How I Ended up on the Front Page of HN and Product Hunt
I’ve been working on Klart.co for about three weeks now and 4 days ago I decided to post Klart on Show HN. This is what happened.
Submit
I was sitting on my couch, having my morning coffee after working out. I think it was around 7 AM. After updating my Trello board with tasks I decided the first task of the day should be to post Klart on Hacker News. I hesitated a couple of times since I didn’t know if it was ready. But then again, would it ever be? So I decided to just do it. I didn’t think it would end up on the front page anyway. But it did.
The First Hour
I remember refreshing the Show HN page every 5 minutes or so to see if it got any upvotes. I’ve read that it takes about 5 upvotes within the first hour to get to the front page. So I waited, nervously. What if it came to the front page? How would people react? Would there be hate?
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, …, 25 upvotes, holy shit.
On the Front Page of Hacker News
Klart ended up on the front page and I also got some comments. Most of them was actually very nice. Some might argue that internet brings out the worst in people. But I really enjoyed getting honest feedback on my work. So I decided to answer all comments, since if someone took time to write me a response, the least I could do is answer them.
Featured on Product Hunt
Something I didn’t count on was being featured on Product Hunt at the same time as I ended up on Hacker News front page. While busy answering comments on Hacker News, and making sure the server handled everything, this happened 🙀:
Mixed feelings occurred, mostly “This is awesome 😺 ”, but also “I’m not ready, It’s not ready”, “Will the server handle it?” and “Shit I haven’t even launched tags yet”, you get the point.
Working in every time zone
I decided to stick with answering all comments. I got invaluable feedback from both Hacker News and the Product Hunt community. I even got some amazing feedback on email.
The downside might be that I stayed up all night psyched by this. Since I’m in Stockholm and San Fransisco is 9 hours behind, I had some work to do 😶. The server handled the load without even working hard, which was quite impressing for a $5/m Digital Ocean droplet behind CloudFlare 👏.
Thank You
I ended up getting about 100 upvotes on Product Hunt and about 50 on Hacker News. I want to thank both communities for providing such awesome feedback and I hope to show you more stuff soon :)
