Hitting the front page of Hacker News is a major win: - **This guide introduces a simple, repeatable process** for getting featured on the front page of Hacker News, including the categories that you should be looking to hit with your content. - **AI
Hitting the front page of Hacker News is a major win:
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This guide introduces a simple, repeatable process for getting featured on the front page of Hacker News, including the categories that you should be looking to hit with your content.
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AI image generators help you turn your ideas into high-quality images, even if you don't have technical skills. Below, Dru Riley breaks down AI-generated assets, video generators, and jobs.
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Founder Lars-Christian Simonsen finally launched a paid option for his 1,000+ newsletter subscribers, and...no one signed up. Here's how he came up with the idea, launched the product, and grew, and what he's planning to do next.
Want to share something with nearly 75,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing
📰 Hacking the Front Page of Hacker News
by Iron Brands
Getting featured on the Hacker News front page is high on every indie hacker’s bingo card. We've found a way to consistently get to the front page using a repeatable process, and we're sharing it with you!
Let’s dive in.
Understanding Hacker News
Adriaan van Rossum and I own Simple Analytics, a simple, privacy-friendly Google Analytics alternative. Feel free to play around with our live analytics here!
You’ll find that the Hacker News crowd is not the easiest. The people on Hacker News will slay you if your stuff is not 100% on point. Also, don’t even try to dump your semi-interesting blog posts on Hacker News, let alone promote your product. Competition is fierce, and only a certain amount of articles will get that front page spot.
After spending many hours trying to understand Hacker News, its users, and the content that is doing well, I identified a pattern. Your content needs to be either:
- Newsworthy: This ranks on the front page because it's news that is relevant to the community. For example, Apple wins antitrust court battle with Epic Games, appeals court rules.
- Investigative research: You researched and found something interesting, it's written without corporate BS, and there is no self-promotion in the text. For example, Fingerprinting is worse than I thought.
Other things you need to take into account:
- Find the perfect time to post: There's less competition on the weekends.
- You can post multiple times: Hacker News understands that quality posts can go unnoticed, so you can try the same post again. Don’t overdo it, though. I would recommend 2-3 times maximum.
- Keep engaging with the audience.
Our strategy
Once we gained an understanding of Hacker News, we created a strategy around it. We chose to rank on the front page with newsworthy articles. This seemed to be a better repeatable approach than the investigative research category.
Our strategy has three steps:
1. News bot:
Stay on top of news that is both in your niche, and relevant for Hacker News. To do this, Adriaan created a news bot to notify us immediately about news that we could act upon.
For us, news on privacy issues, big tech fines, data breaches, and anything concerning Google Analytics is relatable to us, and relevant to Hacker News.
Here is how Adriaan built the bot:
- Fetch data from Hacker News API.
- Set up Google Alerts for your query.
- Fetch data from Google Alerts XML.
- Enrich data, and store in SQLite file with a cronjob.
- Send alerts to Twist API or Telegram API with another cronjob.
We also added ChatGPT into the mix, asking for a rating between 0-100, plus a reason why the article is getting that rating. We send ourselves alerts when the rating is 30+.
To get a better idea of this, check out Adriaan's tweet here.
2. War Room mode:
When our news bot sends an alert that we can use, we drop everything and start investigating the news item. We go into War Room mode. If we feel there is something there, we start writing about it.
To be relevant for Hacker News, you can’t just copy and paste the news item. News items are often very plain, so by providing more context and implications, you can create something relevant that can coexist with the source.
Example: Norway takes a stance against Google Analytics. This got 144 upvotes.
Here's our outline:
- State the news item and link to the source. This allows people to choose what to read.
- Explain what the problem is.
- Explain what the implications are.
- Explain what we can expect in the future.
3. The secret sauce:
We always end with a section called Final Thoughts. This is your moment to shine, and drop a punchline that talks about your product or service.
However, be super careful with self-promotion. We only do this at the end of the article. After providing tons of value to the reader, only include one sentence. Make it the least sales-y sentence in the world.
Depending on the news item, we can create an article in 1-2 hours and post it on Hacker News. That way, we’re always the first to cover the issue, and take a broader perspective than just the news item itself. That’s the value you add.
Timeliness + value = Hacker News front page!
Side effects
Obviously, the goal is to get traffic to your website and increase brand awareness, but there was one side effect that I did not anticipate: SEO.
Because we’re the first to cover these news items, other websites started to link to our content. Three of our most popular articles got tons of backlinks, and even more traffic from those sources:
We even won the Dutch Search Awards for this strategy, and I am not even particularly good at SEO!
