I think that luck is just a much bigger factor than people think.

A while back, I wrote a blog post and posted it to HN. Looked up the best time to post, labored over the wording in the title, everything. It got like three views and disappeared quickly into nirvana.

I was super discouraged and didn't feel like writing more about this topic (probably dumb after just one post but hey that's how I felt).

Then, a few days later, some random person re-posted my blog post to HN. This time it exploded and landed on the front page, giving me a couple hundred subscribers alone. Until now I have no idea why the difference was so huge.

This experience taught me that luck is just insanely important. Not sure how this conclusion helps though.

On HN it all comes down to having 5 people upvoting your post in the first 30 minutes, so of course there is a lot of luck in here.

The rule I follow when I want to publish one post is this one:

- Publish it one time first and see if you get at least 2 upvotes

- If you got them, try again to post it the next day at 9am (sf time)

- If still not successful try again in 3 days

If you dont get those 5 guys interested in your post in 30 minutes you will never get the frontpage, when you are on the frontpage, then there will be enough people seeing it and deciding if it should stay on the frontpage

On HN there are also a lot of emphasis on the title, and clickbait helps a lot also (look at this current post)

(I manage this [1] newsletter of 'HN blogposts which went unnoticed' and very often a post is linked in the newsletter and then a few days after that reaches the frontpage, because it gets re-posted or included in the second pool chance)

[1] https://hnblogs.substack.com

>clickbait helps a lot also

I do like to point out that there are bad examples. Titles that misrepresent content or low quality listicle stuff + "You won't believe #2!"

But headlines have been trying to entice people to read stories since before there were clicks to bait. I know a lot of people here think headlines should be basically boring but that's not how publications outside of journals etc. have ever operated.

I disagree, I posted my Show HN thread [0] on a Sunday, got only 1 upvote in 36 hours, but then it started getting traction. I am not sure what happened, but you can still get on the front page even if you don't get upvotes immediately after submission.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24746921

It's the second pool chance

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23483538

Thanks for the info, that's really interesting, I assumed something like this happened but I didn't know about this system.

The moderators will repost Show HNs that didn't get traction to try to help them out.

Great insight. Are your rules based on analysis (which would be a fun project!) or experience/instinct?

It's experience from having a few posts reaching the frontpage and seeing how contents published on the newsletter finally reach or not the frontpage

>I was super discouraged and didn't feel like writing more about this topic...This time it exploded and landed on the front page

I read something along the lines "Doing is often better than thinking of doing" somewhere and made it kinda my personal motto. Little things add up and you never know when the momentum builds and things start to feel better. I failed to get donations for my tutorials for about a year. Then I tried out converting them to a book. First one didn't give me much financial benefit but the second one did well enough. After 2 years and 7 books, I have sustainable income for the first time since leaving my job 6 years ago.

I have more ideas than I can ever implement, but I try to note them down and work on what I can. 2 hits out of 10 is still better than 0 hits out of 0 attempts. Those hits need luck too, as you mention. Seeing my idea come alive is immensely satisfying too.

Surely the right lesson to take would be to try something like posting links several times? To paraphrase, even if success always comes from accident, there are always ways to make yourself more accident-prone.

This reminds me of the all time classic Chesky quote:

If you launch and no one notices, launch again

https://twitter.com/bchesky/status/312438036929576962?lang=e...

I post things several times to HN. Other communities (lobste.rs, reddit) frown on this more, but HN seems just fine with it (as long as you aren't obnoxious).

I've definitely seen articles I posted (not necessarily mine) get reposted and have wildly different visibility.

It's also a fun excuse to go trolling through your back catalog of writing and see what is worth posting today.

> This experience taught me that luck is just insanely important. Not sure how this conclusion helps though.

Other than being a consolation when you work hard. Which isn't to be discounted.

Thanks for sharing your story.

I will say that I've had a couple of posts on the front page of HN or r/programming and still only get single digit subscribers. So maybe that does point to an issue with the content.

Which then brings up the bigger question of "what is my goal"? If I'm happy writing what I do and don't need a bigger audience, should I just keep doing what I'm doing (and accept the current results)?

It's not just HN. I write for a number of online pubs/sites. Sometimes I'll write something that I think is particularly clever/insightful/useful and it gets relatively few pageviews and no engagement. Then I'll knock something out in a couple hours that I think is fine but pretty-cookie cutter and it gets 10x or more the engagement.

