I like to think it was a Show HN, about a remote isolated browser product, but actually I found that spikes in sales came more often after I made some random comment that showed I'm an expert in that tech, not trying to sell something. What I found is that comments, not posts, led more reliably to inbound sales interest that converted into revenue.
About 5 years back, I submitted a collection of awk one-liners (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15549318). The response I received was one of the reasons I started writing ebooks about a year later. Since then I've done Show HN posts for my ebooks and many of them reached front page too. I give them away for free during release (but readers can still pay) and I've gotten significant sales as a result.
And as mentioned by graderjs, I've also had good sales when I link to my ebooks in relevant discussions.
By the way, for anyone watching, PLEASE do have the "option to pay" and various amounts, too! Many free resources I've found have helped greatly at work, and work is quite willing to pay for them as long as I can generate a reasonable looking receipt for it (e.g., $50-100 for a book is fine, $50-100 for "PATREON - BIG JOE" is a harder sell).
This looks cool but I would expect a big section on the home page about why I should trust you and upload my bank statements on your website.
I don't doubt that it works but I'm frankly amazed that people have paid for this service and happily uploaded such sensitive documents without any kind of reassurance (hell even just some plain old marketing)
I agree with you on that, a few customers have called me up to make sure I'm not a criminal. It doesn't seem to be an issue for 99% of my users though. I don't do anything with the documents or data in them, they get deleted quickly and automatically as well.
I later repeated it after hearing (again on hn) a rumor of another spectre-related Intel bug. This one did not make a splash in the markets. As I was ready to give up and pull out my options play, I happened to be delayed due to international travel, Intels's CEO resigned (due to having sex with his wife). The stock tanked even harder, and I made 3x what I made off of spectre.
I learned my lesson on market rationality that day. Not a bad lesson to learn
He resigned due to having sex with his wife? In some marriages it may be an unusual occurrence, but I’m not sure why you’d have to resign because of it.
It was worded to be funny. He had had an affair with his now wife at a time when she was quasi? (Iirc) under him in the chain of command, which was against company policy, so yeah a firable offense, if, uh, a bit late.
I think that it is not unreasonable to speculate that was the reason they gave and not the "real" reason for firing.
Just reading this site and participating in the comments have made me money, indirectly. It is like the colleagues I do not have, so I am able to keep up with the new things here. Amazing. Like a real time Scientific American & Wired crossover BBS, where we're the players...
Seven years ago, I started a blog called The Pragmatic Engineer. For three months, I wrote a post every two-three weeks. But no one really read them. So I took a short break, which break turned into a month, then another, another… and I did not have motivation to write. Barely anyone read it, after all.
A few months after starting the blog, I saw a small traffic spike - maybe 30 visitors - from this site called Hacker News after a submission [1]. I never heard about HN before but it looked interesting so I started to visit it, and eventually registered to upvote stories I like.
Then, another few months later - when I had not published anything for 3-4 months - as I was checking out HN, I could not believe what I saw: a months-old post of mine was on the front page titled “Move Fast Without Breaking Things”. Traffic was so high, my site could barely keep up on shared hosting with MediaTemple, my blog running Wordpress.
There were 50+ comments discussing my post, versus the 2 that were on the blog itself (it had a commenting system). The comments were more insightful than I’ve ever seen for any of my blog posts. This was the HN post [2].
Now, this post did not “make me money”. But it WAS a turning point where I got validation that strangers on the internet find what I wrote interesting. And it gave me a motivation to write when no one read it, knowing that just because people are not interested in what I wrote today, people might find it interesting months or years later.
I kept writing my blog for years. Eventually, this blog served as the basis of The Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter which I launched a year ago, and which is my new fulltime job and one of the most popular technology newsletters with over 120,000 people reading it. More than enough people chose to pay for it to make this a a viable fulltime career on the long run.
Thank you, Hacker News, for those first two submissions, all the comments, and the motivation it gave to keep writing. It was a turning point. I still remember how I could barely believe in March 2016 that so many people I never met can be interested in reading thoughts I put in writing.
I've experienced the same thing. Blog posts I wrote almost 10 years ago are still getting traffic to this day. Sure, it's only 4-10 views per day (which is still thousands of views per year!) but sometimes it'll get referred by someone else's blog and there will be thousands of views over the course of a week or so. It's been fascinating watching this process over the years.