This approach has generated many upvotes, and has become a repeatable process for privacy-related or Google-focused topics. If your audience is on Hacker News, you should give it a spin. If you reach the front page, and want to track that juicy traffic coming to your website, check out Simple Analytics!
Will you try this approach? Share your thoughts in the comments!
Discuss this story.
📰 In the News
from the Growth Trends newsletter by Darko
🤖 Can AI give you a distribution advantage?
💻 Tips to help you double your organic clickthrough rate.
👥 Marketers need to consider this highly influential audience segment.
💰 The SEO content strategy that drove $134K worth of monthly traffic.
💖 An AI girlfriend made $72K in one week.
Check out Growth Trends for more curated news items focused on user acquisition and new product ideas.
📸 Trend Alert: AI Image Generators
from the Trends.vc newsletter by Dru Riley
Why it matters
Now, anyone can create quality images.
Problem
You have ideas for visual art, but you don’t have the ability to express them.
Solution
AI image generators help you turn your ideas into high-quality images in seconds, even without technical skills.
Players
AI image generation apps:
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Pollinations: Create unrestricted, customized AI media.
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DreamStudio: Create AI-powered images using Stable Diffusion.
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Craiyon: Free online AI image generator from text.
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NightCafe: AI-powered text-to-image generator.
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Deep Dream Generator: Combine text and images to generate photorealistic art.
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Artbreeder: Create images by mixing them together and editing their genes.
AI image generation tools:
AI image generation models:
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DALL-E 2: Create realistic images and art from text.
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Stable Diffusion: A latent text-to-image diffusion model.
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Midjourney: Create images from textual descriptions.
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DeepAI: AI image generator API.
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Big Sleep: Simple command line tool for text-to-image generation.
Predictions
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We'll see new jobs for AI image generation professionals. They will build, train, and deploy AI models, write prompts, and generate images and animations. Clone Lexica for $4K. Build an AI image database for $750-$1.5K. Create an AI-powered avatar builder for $2K. Become a Stable Diffusion coding expert for $5K. Add text-to-image generator to a website for $750-$2K. Teach advanced Midjourney techniques for $5-$45 per hour.
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NFT collections will be launched with AI-generated art. Dream Capsules is a collection of 1K AI-generated dreams. DEEP JOURNEYS is a collection of 500 AI-generated animations. QUANTUM TENTACLES is a collection of 712 AI-generated art pieces. Artificial Intelligence Art is a collection of 1K unique AI-generated NFTs.
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Content creation platforms will build AI image generation features. Users will be able to generate visuals for ads, blogs, and social media. Canva launched a public beta for its text-to-image tool. neuroflash is working on its own royalty-free image generator. Jasper added Jasper Art to its AI-powered content creation tools. Picsart added a free AI image generator to its suite of creative tools.
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Companies will build side projects around AI image generators. This helps them boost brand awareness and get more leads. AISEO is an AI-powered writing assistant that made AISEO ART. Noonshot is an NFT shop builder that made Midjourney Prompt Tool. Shutterstock is a stock image marketplace that is creating Shutterstock AI.
Opportunities
Risks
- Platform risk: You are subject to the platform's content policies. Getty Images banned AI-generated images due to copyright worries. Newgrounds endorses art made by humans. Fur Affinity banned AI-generated images due to a lack of artistic merit.
- Copyright risk: AI image generators are trained on real artists' concepts, attributes, and styles. It's unclear who owns the rights to AI-generated images. Artists can use the Have I Been Trained? tool to check on whether their art appeared in training datasets.
- High costs: You may go bankrupt if you don't balance the supply and demand for your AI business, especially during the early stage. Interior AI grew to 23 customers and $500 MRR, but the GPU costs grew to $1K per day, 60x more than its monthly revenue.
Key lessons
- Some artists don't want to be used as training material. They fear that AI will replace them. Greg Rutkowski says that, when you Google his name, there's more AI work than work he's actually done himself.
- Major AI image generators are trained on publicly available data. They use open datasets such as LAION-5B, which scrapes sources such as Pinterest, DeviantArt, Getty Images, and more.
- Publicly available datasets may not be copyright-free. They may have images that have their rightful owners. LAION-5B and ImageNet explicitly say that images are under their own copyright.
Hot takes
Haters
"Unrestricted, open source image generators are subject to unethical use."
This is true. They do what we tell them to do. Deepfakes can be used for doing both good and bad things. The same is true for AI image generators.
"It can be hard to control the final result."
Many AI image generators are pre-trained models that follow a strict set of rules. Learn the art of writing prompts to produce detailed outcomes. Use open source tools to fine-tune your models if you're a tech-savvy person.
"Digital artists may lose their value. It can be hard to distinguish between them and AI."