Paraphrasing an Elton John quote: "People think it's easy for me to know what will be a hit because I've had so many. The truth is I've written songs I was sure would be a hit and nobody ended up listening to. I've also written songs that I didn't think would do anything and I even hesitated to include on the album and they turned out to be my biggest hits."

Having a post to repost on HN is a prerequisite to "being lucky".. luck favors the prepared and all that.

I have noticed with HN, there are waves of content on subjects, a topic on something interesting is posted and then over the next few days related posts will popup and the audience who is already interest from the initial post that blew up is primed to read more.

I'm not sure you can engineer one of these waves, but you can jump on one when it appears perhaps.

I've definitely jumped on waves via comments, rather than posts. Sometimes having the first comment on a highly ranked post leads to significant traffic, as well as insight.

But that's helpful to think about waves of posts too.

Jim Carey gave a commencement speech that went viral a couple years ago, he said the same thing most successful people say (deeply paraphrased here): You have to work really hard and go for it. However, working hard is a necessary condition but it's not a sufficient condition. For every Jim Carey there are countless failed comedians who worked just as hard. I'm not saying he doesn't deserve it, but we labor under the delusion that the free market always rewards hard work and if you don't reach your goals it's because you didn't work hard enough. Of course you can't reach hard goals without working hard, but working hard doesn't always get you there. You can do everything right and still not catch a break.

4000 years of civilization and we're back to jungle life

Free market !== Equitable market

Dan, I think the sales of the book might be stimied by the price point. $37 is a bit steep.

I would put a book cover in the right sidebar of your wordpress site too to give a bit more visuals. Possibly also redesign the hero area to give it more pop. You're also not prompting for a newsletter signup anywhere.

Happy to give you a few minutes of loom or zoom feedback if you think it would be helpful to optimize the site better since your content is already good, its your marketing that could use some help.

> Dan, I think the sales of the book might be stimied by the price point. $37 is a bit steep.

Agree! I don't have much control over pricing (traditional publisher) but I should probably raise the issue with them and see if there's anything I can do.

Thanks for the offer of feedback! Let me take what you've already given and see what I can do. I see you have contact info in your profile so will reach out after I've implemented it.

That can definitely be a downside of a traditional publisher. It's even more the case when you're not really trying to make money with a book but are using it as a more reputational thing.

Yes. I had previously published an ebook through leanpub and wanted the traditional publisher experience. The jury's still out, but it definitely has downsides.

The biggest win for me is that, rightly or wrongly, a fair number of people have a higher opinion of books that come through a traditional publisher. A publisher also provides editing services and so forth but, in my experience, they're pretty lightweight. I'm actually doing a new edition of one of my books right now and I'm finding more copyedit misses than should be the case.

You may well make more money depending upon the sales. But, to be honest, what I make off the book is so trivial compared to what I make indirectly by having written the book that it doesn't really matter to me.

Deadlines are both a blessing and a curse--especially for the original book. On the one hand, they probably forced me to go heads down when I might have been inclined to work on other things. On the other hand, you sometimes have to do those other things too.

I am working with a platform that has limitations but I did try to make the email list easier to sign up for. I also added the form right on the page, instead of requiring a click. I feel like more customization would probably require a platform change or upgrade, so I'll think about that.

Thanks again for your feedback.

How often do you publish? I was also a bit surprised that the blog just skimmed over what I think is the most important part: how to build an audience.

It sounds like "I wasn't a good writer, but I just wrote 50 articles and improved and now I had tens of thousands of readers a month"

I am skeptical that it was all about quality. If his first article had been the best article ever it's still unlikely he'd have found an audience/get noticed. So maybe it's about the frequency of posting? I think it'd be worth reflecting on this more, how did his readership grow in that early period? Were there any inflection points? Etc

For the first 1.5 years, twice a week. Lately it's once a week (on Monday). Some of my posts, esp the early ones, were short (1 minute reads).

I think that leveraging a platform like medium or dev.to can really help. I republish some content there and especially if you get picked up by one of the "magazines" it can put you in front of a different audience. This belief is based on a large part on research rather than firsthand experience, though.

Summarizing my experience: I have published a single article with the goal of better understanding the subjects and be able to correctly teach it (ofc a side income would be nice as well). Wanted to provide more value than what existed and posted in my own blog (powered by Telescope.ac), Substack, Medium, Dev.to and HackerNoon (sent for approval and got approved). Medium editors liked it and recommended it in the frontpage and their newsletters and "The Startup" magazine invited me to publish the story as theirs as well. And, as your belief, it suddenly "exploded": https://i.imgur.com/JHIoUIy.png

Too bad the post received a somewhat bad criticism and my moral went down to keep writing at the time. I will get back to it someday for sure.