This is the part of evergreen content that is often lost in the hustle and bustle of "latest posts" - I have a very crappy blog I mainly used as notes to myself on certain things, but posts still get hits and comments literally decades later.
Similar. People actually reading and discussing your work is highly motivating to keep doing it.
I'm in the middle of a security and antifraud series now, motivated entirely by Brian Krebs [1] retweeting me after the Experian breach. The articles have gotten essentially zero traction on HN, but I'm having fun writing them and seeing them get attention on other avenues.
I've been writing off an on for years now, thanks largely to the motivation that getting on the HN front page [2] gave me back in 2014.
At some point, I think I would like to attempt to monetize my writing but I get enough enjoyment from doing it that I haven't ever bothered.
I had a similar experience. I would write whatever I felt like writing and put it up on my blog, but the first real appreciation I got was on reddit and later HN.
This doesn't make me any money, because I don't monetize my blog. But having people read, critique and enjoy my writing has given me immense satisfaction over the years. Can't put a price on that.
Thank you for your insightful articles and shedding more light on compensation data in europe! Your tri-modal article has been particularly well received!
Who wants to be hired thread got me a nice little raise and the general knowledge/info that I see on HN make a difference in my job. I've got my finger on the pulse of the industry and there are many languages/frameworks/concepts that I first learned about reading HN that I use in my job. Sometimes I spend too much time here but overall HN is a net positive for me and introduces me to things that I wouldn't see elsewhere, even on the tech-related subreddits.
I didn't even think to check back on it until during a meeting I noticed my inbox was suddenly filling up :) I was astonished and inspired by the response, and haven't stopped working on it since!
Wow, good eye! I see you're one of the OG people who tried it out. If there's still a product area you'd like to see fleshed out more, do let me know. It's been a whirlwind of a year trying to maintain a high development velocity as a solo dev working on nights/weekends, but in the grand scheme of things it's easy to do when you love what you're building.
Before this, that was me. In fact, PL originally started as just a spreadsheet I shared around with a few friends, but as I added more to that it became exponentially more difficult to maintain. All the formulas got really nasty, which made it super opaque how everything actually worked. Eventually I realized there must be a better way!
Glad to hear someone likes the email updates! Usually it feels like sending those into the void. If you ever want to beta test and help shape new features before they make it to production, I post to #early-access in the discord fairly often during the dev process.
I'm a new grad who's starting his first big boy job tomorrow.
Finding Projection Lab in that first Projectifi post was transformative for me! It helped more than anything else to understand my potential financial future. I've used it when comparing potential jobs, lifestyles, locations. It's been incredibly valuable to me.
I have quite a few friends who have become fans of the tool as well. And I used it to show some friends that yes they can retire with some smart early decisions!
So thank you! I'm glad you posted it on HN and kept up development. I plan to keep using Projection Lab indefinitely to better understand my finances as they develop.
And I do subscribe to the newsletter as well! :) It serves as a nice reminder to check-in.
That's awesome. Makes me happy to hear it's helped others weigh the same kind of decisions that I have. At this point it still feels like a pipe dream to one day be able to go full-time on it, but either way the plan is to keep making it better and better (no shortage of ideas!). Ironically, I'm sure grinding leetcode instead and switching to FAANG would result in much better projections in PL for myself; but sometimes I think it's more about what keeps you energized and passionate than what optimizes total comp.
I'm a huge fan of ProjectionLab (good call on the name change)! I had just had a windfall from an old employer's IPO. Not life-changing, but enough that "save as much as I can and hope for the best when I hit retirement age" was no longer the only option. I was looking for tools to help me plot out some scenarios and the only options I could find were:
1. 5-input 'retirement calculators' that various sites had up as lead-gen tools
2. Build a complex and bug-riddled model in a spreadsheet
3. Pay for a financial planner to plug my situation into their spreadsheet
I saw ProjectionLab on HN, though, and it was exactly what I was looking for. The end result I cam up with was good, but even just playing around with the modeling helped me build up a much better intuition than I'd started with. Thanks for your work, and I'm glad you stuck with it!
