The Morning After: Startup Famous for 24 Hours

Or, What a Hacker News Hangover Really Feels Like

Last week, Part 1 of The Epic Guide to Bootstrapping a SaaS Startup from Scratch — By Yourself made the front page of Hacker News for 24 hours, peaking at #3.

(UPDATE: tedmiston on Hacker News just pointed out to me that it actually got to #2! [Bested only by the Jarvis Zuckerberg/Freeman power combo. I’ll honestly take that hit.])

Here’s the no holds barred story of what the experience was like first-hand, as well as all of the gory details you’ve probably ever wanted to know about what happens when you cross paths with otherwise mythical startup unicorn events (complete with detailed diagrams and sidebars on rainbow poop).

[BONUS ALERT: If you’re a fan of The Epic Guide, there’s something at the end of this article you might think is pretty awesome, so be sure you don’t miss it!]

So how did this happen?

The day that the Hacker News Tsunami hit started out pretty much like any other day in the life of a boring-ass bootstrapper such as myself.

I had been spending the last few weeks in an unusual heads-down streak working on a new set of behavior analytics features for Tamboo and had taken my foot off of the marketing gas pedal.

I felt the guilt building up as traffic to my site kept trending down (there’s a direct correlation there) and decided to at least turn the marketing engine’s ignition over to make sure it would still start.

I’ll be honest — I was so deep in this pit of analytics hell that I was having a hard time getting into the right mindset to create marketing material for my target markets that met my standards. Believe it or not, it’s kind of hard to put yourself into people’s shoes and really think about what they would want to read when your brain is spending all of its free cycles (even when you’re supposed to be sleeping) worrying about time series, 2D transformations, and linear algebra. (This is why I usually batch my time and only focus on development or marketing one at a time, and each in their own turn.)

So I procrastinated a bit and wrote Part 3 of The Epic Guide instead.

Then I shared it on some of my favorite bootstrapper sites (as I’ve done with every other article I’ve written on the topic):

• Barnacles
• Discuss (Bootstrapped.fm)
• SaaS Subreddit
• And of course, I threw it at Hacker News for good measure, since there’s usually a handful of people who come through from there. It received (even up to today) a total of 2 whole points! (But this is not how I got on the front page, so read on.)

A couple of hours later, I got an unsolicited request from the awesome folks at Hacker Noon to have Part 3 featured on their homepage.

I was pretty jazzed about that. Up until that day, a hundred views of my article was baller territory for me and I thought, “Wow, think of all those people that might come through and read it!”

I told my girlfriend that this site called Hacker Noon wanted to feature my article and she was like, “What? Hacker News? Isn’t that like a huge site or something?”

And I was all like “Hahaha! No, not Hacker News, Hacker Noon! Getting on Hacker News is like some mythical thing reserved for the startup gods of Olympus who have learned the mystic arts of breeding and riding unicorns and is simply not something mere mortals such as I should ever even dream of doing! Don’t you remember the story of Icarus?! ” (Or something to that effect.)

And then I went about the rest of my day.

But first, here’s what it’s been like up until now.

If you’ve read any of the parts of The Epic Guide, you probably know by now that I’m not about sprinkling petrified feces on your cornflakes and telling you it’s just sugar coating.

I personally can’t stand those smug-ass humblebraggers that would tell this story like this:

I spent some time learning how to write great content. I posted it in a few places and it just went viral and my business took off from there.

So I’m going to digress a little bit and tell you what it’s been like getting to this point just to drive the point home that you don’t go from Point A to Point B without slogging through a whole swamp full of raw sewage and shit along the way.

Let me preface this by saying that five years ago, I didn’t even really know what marketing was (aside from some department that seemingly was always employing fresh college graduates that would find new and inventive ways to cook up some hair-brained scheme to make us developers work around the clock to build something that was supposed to make the company a gazillion dollars but which (somehow, puzzlingly) never seemed to actually reach any such “no-brainer” revenue targets).

And let me also say that historically my “social” stats (followers, shares, likes, retweets, shout outs, fist bumps, etc.) have hovered between depressing and down-right abysmal.

Basically, I was not born a marketer and definitely not a born social media genius. So getting to the front page of Hacker News (coupled with all of the other attention that followed) for someone like me has been a mind-blowing experience.

And rather than just be like “Yeah, you know, I just kinda fell into this” (fucking hate that shit), I thought I should tell you a little bit about how I went from laughably sucking at marketing and writing content to having an article that legitimately went viral.