Would be glad to read your posts!

Agreed, please share a link.

Thank you both! A Friend Link without Paywall :) https://medium.com/swlh/why-you-shouldnt-use-offset-and-limi... Let me know if you have any suggestions on it, would love to know about them!

One of the things I've learned is literally don't "impose" anything to your readers. What I've written is mainly cited by big sources (and I have included the sources in the article!), but people rather prefer to point the finger if they do not agree with you.

I believe the article title is a bit "imposing" on the reader, but so do are all the other "click-baity" titles we see everywhere, and in this case I am able to prove my point of view, being it through an explanation or a PoC that I do provide as well. But people are mean :)

Hey there, I had a look at your website and if I could provide some small feedback? Add an image here or there in your blog posts! You could start with free (but nice) photos from unplash or similar. You clearly have a lot of great content, but there's no initial visual "hook" to get me interested. Hope this helps and keep it up!

Went through and added photos to the last 15 or so posts, and will continue to work my way back, using pixabay.com for photos available for commercial purposes.

Thanks again for the suggestion!

Awesome, thanks for the feedback! I appreciate it.

In life, we tend to sometimes believe that once we have done great work and even shown great work, that the bright lights of Vegas will come illuminate us like the sun illuminates the earth. What a painful and unproductive belief!!! What became obvious to me from observations in my career, life and others is that you must intentionally choose who you show your work to. Who sees your work is incredibly important. Always remember WYSYWC.

The paragraph above is what I wrote in my article in https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/cracking-the-who-you...

Don't give up.

That really resonates. I used to think it was about doing great work, but a few failed startups wrung that belief out of me. Doing great work is necessary but not sufficient. As you say, who sees it matters.

Thanks for the encouragement.

You're welcome.

It is the title. I havent read further. Nobody wants to be thought of as 'the new' aka green behind the ears one. Change the title to 'letters to the experienced developer', slight adjustment of text (although mentoring applies as wall; and what is good for the new one is good for the seasoned), 3. grab the cash.

Thanks for the feedback. I haven't heard that before, but maybe that's because folks were hesitant to say "your baby is ugly"? I'll think about this.

Could be out of politeness, but could also be they dont see it. People might read it and think it is really a good book for the target audience (which it probably is); they probably dont see themselves as the target audience. Also they read the whole book and maybe it was great for them, and their feedback was honest. My claim is the people who would benefit from it wont get past the title, but I have no idea how to validate this idea.

Don't blame yourself entirely, It's not about you being medicore, although after 2 years work on a project that's not meeting your goals something's amiss. Ideally you validate the market and your place in it early on, for instance by hitting the front page of HN/a subreddit or something like that with one of your articles every so often. If your hit rate is too low your market probably is too small or you're not giving them content they want (even though it may be high quality content that they need...). At some point you change what you're doing, change your goals or move on.

I think part of it is also that one can leverage past platform/network effects too. Someone who has 5000 friends on facebook or 2000 twitter followers has a jump start over the one starting with less than 100. I think past success builds up to the next success. Build a smallish audience for the first book, leverage that and build a larger one for the next if that makes sense.

Medium does give you exposure and a potential income. Sadly I am not much of a blogger but if I were to start doing it I would probably go with medium.

It's the old tradeoff of giving up control for reach.

Is it really giving you reach though? It's probably giving you some discoverability, albeit with something of a paywall. That said, I've never been a big Medium fan although I used to mirror some posts to it. But, then, my goals are different from someone trying to build a business and I mostly write on some sites that do a fair bit of organic promotion.

Amy's philosophy is to learn how to sell first with an easy-to-make product, not move toward teaching.

It's quite clear from the linked article too.

The easy to make product is an info product (rather than a business, for example).

I'd consider that teaching.

Sorry if I was unclear, I didn't mean "teaching" in the classroom or webinar sense, I should have used the word "educate".

The open secret is that, if you want a following on the major platforms that use recommendation engines for follow suggestions, you have to pay for your first N thousand so you can trick the recommendation engine into giving you access to everyone else. Everyone and their brother is doing organic content and SEO and all that jazz. You either cheat or don't play.