Thanks for sharing your experience! I agonized over that name change for so long that I even built a custom name generator and availability checker to run through all the permutations of relevant words, themes, prefixes, suffixes, etc... all to end up coming back to one of the first ideas from my initial brainstorming session XD
You touch on something I've noticed as well; that if you play around with models like this long enough, your intuitions start to become noticeably more refined. I can tell the way I think about finance has definitely evolved throughout the course of building the tool.
Everyone is posting anecdotes. My anecdote is that it hasn't made me any money. The number of commenters on this post is much less than the overall number of users on HN. I see no evidence against my statements either.
"HN posts have made people money directly AND indirectly."
This doesn't negate my claim. Some people do make money on here. I feel that number is very low.
This thread was made 2 hours ago, it's 745AM in silicon valley, where majority of people on this site are at... Don't expect it to explode so fast with people sharing.
The difference between your anecdotes and everyone else's is they aren't saying "Well only 6 people replied to this thread in the first hour and a half, therefore I claim nobody has made money from HN"
"in silicon valley, where majority of people on this site are at"
Do you have a source? I find it hard to believe that even 51% are in SV.
The second paragraph is a gross misrepresention of my position. And it seems you're implying that as more people wake up, this will somehow prove that the majority of HN users have made money on posts here... which isn't any different the (misrepresented) argument that you were just complaining about.
I'll wait for you to provide some actual evidence that 51% of users have directly or indirectly made money on posts here.
> Edit: Why disagree without reply? Most of us (even on HN) are just normal devs and nothing we do on here will make us money.
Because your personal anecdote of "Nope." doesn't really add much value to the thread, and the second sentence is an assumption (so it may not even be correct), and either way, it also doesn't really contribute to the discussion.
I'm not sure how someone who hasn't had that experience would elaborate on it. The point is that not everyone makes money on these posts. The way the question was worded indicates that those who didn't make money are still welcome to answer.
The fact that it (at least at the time) was the only response about not making money does add to the conversation, as prior to that the conversation was very one sided. So all you're really hearing is how some people made money, but it's not accurately representing how many people do or don't make money on here. I would like to see responses by other normal devs saying they did or did not make money on here since that can give insight into the assumption to determine what kinds of people benefit. Or perhaps I'm looking for too deep of a discussion?
I guess, as the title (What HN post made you money?) implies, it's looking more for responses from those that made money from HN posts, vs. a poll with a title more along the lines of "Have you made money from an HN post?".
I'm sure there are several that haven't made money from HN posts, but I'd imagine there's not much to discuss around that, other than just collecting raw numbers.
Unless some can offer discussion around how they tried and failed to do that, but again, the title doesn't really suggest that sort of discussion.
Not sure if saving money counts here, but several years ago, some HN comment linked the MMM blog, from which I learned about the importance of investing and specifically index funds.
I had a similar experience through the Bogleheads, for which I'm still grateful. Haven't entirely succeeded on FIRE, but I'm much better off than I could have been.
With questions like 'What HN post made you money?' being tossed around, I'd expect a rapid increase in Show HN. It could get out of hand and ruin it for everyone.
I am a UX/UI designer, currently working as a freelanceer. Once I got inspired and wrote a somewhat lenghty reply to "Ask HN: how to find a good designer for a small project" [0].
Not only have I been working with the post author ever since - half a year later, someone else approached me for a design project, because they found this post and my reply to it! Thank you HN.
The bootstrapping-type posts got me excited to try my hand at it. I'm at $5k/month (mostly) passive income right now, while also consulting 4 days a week.
Who wants to be hired helped me find my first freelancer gig.
I'm really nervous about any attempt to measure the value of HN in terms of money.
It could be that HN has made me a lot of money by giving me a place to relax and NOT think about money, allowing me to be more effective in the areas where I do make money.
In a sense, this comment [0] from bitexploder made me money; it gave me a framework I used to learn how to be a security engineer. Funnily enough, I unknowingly applied to his consulting firm years later before I found my current role.
I have benefited monetarily indirectly by lurking on HN for years and reading others’ thoughtful comments on a variety of subjects. Then apply some of those thoughts to my career as a developer, then later a EM. HN has been a gold mine of ideas by reading what others on HN post while interacting with each other.