Getting to this point has been (and continues to be) a legitimate struggle that I have had to purposely work at and through.

Like all people with a development background, if I could avoid sales and marketing outright and still make money, I would do so in a heartbeat.

But it doesn’t work that way. As I’ve learned from experience.

And being honest, I have probably sucked at doing startups more than you ever will. In part because when I started out there was not nearly as much material about how to do things as there are nowadays. And also in part because a lot of that material was actually just a bunch of hyped up fluff created by people employing a (at the time) new marketing strategy now known as content marketing.

It took me years to finally catch onto this charade (hence why I have such a vendetta against all of them).

I read articles about how this one company just built and launched their startup with no marketing and no advertising — just organic Google traffic — and thought that’s just how this worked.

So I spent five months working nights and weekends building my startup — a job board for developers that would match developers to a company’s values and culture — and put it up.

And nothing happened.

I read articles about how this one guy started his company just by putting a tweet out into the Twittersphere about this idea he had — and had more business than he knew what to do with.

I tried that — after having spent three months building another product end-to-end.

Nothing.

I read articles about how this other guy just took out some Google AdWords ads and built his company in a weekend.

So I spent another three months building something and tried running ads for a weekend.

No dice.

My thought process was pretty much as follows: All these people I look up to who have a successful software business are saying “this is how I did it” and since they’re successful, that must be true. But when I try to use their same method, I’m getting nowhere. My business ideas must really suck, since if I had a good business idea, it should just take off like theirs.

So I went through business idea after business idea, codebase after codebase.

In all, I wasted years — more than a decade — chasing this fool’s errand.

No one — and I mean no one — said anything about this whole business taking months, if not years, to get even a tiny form of traction going. Or even what they had to go through to “get good” at it. They were all pandering this fantastical story about how they did “this one thing” that took them from zero to hero over a weekend. So why should I expect my experience to be any different? I was a developer. I was trained to trust the experts. Standing on the shoulders of giants and all. What a crock of shit. Fuck giants.

During this same time period, I spent thousands of dollars on business, marketing, and sales books. Yes, thousands.

I read anything and everything I could get my hands on to try and learn what I needed to learn (and which I so obviously sucked at) so that I could finally fulfill my years-long obsession with building my own online software business.

I learned all about the three P’s, demographics, TAM, SAM, unique selling propositions, etc. — to absolutely no avail. All of the material was mostly theoretical, and any of the “practical” books I got my hands on were really just promotional pieces for the author’s speaking, consulting, and training engagements.

Out of desperation, I tried mimicking other people’s content and styles. I tried mimicking other people’s marketing campaigns. All while always trying a new business idea or product concept or whatever the fuck. I’ve registered more domains and started and shuttered more codebases than I care to reflect upon.

And let’s not forget the countless blogs I’ve started and shuttered and the innumerable hours I spent writing blog posts no one ever even bothered to read.

Despite all of this “learning” (and years wasted reading, listening to podcasts, etc.), I still couldn’t move the fucking needle. They were dark times. I was not a lot of fun to be around.

Finally, one night while sitting on my deck and being absolutely miserable, I said “fuck it”.

I asked myself — what really is marketing and why do I suck at it so badly? There are tons of shitty products out there that are successful — why the fuck can’t I just have some half-way decent success off of a non-shitty product? I get paid good money to design and write software for companies — why the fuck can’t I get anyone outside of those companies to use and buy my shit?

I came up with the following definition of marketing (that I still use in my head to this day):

Marketing is anything that gets people to know that you exist and that gets them excited about what you have to offer.

That’s it.

And in the same “fuck it” vein, I decided from that day forward that I was done taking advice from these so-called “gurus”, that I was done trying to imitate anyone, and that I was done trying to “be like” someone else. I was going to find out — in my own way — how to tell people that I exist and how to get them excited about what I have to offer.

And I was going to do this until I bled. The way that I referred to it to people was “I’m taking it to the hilt.” Meaning, I wasn’t going to stop pushing until I had nothing left to push with. I was going to take constant action until I found a way to break past this wall, and I didn’t give a fuck how long it was going to take — this wall was going to come down come hell or high water — even if I had to spend the rest of my life in the process. (Yes, that’s how obsessed I am about this. I’ll explain why in another installation of The Epic Guide.)

