Last week, we posted about Revideo on Hackernews. We had already attempted a few Show HN’s before, which unfortunately did not get a lot of attention. This time however, we made it to the front page!

We were stoked about getting here, and quite nervous about how people would react to our project. The Hackernews community is known for being quite harsh, so we mentally prepared to get roasted and humiliated for our code.

It’s now been five days since we landed on the frontpage, and things have gotten a bit calmer again after the initial buzz - we decided to take a look at how our post helped us and our numbers.

Revideo is an open source project at a relatively early stage. We have been working on it for around three months, but have not had any hugely viral posts yet that improved our reach prior to our Show HN.

For our launch, we had a few objectives:

Increase Github Stars: We know that Github stars are not necessarily reflective of user numbers, but it’s undeniable that they influence as how reliable and trustworthy your project is perceived. We ourselves had noticed that we really only wanted to build on top of projects with 1k+ stars - this is a number we wanted to achieve for Revideo as fast as possible too.

Get more Users: Obviously, we want as many people as possible to use Revideo - this doesn’t require any additional explanation.

Get Waitlist Signups for our Platform: We want to monetize Revideo with a platform that lets developers deploy their Revideo projects for rendering. We set up a waitlist for this platform on our website, along with a button to schedule a call.

Our launch went really well - better than we expected! We received 296 upvotes and had great discussions with the HN community. Here are some of our numbers:

Stars: We went from 300 to 1,000 stars within 3 days of launching. Even now, our star growth is still good! Today, we are at 1.4k stars

Users: It is hard to give concrete estimates as we did not want our telemetry to be too invasive. However, we know that since the launch, 100 new Revideo projects were created.

Waitlist Signups: 65 people signed up to our platform waitlist - this number is good, but not amazing. Most likely, the reason for this is that we only noticed very late that there was no link to our website and therefore the waitlist in both our repository and the hackernews post. This clearly affected the number of signups we got.

Overall, we were super happy with these results. We’re noticing that there’s more activity in our Discord server and are super motivated to see more people building with Revideo. If you yourself are building a dev tool, we’d highly encourage posting about it on HN!

Clearly, we are not yet Hackernews or Devrel experts, so take the following advice with a grain of salt. However, here are some of the things we think we did well and the things we would change:

Try Posting multiple times: It’s unlikely that your first Show HN will go viral. Keep posting, and at some point you’ll get there :)

When you get to the frontpage, stay on your laptop and respond to comments instantly: We made sure to instantly respond to all comments in our thread and kept monitoring the post for hours without doing any other work. This kept engagement high and caused us to stay on the frontpage for much longer.

If you have a waitlist, link to it in your repository: We did not link to our waitlist, and therefore didn’t have a huge amount of signups. Next time, we’ll do this differently