I went viral on Hacker News with my High Signal website
I got 14,000 new visitors to my High Signal website at the weekend! Someone shared an interview I did with a French founder who makes $10k/month from his French learning SaaS on Hacker News. You can see the post here:
It's a great story! Benjamin only took a year to learn to code and get this off the ground.
I was actually just about to go to sleep after a long week of travel when Benjamin, the founder I interviewed, told me someone had submitted it to HN. Other friends started messaging me with screenshots showing 130 upvotes. At the time of writing this a few days later, it has reached 183 upvotes.
I quickly opened my laptop, wrote a reply in the the thread and then went to bed. The next day I woke up to 130 new email subscribers! I tweaked my newsletter sign up form a little bit and added a link to my Twitter ghost writing page to try to get more leads for that.
You can never predict when something will take off on Hacker News. I'm not sure why this did so well but maybe it's because of who posted it or because it involves learning a language, which is something lots of people want to do.
I still think it's better to grow from more predictable traffic sources like social media and SEO. But it's still very gratifying and fun that someone would share something I put together on the internet and that 16,000 people would see it 😀