And so I started writing things that I would want to read if I were my customer. I wrote with my voice, with my own wry, twisted, dark sense of humor. In other words, if you were to have a real-world conversation with me in person, this is exactly how I would sound (I’m quite fluent in Sailor and Pirate).

I stopped holding back. I stopped trying to sound professional or super-smart. I stopped trying to sound like an expert. I stopped worrying about what people would think. I stopped writing like I was writing an article for a famous publication. I started writing like I was having a conversation with one of my buddies.

And then the needle started moving.

Where before I couldn’t get a single retweet, like, share, pageview, engagement, or signup — now things were starting to hum a little bit more.

Things started moving because by putting myself out there as I am, I was putting something out there that was unique and that stood out from everyone else following the “sound like a non-offensive professional” marketing playbook.

It turns out that professionalism is for amateurs.

With my online businesses starting to gain some traction thanks to my renewed and refocused marketing efforts (which I can cover in more detail in a later installment), I started writing answers on Quora about my experiences and thoughts on different startup-releated topics. I was surprised to see how much my approach really resonated with people and promised myself that I would write some how-to guides and articles about these things at some point — things I wished I had when starting out. Things that would have helped me avoid wasting a decade of my life.

The Epic Guide Part 1 was the start of fulfilling that promise to myself.

And that’s how I got here.

But make no mistake — it’s not like everything I do or write at this point is a grand slam (or even an on-base hit)— I would love it if that was the case, but that’s just not how it works.

Want to know something really funny?

I actually submitted Part 1 of The Epic Guide to Hacker News two months ago. It got no points, no upvotes, no comments, no nothing:

Now let’s get back to the story at hand.

When things actually “work”…

That same day after I posted Part 3 I was on the phone on a business call and thought to check my Medium stats to see how it was going. After all, I was really curious to see how many new readers would come through the Hacker Noon feature.

I hit refresh.

Wow!

I had something like 600 new views! I was tickled fancy. This was new baller territory!

I wanted to confirm where the traffic was actually coming from (I’m neurotic like that), so I clicked on the referrers tab.

At the top of the list, staring back at me, was news.ycombinator.com.

What the hell?

I fired open a new tab and headed over to Hacker News, looking to see where in the list my article was.

I didn’t have to scroll far.

There, on the front page, right at #11, was my article:

I then promptly and very audibly exclaimed (yes, into the phone, during a business conversation) “OH SHIT!”

I made up some excuse about thinking that I saw a squirrel running around the inside of my house and that I needed to get off the call and chase it down. (No, I’m not kidding.)

Three things are going through my mind right now:

1. What the hell is happening and how the hell did it happen?! (Turns out someone on Hacker News by the name of batina submitted it. I still don’t know who they are — but THANK YOU batina!!!) [The bottom line: It was pure fucking blind luck. Trying to take any credit in any way that would lead you to believe that I somehow know some secret way to get on the front page of Hacker News would be disingenuous and a downright lie. The truth of the matter is this: I got lucky. Very fucking lucky.]
2. I’m not ready for this — Tamboo isn’t ready for this! I’m literally working on what I think are the most important set of features for Tamboo right now. Not only that, but there are a ton of huge improvements to my marketing site that I’ve been getting staged and they aren’t live! AND I’m running an experiment with a 24-hour trial and no pricing page! The people coming from Hacker News are going to torch what I have up there right now! AAAGGGHHGGHGHHGHGH!
3. Holy shit. Holy shit. My servers are going to catch on fire and melt into languid piles of plastic.

So at this point I’m just freaking out and trying to make heads of everything. I might be visibly shaking, I’m not too sure.

I ran and told my girlfriend and she was like, “Yeah? You told me about that this morning.”

And I was like “NO! That was Hacker Noon — THIS is Hacker News!”

In what could only be described as a scene right out of Dude, Where’s My Car? we went back and forth until she finally understood that I had somehow unwittingly been whisked up by a rogue startup unicorn and had been unceremoniously dumped on the top of Startup Olympus, anointed head-to-toe in rainbow unicorn shit.

I went back to my computer and spent probably the next hour toggling between Hacker News, Medium, Tamboo, and Google Analytics hitting “refresh”.

Within that time, it broke the top ten:

Within three hours, it was in the top 3:

At this point, traffic is going through the roof — both to my Medium article and to Tamboo.

On Medium, hits are coming in at around 150 views a minute.

