Hacker News

“It stayed at the top of Hacker News for two days.”

“Things get submitted to Hacker News. I think that's probably our number one growth channel. People on Hacker News reading interviews.”

“I think probably half the engineering team that we hired came through Hacker News, and that's not atypical for YC companies.”

“At the very beginning, we actually launched as an open source library on Hacker News. And it took off there, blew up basically overnight.”

“YC, Although PG and Jessica, Robert and Trevor might not say this, has been doing, like, content marketing since the very beginning. Even before. So with Paul's essays, and then Hacker News was built, and then those essays do really well, and that's the exact …”

“Just getting good at engaging with your community on HN and Product Hunt is really undervalued.”

“In the early days, what they were doing Was making things that Hacker News wanted, but it turns out that Hacker News and their customers was not a 100% overlap. So they were spending all this energy generating this content to get people through the door, but t…”

“And so I think probably our first 300 customers were coming from content that I was writing on Like medium or, and then sharing on hacker news or guest posts or on our blog and writing about email, which I think was a topic that people like treating about or l…”

“It started off as a side project and it was right between startups. I was leaving in another one and kind of tinkering and interviewing at other startups. Started product time. It started off as an email list. Got some traction there. That then turned into a w…”

“Some of them are going to be haters and be rude. Well, you should engage with them too, but your goal is not to convince them. It's just to convince any other readers who are going to read how you reply to these haters.”

“Your goal is not to sell your product just yet here. Just be helpful. Just establish yourself as the expert. And of course people are going to start knowing you and trust your brand, your company. That will help you down the line. People will think about you w…”

“The best place to launch for DevTools, I would argue, is Hacker News.”

“I pull up the post hoc slide every now and then, and I believe according to the slide, and I think it's true, it was the most upvoted dev tool hacker news post of the year.”

“We started with just open source products analytics on Hacker News. We spent like the last four weeks of the batch desperately trying to get that out of the door. And then we pivot, we iterated, I would say, afterwards, and now we're all cloud-based with multi…”

“We got rejected from YC four, three or four times, and then we got invited to do YC because Paul and Sam saw us on Hacker News.”