While AI can copy artists' styles, it lacks a human touch. Those who value human personality, story, creativity, and passion will continue to appreciate non-AI art.
Links
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Looking for AI Image projects: The tweet behind this report.
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AI Image generators, a complete guide to this new technology: Introduction to how AI image generators work.
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The Anatomy Of An AI Art Prompt: Guide on how to write a good prompt for AI image generators.
Related reports
More reports
Go here to get the Trends Pro report. It contains 200% more insights. You also get access to the entire back catalog and the next 52 Pro Reports.
Subscribe to Trends.vc for more.
🧠 Harry's Growth Tip
from the Marketing Examples newsletter by Harry Dry
“Never forget, people want to be taken somewhere.”
— Donald Miller
Go here for more short, sweet, practical marketing tips.
Subscribe to Marketing Examples for more.
💸 Lars-Christian Simonsen's Paid Newsletter
by Lars-Christian Simonsen
Hi indie hackers! I'm Lars-Christian Simonsen, and a year ago, I made a decision to give this indie hacking thing a proper go.
I’d been working sporadically on my niche website and newsletter for a couple of years, slowly gaining a bit of momentum. Even with my lackadaisical approach, it had gained some traction. I thought, imagine what could happen if I put some real effort into it!
So, one year ago, I decided to up my game. I would make a real effort to publish new content regularly, and I would email my subscribers every single week, without fail.
Here's where it all went downhill.
Time to get to work!
Once I decided to become consistent, all of my numbers started pointing in the right direction. The number of website visitors grew steadily, from an average of 10-20 per day, to 10x that. Subscriber numbers trended in the same direction, finally crossing that magic 1K barrier thanks to a combination of organic and social ad reach.
Now we’re getting somewhere, I thought. Time to really kick this thing into gear! I switched to ConvertKit in an attempt to improve my delivery rates and prepare to monetize. Growth continued, open rates went up to 40%+, and my click rates often climbed above 5%.
After I'd been sending out this newsletter every week for almost a year, I decided to introduce a paid premium subscription. Subscribers would get an extra newsletter each week, full of exclusive content.
I figured that if I could just convert a small percentage of my subscribers, that would be enough to at least cover the costs of my ConvertKit plan. If I could double that, or maybe get to 3%, I could reinvest that and grow to new heights.
The big day is here!
I finally launched my paid subscription. I sat back and eagerly anticipated all of the signups that would come in over the next few hours. Maybe I’ll finally take the time to make a post on Indie Hackers to talk about how I grew from $0 MRR to hundreds of dollars, I smugly thought to myself.
And then...nothing happened.
Well, that’s not entirely true. Because hundreds of subscribers opened my email, as usual. But that was it. No signups. Not a single one.
The subscribers
Let me tell you a little more about the subscribers on my list. I’ve been exchanging emails with some of them regularly for months, even years. I was conversing about the topic of my newsletter, really getting to know them, and letting them get to know me.
But none of them found signing up for a premium subscription worthwhile. Fair enough! It’s a very personal thing, after all, to part with your hard-earned money.
Not a single one of them found it worthwhile to become patrons of my little side project. I’m doing something wrong here.
And, guess who’s also on the list? My parents. Both of them. They are both quite interested in this thing that I write about, and we talk about it quite often. But neither of them signed up. Now, I’ll grant that they’ve certainly done enough for me to not have to throw money in my direction, so maybe they get a pass. But still…
The worst part of it all? My wife is on the list, too! Even after I told her she could grab the money from our joint account (now, that's one way of offering a discount!) she couldn’t be bothered to sign up! Of course, she isn’t particularly interested in the subject matter. But still…
I think I should quit
Obviously, I’ve done something wrong along the way here. I’m just not sure what. I didn’t expect to see a ridiculously high conversion rate or anything like that, but I sure was hoping to get a few people signed up to help support and fund the growth of this project.
I thought that putting stuff out there regularly, creating connections, and truly engaging with people along the way was the key to building a monetizable audience. At this point, I have no idea how to amend my approach to get closer to that.
If you want to offer constructive criticism, you can check out the email that went out to my list here. Although I'm currently despondent and thinking of just throwing in the towel, I still want to learn from this overall experience.
Wishing you a terrific week, with magical MRR bumps and all around good vibes!
Discuss this story.
🐦 The Tweetmaster's Pick
by Tweetmaster Flex
I post the tweets indie hackers share the most. Here's today's pick:
🏁 Enjoy This Newsletter?
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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Iron Brands, Darko, Dru Riley, Harry Dry, and Lars-Christian Simonsen for contributing posts. —Channing