In 2013 I started reading about Bitcoin and became a skeptic as to its long-term value, as well as other cryptocoins. In 2014 Stripe did a free coindrop of thousands of Stellar, if you connected with your Facebook account. My friend prompted me to do so, so I did. At the time I looked it up and saw it was all worth two cents or so. I wrote down my info and forgot about it.
Then I saw this post. I looked it up and my Stellar Lumen were now worth a few thousand dollars. To diversify I traded some of my Lumen for Bitcoin and Ethereum. Then I cashed out some of my Lumen. I sent the HN account a few Lumen in appreciation, and the person who prompted me to sign up. I have cashed out almost all of my crypto, although I may have some coin in some wallet somewhere. I am still a skeptic, although it was an easy couple of thousands of dollars.
In early 2007 I started posting here. It was, I think, a large part of why we got into YC in summer of '07. It was a much smaller community then and PG was still actively engaged with HN, so likely this wouldn't work today.
193 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 310 ms ] threadAnd as mentioned by graderjs, I've also had good sales when I link to my ebooks in relevant discussions.
Interesting stories, I read the one about HSBC statement, what a mess.
I don't doubt that it works but I'm frankly amazed that people have paid for this service and happily uploaded such sensitive documents without any kind of reassurance (hell even just some plain old marketing)
I learned my lesson on market rationality that day. Not a bad lesson to learn
I think that it is not unreasonable to speculate that was the reason they gave and not the "real" reason for firing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31625804
I had no involvement in posting the link though.
A few months after starting the blog, I saw a small traffic spike - maybe 30 visitors - from this site called Hacker News after a submission [1]. I never heard about HN before but it looked interesting so I started to visit it, and eventually registered to upvote stories I like.
Then, another few months later - when I had not published anything for 3-4 months - as I was checking out HN, I could not believe what I saw: a months-old post of mine was on the front page titled “Move Fast Without Breaking Things”. Traffic was so high, my site could barely keep up on shared hosting with MediaTemple, my blog running Wordpress.
There were 50+ comments discussing my post, versus the 2 that were on the blog itself (it had a commenting system). The comments were more insightful than I’ve ever seen for any of my blog posts. This was the HN post [2].
Now, this post did not “make me money”. But it WAS a turning point where I got validation that strangers on the internet find what I wrote interesting. And it gave me a motivation to write when no one read it, knowing that just because people are not interested in what I wrote today, people might find it interesting months or years later.
I kept writing my blog for years. Eventually, this blog served as the basis of The Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter which I launched a year ago, and which is my new fulltime job and one of the most popular technology newsletters with over 120,000 people reading it. More than enough people chose to pay for it to make this a a viable fulltime career on the long run.
Thank you, Hacker News, for those first two submissions, all the comments, and the motivation it gave to keep writing. It was a turning point. I still remember how I could barely believe in March 2016 that so many people I never met can be interested in reading thoughts I put in writing.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10692734
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11374221
And that's with nearly no effort!
Drop the link mate
Man it's been 12 years since I bothered posting, I probably should follow my own advice lol
I'm in the middle of a security and antifraud series now, motivated entirely by Brian Krebs [1] retweeting me after the Experian breach. The articles have gotten essentially zero traction on HN, but I'm having fun writing them and seeing them get attention on other avenues.
I've been writing off an on for years now, thanks largely to the motivation that getting on the HN front page [2] gave me back in 2014.
At some point, I think I would like to attempt to monetize my writing but I get enough enjoyment from doing it that I haven't ever bothered.
[1] https://www.brightball.com/articles/automatically-reversing-...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8371249
This doesn't make me any money, because I don't monetize my blog. But having people read, critique and enjoy my writing has given me immense satisfaction over the years. Can't put a price on that.
[0] http://blog.freshdesk.com/the-freshdesk-story-how-a-simple-c...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1358398
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28625195
I was about T-minus one week from halting work on it and starting something else when I posted to Show HN on a whim: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26969173.
I didn't even think to check back on it until during a meeting I noticed my inbox was suddenly filling up :) I was astonished and inspired by the response, and haven't stopped working on it since!
What's the best place to provide feedback / ask questions? Discord?
Finding Projection Lab in that first Projectifi post was transformative for me! It helped more than anything else to understand my potential financial future. I've used it when comparing potential jobs, lifestyles, locations. It's been incredibly valuable to me.