I accidentally ended up buying followers on Twitter. My wife writes sci-fi novels and I was looking for options to help market the books. At the same time, I was building a software product and trying things out for myself. Amazon had just released their "promotions" platform. One of the things you can do is a sweepstakes give-away. You pick an item on Amazon, set a max number of copies you'll give away, and set proportion of how many people will get the thing if they follow some call to action, and set a length of time. Just wanting to see how it worked, I thought I'd give away some Google Cardboards for people to follow my VR-oriented account on Twitter. I set it to 10 copies for a week, thinking it'd be super low effort and just give me a concept of scale of effort before putting real effort into a "campaign". I think it would have cost me $150 total, if the whole lot had been given away. I expected that maybe I'd get 20 new followers out of it, folks interested in VR since I picked an item I thought would only be desirable if you were interested in VR.

I completely underestimated people's lust for free shit. A week later, 5 had been given away and now I had 3000 throwaway accounts following me on Twitter, where I previously only had about 150 (most of whom were acquaintances). Super low quality, not a single person was there for my content. It was easy to tell; their accounts were full of retweets for other giveaways, they had no other content, and their profiles were empty or talked about being a stay-at-home mom. I was mortified. I thought I was at the door of getting banned.

But something weird happened after. Legit followers started slowly trickling in. Eventually, I had an additional 500 followers, through no new effort on my own. I was still posting the same content, and the promotion was over. Where I couldn't get the needle to move before, suddenly it felt like it was working all on its own.

I eventually got rid of the fake followers. If you block someone on Twitter, it force unfollows your account for them. I then undid the block, just in case there were limits to how many people you could block or if I accidently swept up a friend in my dragnet. It took a solid week of spending an hour a day, force-unfollowing people.

I have a job that I love now (working in VR, I'm the head of the department), so I'm not trying to side-hustle anymore. And life is much better now. I still get a few legit followers every month, but I'm not putting any effort in other than posting what I want to talk about. The clear pay-to-win aspect of Twitter is not something that interests me. I never wanted to buy followers. I thought I was being smart about just getting my name in front of interested people and then they'd decide if they wanted to follow me or not. But that's not how it works. You're getting the randomized masses, and they are clicking through promos too fast to consider even the item that is being given away. But that is apparently necessary, if you're not already some kind of celebrity.

Thanks for sharing that tactic.

"On weird trick to fuck over your Twitter timeline forever"

First, congrats on launching the book. That's a huge achievement and you should be proud! It's also great that you've kept on it for 2 years, and published a lot of posts.

So the question is why hasn't it "worked" yet. There are TONS of new developers entering the field. The audience definitely exists, and they do hang out online.

I took Amy & Alex's 30x500 class a few years ago and it was a big factor in getting my blog + business (https://daveceddia.com) off the ground, so my ears perked up when you mentioned Amy!

I think you've got it right that she advocates for creating a tiny infoproduct first, but the emphasis is on tiny, less on education. Other tiny things are icon packs, or templates, or themes, etc. Small, quick-to-create, one-time-purchase products. Goal is to learn the entire build + market + launch cycle with low risk (vs building software for 6+ months that nobody wants). Once you get your footing with all of it, you can move up bigger/riskier products, if you want.

They also advocate that the content you create should deliver some kind of fix for a problem the reader has. Give the reader a win. Also, ideally, quickly helps the reader decide "this is for me". The easiest way to do that is to make it clear you understand their struggle.

I think this is where some of your posts could use tweaking. The "Write good commit messages" article, for instance, starts with "Take the time to write good commit messages." It's advice, yes, but is it for me specifically?

Contrast this with a title like "How to Write Better Commit Messages" and opening with "It's time to commit your code, and you need a commit message. What should you say? How long should it be? Should it describe every little detail? Or is shorter better? In this letter we'll look at some examples of bad commit messages and how to write better ones."

You mentioned that your email list hasn't grown much too. It's hard to figure out how to sign up though! There's a small sidebar link "Sign up to receive posts via email" and the "Subscribe to new posts" header link, but the copy isn't terribly compelling. Few people will go out of their way to click a link to sign up (as you've noticed!). You could probably improve signups quite a bit by writing more compelling copy and including those signup forms within the articles. I'd also remove the required field "how many years have you been a dev", it's just extra friction. Feel free to ask them that question in the welcome email though, it'd be a good way to connect.

Last strategy I'll mention is that hanging out in communities with your audience is a great way to learn what they struggle with, help them where they are (with comments/replies/tweets/etc), and occasionally, sometimes, share a link to something of yours if it's relevant. Goal is to be helpful and build a reputation, not just to share stuff.

Happy to chat more about this stuff any time.

Thanks so much for the feedback. I think you're spot on that some of the more abstract stuff would be more compelling if it was more concrete and tactical.

I'll also revise the email signups a bit, that's helpful too.