Tamboo traffic is less (since there’s only one link off of the article to my site) but still wildly impressive compared to a normal day. (Full stats to follow.)

But then something else happened.

It spread.

More like “Project X” than “The Hangover”

When I started writing The Epic Guide, I thought I was writing something that would only matter to a very small community — bootstrappers. (Side note: I hate that whole “self-funded” nonsense people are trying to push. Unless you’re already rich, you’re a bootstrapper. If you are rich, feel free to “self-fund” the fuck out of yourself. The two are not in the same camp.)

When compared to the overall startup ecosystem, us bootstrappers are like the estranged twice-removed cousins living off the grid in a cabin in the woods, preferring to live off the land by our lonesomes and kill our food with our own hands instead of falling into a life of mass-consumerism, suburban townhouses, and grocery stores.

Most of us think of ourselves as being a little bit crazy like this. How else can you explain the fact that most of us willingly work an 80 hour week simply to avoid having to work a 40 hour one in the employment of someone else? Or that, when we could just have a comfy job writing awesome code, we instead force ourselves to slog through learning and executing business management, sales, marketing, accounting, web and graphic design, copywriting, advertising, customer support, and every other unsavory job a developer could ever dream of?

So when I wrote The Epic Guide, I truly thought it was going to be a small intimate gathering with a group of close friends.

This small intimate gathering quickly turned into what can only be described as the plot of Project X.

People started sharing the shit out of the thing and even more people jumped into the fray.

Each of those shares brought roughly 10x as much traffic to the article from what I can tell looking at the stats. In other words, the 388 Facebook shares brought roughly 3,900 views.

My phone starting pinging around the clock with shares, mentions, new followers, shout outs, and fist bumps.

And in true Project X fashion, there were even a handful of… let’s call them amorous advances. (Sorry, but I’m off the market.)

Meanwhile, in the back office…

I would love to say something like “I got so much traffic from Hacker News that my servers crashed, caught fire, and exploded in an epic fireball of startup awesomeness!”

But that didn’t happen.

The servers kept serving. No real drama.

I’ll admit that the brunt of the traffic was being fronted by Medium and I’ll also admit that I was pretty nervous that something might go wrong (you never know with these things). But all in all, everything ran without issue.

I did get to spend the next two days (pretty much around the clock) trying to play catch up with people on social media, answering email, supporting people who signed up for the service (I had to among other things implement some last minute features, help troubleshoot some rendering issues, etc.), and trying to keep up on the Hacker News and Medium comment threads. Which, by the way, everyone was super cool on. I had concerns about strongly opinionated technical people whipping out the pitchforks and torches and digressing the conversation into a flame fest, but everyone was really awesome and encouraging — I was floored by the reception.

I think it’s important to note a few things here before I dive into the final stats and numbers.

First of all, although this was a really exciting experience, I knew that it probably wasn’t going to result in a huge number of new signups despite all of the traffic. If you think about it, people were in a state of curiosity, not in a signup mindset. They just wanted to see what Tamboo was all about. They weren’t actively looking for such a solution. They were much more interested in the content of the article (how to bootstrap their SaaS startup). A good analogy is this: Let’s say you just got done eating a huge dinner and you’re walking home. You pass a street vendor offering the most delicious food you can imagine. You’re going to pass. Why? Because you’re not hungry. Contrast that with if you’re starving. At that point, you’re probably going to splurge and get the food — because you have a need. The majority of people visiting Tamboo from the article didn’t have a need right then. So I wasn’t expecting much in terms of signups.

Second, I knew this would eventually taper off. Huge traffic inflows like this always taper off. Once the article fell off the front page (roughly 24 hours later), things did taper off. It was a little sad, but all good things must end, right?

Third, I knew better than to try and make a change to “take advantage of the situation”. I didn’t have an email list for people to sign up for (would have loved to have had that right about then). And I was a little upset that I had the whole 24-hour trial experiment running instead of a more standard 7–14 day trial and that I didn’t have pricing plans published. I thought I might be able to get some more signups out of the whole thing if I had those things in place. But I knew better. Making last minute changes never work out. You always miss some mundane detail and make things worse. So I just sat back and grinned and beared it. Trying to take advantage of a situation like this might seem like the smart thing to do, but I knew it wasn’t a sustainable strategy and that it would probably bite me in the ass. So I just said to myself, “This is really awesome. But it’s not how I got my first customers, and it won’t be how I get my customers a year from now. So I’m just going to go along for the ride and stay focused on what’s been working for me.”