I have quite a few friends who have become fans of the tool as well. And I used it to show some friends that yes they can retire with some smart early decisions!
So thank you! I'm glad you posted it on HN and kept up development. I plan to keep using Projection Lab indefinitely to better understand my finances as they develop.
And I do subscribe to the newsletter as well! :) It serves as a nice reminder to check-in.
1. 5-input 'retirement calculators' that various sites had up as lead-gen tools 2. Build a complex and bug-riddled model in a spreadsheet 3. Pay for a financial planner to plug my situation into their spreadsheet
I saw ProjectionLab on HN, though, and it was exactly what I was looking for. The end result I cam up with was good, but even just playing around with the modeling helped me build up a much better intuition than I'd started with. Thanks for your work, and I'm glad you stuck with it!
You touch on something I've noticed as well; that if you play around with models like this long enough, your intuitions start to become noticeably more refined. I can tell the way I think about finance has definitely evolved throughout the course of building the tool.
Nope. I assume very few people made any money from an HN post, directly or indirectly.
Edit: Why disagree without reply? Most of us (even on HN) are just normal devs and nothing we do on here will make us money.
Probably being downvoted because you have no evidence to back this up. HN posts have made people money directly AND indirectly.
"HN posts have made people money directly AND indirectly."
This doesn't negate my claim. Some people do make money on here. I feel that number is very low.
The difference between your anecdotes and everyone else's is they aren't saying "Well only 6 people replied to this thread in the first hour and a half, therefore I claim nobody has made money from HN"
Do you have a source? I find it hard to believe that even 51% are in SV.
The second paragraph is a gross misrepresention of my position. And it seems you're implying that as more people wake up, this will somehow prove that the majority of HN users have made money on posts here... which isn't any different the (misrepresented) argument that you were just complaining about.
I'll wait for you to provide some actual evidence that 51% of users have directly or indirectly made money on posts here.
I'll provide that when you provide evidence that nobody has.
Interesting how you can make claims without facts to back them up, but demand me to back up my claims against yours.
Yep, that's intentional. That's exactly how you started attacking me. And now I have you making the statement/point about the lack of evidence for me.
Where did giantg2 claim that?
Because your personal anecdote of "Nope." doesn't really add much value to the thread, and the second sentence is an assumption (so it may not even be correct), and either way, it also doesn't really contribute to the discussion.
The fact that it (at least at the time) was the only response about not making money does add to the conversation, as prior to that the conversation was very one sided. So all you're really hearing is how some people made money, but it's not accurately representing how many people do or don't make money on here. I would like to see responses by other normal devs saying they did or did not make money on here since that can give insight into the assumption to determine what kinds of people benefit. Or perhaps I'm looking for too deep of a discussion?
I'm sure there are several that haven't made money from HN posts, but I'd imagine there's not much to discuss around that, other than just collecting raw numbers.
Unless some can offer discussion around how they tried and failed to do that, but again, the title doesn't really suggest that sort of discussion.
Not only have I been working with the post author ever since - half a year later, someone else approached me for a design project, because they found this post and my reply to it! Thank you HN.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29723734#29724047
Who wants to be hired helped me find my first freelancer gig.
[1]: https://fadel.io/
[2]: https://vidcap.app/
Mac apps == organic. iOS apps == mostly organic, I'm testing some ads for VidCap.
macOS sales stable while iOS is growing fast.
It could be that HN has made me a lot of money by giving me a place to relax and NOT think about money, allowing me to be more effective in the areas where I do make money.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14103349
In 2013 I started reading about Bitcoin and became a skeptic as to its long-term value, as well as other cryptocoins. In 2014 Stripe did a free coindrop of thousands of Stellar, if you connected with your Facebook account. My friend prompted me to do so, so I did. At the time I looked it up and saw it was all worth two cents or so. I wrote down my info and forgot about it.
Then I saw this post. I looked it up and my Stellar Lumen were now worth a few thousand dollars. To diversify I traded some of my Lumen for Bitcoin and Ethereum. Then I cashed out some of my Lumen. I sent the HN account a few Lumen in appreciation, and the person who prompted me to sign up. I have cashed out almost all of my crypto, although I may have some coin in some wallet somewhere. I am still a skeptic, although it was an easy couple of thousands of dollars.