We knew we wanted feedback from the developer community, so we looked at other startups who had debuted via Show HN. We wanted to see what was most effective at gathering feedback.

• Trigger.dev’s Show HN

• PostHog’s Launch HN

• Clerk’s Show HN

• HelixDB’s Show HN

These posts gave us a frame of reference: for how to tell our story to Hacker News, and how to engage the community as developers gave their feedback.

Recording a Demo Video

This one mattered a lot… but not for the reason you’d expect. Yes, a demo video will show your product to users curious enough to click “Play” but not “Sign Up”. But more importantly, it will force you to answer an important, hard question:

If a stranger on the internet saw your demo, would they 1) understand what your product does and 2) feel like watching it had been worth their time?

If you can’t answer “yes” to both of these questions, you’re probably not there yet. We ended up pushing back our launch by 10 days because we felt the demo was underwhelming. But after some iterating, we knew we were ready when we had a video with a title that wrote itself: “Integrating Payments with Only Copy, Paste, and Enter”.

Staying on top of comments

Staying on top of the comment threads made it clear that we wanted feedback and were ready to embrace it in the spirit in which it was given.

HN Replies was a lifesaver for this. It notifies you whenever someone replies to your comment (or post): https://hnreplies.com. Once we were properly on top of our replies, we had to simply accept good feedback, even if it was extremely direct.

Highlight our OSS Licenses More Prominently

A lot of the comments were feedback about our messaging rather than the substance of our product. Partly because devs on Hacker News are really particular about products that market themselves as “open source” but actually don’t meet the definition.

Thankfully, Flowglad is distributed under standard OSS licenses: AGPLv3 for the SaaS, and MIT for the the rest. We had a lot of people saying we weren’t open source who didn’t look at the repo. To make everyone’s lives easier, we should have stated our OSS license in the body of the post. Trigger.dev did this and I can’t help but feel it’s a huge part of why they were so successful.

Watch Out for Post Formatting

This one’s silly, but if it tripped us up it might trip you up, too. If you’re going to use bullet-point lists, just know that HN requires them to be formatted double-spaced between bullet points, e.g. - foo...\\n\\n- bar...\\n\\n- baz... . This will look weird if you’re drafting your post in Notion. We single-spaced our bullet points and it made our list come out like one big paragraph.

What’s Next

Now that we have all this great feedback, and a community growing around our product, it’s time to deliver on our promise: painless, solid-state webhooks!

[0] It was among the top ~100 Show HNs of the past year. And judging by the past week of Show HN submissions (the largest timespan for which we can see a full set in the search results), there are about 36,500 Show HN posts annually.