I've always been curious to know how big is the impact of being featured on HN home page.
Of course some people published about the conversions, the traffic and this kind of stuff but how big as been the impact on your startup on the long-term. Where you contacted by investors ? Did you get bought ? Did you get in an incubator (maybe YC) ?
I can't recall offhand if any of our content has ever made the front page or not, but we've definitely gotten some traffic from HN. So far, the biggest thing that we've gotten from HN is traffic to our blog[1], and a little bit of traffic to our main website[2]. And possibly a few subscribers to our announce list.
But, we're a B2B enterprise software play, and our product isn't even in GA yet (it's all on-premises deploy at the moment, not a SaaS offering). As a result, we can't claim to have converted any customers yet as a result of any HN links.
No investors, potential partners, etc. have reached out to us either. Of course, on the flip side, we aren't trying to raise money right now, not are we looking terribly hard at partnering opportunities. We're heads down, nose to the grindstone hammering on product/market fit and creating great products.
Edit: to give some solid numbers... between Jan 23 and Jan 30 of this year, we had 140 hits to our blog. 55% of those were referral traffic, and of those 29 were referred from dzone and 19 were from HN. The rest was 1 or 2 hits from a mishmash of other sites like LinkedIn, Quora, etc. Note that that was from a post that never got any upvotes on HN and disappeared off of the "new" page pretty quickly.
When our new startup matchist (http://matchist.com/talent) was featured on the home page a few months ago, we saw the usual spike in traffic. But more importantly, we received a ton of useful feedback (both positive and negative), and the HN community asked a lot of really insightful questions that helped us think about things in a new light, and also realize that we knew our idea/business really well.
While this might seem very intangible and not as cool as finding an investor on HN, I'm really thankful for that initial feedback/criticism/insight. Definitely helped us a lot.
I think we had a few posts from our blog hit the home page.
As we started in Dec 2012 there wasn't too much to show, so no investor contacts etc.
What we did get was a huge amount of great feedback, some monetisation suggestions and offers, offers of free trials for useful products, and plenty of sign-ups to our email newsletter.
The feedback is particularly valuable from this community because the amount of collective knowledge here about technical, business, and design thinking is astounding.
I had great feedback from the community but our startup is just not marketed towards the type of people on here. The feedback was very good and certainly helped, also the spike in traffic showed me that I really didn't need to worry about the site becoming overloaded.
The next day I placed some adds on AdWords and we have been raman profitable since.
One time I got in the homepage, OMG my server was exhausted! I was so happy looking at the stats, it was incredible. No I was not contacted by investors but I was very pleased with the traffic. Oh, and the Google bot was extraordinarily happy with my content too.
But, we're a B2B enterprise software play, and our product isn't even in GA yet (it's all on-premises deploy at the moment, not a SaaS offering). As a result, we can't claim to have converted any customers yet as a result of any HN links.
No investors, potential partners, etc. have reached out to us either. Of course, on the flip side, we aren't trying to raise money right now, not are we looking terribly hard at partnering opportunities. We're heads down, nose to the grindstone hammering on product/market fit and creating great products.
Edit: to give some solid numbers... between Jan 23 and Jan 30 of this year, we had 140 hits to our blog. 55% of those were referral traffic, and of those 29 were referred from dzone and 19 were from HN. The rest was 1 or 2 hits from a mishmash of other sites like LinkedIn, Quora, etc. Note that that was from a post that never got any upvotes on HN and disappeared off of the "new" page pretty quickly.
[1]: http://fogbeam.blogspot.com
[2]: http://www.fogbeam.com