Now, let’s take a look at those beautiful numbers.

Here’s the Hacker News Tsunami Medium stats:

(I also got over 1,000 new Medium followers.)

And here’s the Tamboo stats:

And here’s the Medium article referrer stats for Part 1 (people read multiple Parts of The Epic Guide and that’s why the overall Medium numbers are higher):

And, in a surprising bonus, the article made #3 on Medium’s Top 20 for the day!

So how’d I make out?

Drum roll please.

I can attribute a total of 36 new signups to the Hacker News Tsunami and its Social Media Aftershocks.

Of those 36 new signups, 24 actually installed the Tamboo JavaScript snippet on their sites.

I extended everyone’s trial as a thank you for signing up (as well as to reflect the 14-day trial now on the site), so I won’t know until the 31st of this month how many people actually convert into paying customers from that group. (Much of running a SaaS is a “fun” waiting game. “Fun” being a subjective term.)

But doing some simple math, if every one of them were to convert (highly unlikely) and were to convert at the $29/month plan (pretty common), getting to the front page of Hacker News added a total of $696.00/month to my bottom line.

Yep, you read that right.

Get to the front page of Hacker News for 24 hours, and you too could get an additional $696.00 MRR!

If you were to assume that every one of them stayed around for a year (also highly unlikely), then that would (in theory) add $8,352.00 to my ARR.

In all likelihood, it will be far, far less than that.

So if your startup’s launch plan consists of “get on front page of Hacker News” or “get featured on Tech Crunch”, you should probably rethink that strategy.

It’s a wildly fun ride but it’s just not a payoff strategy.

The only real payoff strategy is to work every day to make consistent and incremental progress to your goal. You don’t fill a pool with water in one fell swoop. It needs to be a constant stream. That’s how this stuff really works.

So where do we go from here?

I’ve been completely blown away and humbled by this whole experience. If you were to tell me that 1) people would take to my writing the way that they have or that 2) I would make #3 on Hacker News for anything I’ve ever done, I would nod and smile while secretly speed dialing the men in white coats behind my back.

The one thing this whole experience has shown me is that there are way more people out there than I thought who are hungry for Bootstrapper Startup Truth Sandwiches (they are delicious!).

At the same time, I can see that the time it would take for me to get everything out of my head and into your hands would be enormous. Each of these articles that I write can take days to flush out, edit, and revise. And I have to leave out all sorts of details that I would love to include just because of time constraints (and format). That’s why I typically write one post a month — they’re time consuming. Plus, let’s not forget that I have a business to run (all by myself).

So let me throw something out there for your consideration.

How do you feel about The Epic Guide: THE BOOK?

This is something I would love to do. But rather than just shut myself off from the world for the next eight months cranking away and then finding out that no one wants it, I’m asking you to validate that this is something you want. (See, I do eat my own dog food.)

So here’s how we’ll do this.

If you want me to write what I hope will be the last book you will ever need to read about getting your software product business off the ground and running, tell me.

Tell me in a response to this article. Tell me on Twitter (@cliffordoravec). Tell me through the contact form on Tamboo. However you can, just tell me.

Picture everything you love about The Epic Guide — but expanded and unabridged.

Plus, whatever you might like to see. What burning questions do you have? What struggles are you facing? What’s stopping you from getting what you want? Let me know and I’ll include something on it (so long as it fits — I’m a bootstrapper, not a psychologist).

I want this to be the last book you ever read on the subject of building your software product business to the point that you can quit your job. You can read whatever other books you want about scaling teams, creating company cultures that stick, how to attract top talent, etc. I’m not going after that. I’m going after everything in between that and where you are today.

So if this is something you want, tell me. I’d really hate to just chalk this one up as one of those “great ideas” I’ve had that I wasn’t able to move forward on.

Thanks for reading, and be sure to give me a follow and stay tuned for more awesomeness to come!

A Quick Update

Since its original publication, The Epic Guide has become an *insanely* popular resource for bootstrapped startups — on the verge of becoming a “cult classic”!

I’ve had an insane number of people asking me for even more down and to the point advice for building their startups — so much so that it’s inspired me to give The Epic Guide the full-length book treatment.

If you’re interested in learning more about the book or if you’re itching to pick up a copy, head on over to this page I’ve set up for The Epic Guide to Bootstrapping a Startup By Yourself: The Book!