How to Make Hacker News Top 10 (By Accident)

Despite my best efforts I made it to #8 on Hacker News the other day with this article I wrote about one of my favorite writers, Derek Sivers and his philosophy of defining “enough”.

What’s Hacker News?

Hacker News is a simple up-vote/down-vote story posting platform for writing related to business, and technology. It’s kinda like Reddit, just with less crazy people.

While I’ve had some success with an in-person service as a coach, I’ve been trying to build my audience online for the past few months. To do this I’ve take a few courses by Daniel Vassallo, Jack Butcher and David Perrell whose combined principles gave me the tools to make this nice ranking more likely.

Daniel Vassallo

Daniel is an ex-Amazon programmer who left in order to pursue building his own business. (This itself is quite the story you can read here). Per Daniel, distribution is at least 80% of the battle, at least at first. Once you write something interesting you need to get it in front of some eyeballs.

What really helped me was getting my article posted to Hacker News. Historically, most of my traffic has come not from Twitter but from Hacker News where people can up-vote or down-vote your content.

This was BEFORE I realized I messed up…

Jack Butcher

Jack is a former Fortune 500 marketer who built his company Visualize Value that helps businesses create visual assets to better convince others of their ability to deliver their service/product.

Jack Butcher talked about “permissionless apprenticeship” in his course Build Once, Sell Twice. Simply, it means you take it upon yourself to solve a problem you care about as if someone had already hired you for it.

Jack’s account on Twitter took off when he, without permission, started creating unique visuals to Naval Ravikant’s popular one-liner tweets (Naval is a popular Silicon Valley VC and thinker).

David Perrell

David created the quite popular Write of Passage Course on how to grow your audience online via writing.

While I took David Perrell’s How To Crush Twitter course, it really was his free guide to writing online that solidified in my head what Jack Butcher was talking about. If you lack credibility, borrow it by positioning yourself as a synthesizer of various thought-leaders’ ideas. Since I read a ton it was pretty easy to do this for my favorite authors like Seth Godin and Derek Sivers.

Thanks from Seth Godin and Derek Sivers

While I thought I’d never get email responses from these guys, both Seth and Derek emailed me on the same day I included a nice note to them thanking them for influencing my life with a link to their articles.

I think as long as you come at their work from a respectful place, they’ll be positive back towards you. You are also giving them publicity and introducing their work to more people who might be moved by it.

Give it a try, seriously.

The Problem

While I was busy drooling over going from 11 website visitors to 11,000 in a single day, I forgot to implement a simple email opt-in and to check that my Twitter link worked on my website until Gary here told me.

Thanks, Gary. 🤦‍♂️

Here are my takeaways:

1. Hacker News users either love Derek Sivers or loath him. If I want to rile up future Hacker News traffic it might be good to start with him or someone connected to him.
2. Distribution is just as important as content.
3. Borrowing credibility has been fun and more productive than writing my own stand alone articles.
4. It’s really hard to catch fish with no net. Always double check your email opt-in and that your social media links work.

Thanks for reading, and I hope this helps you avoid my headaches.

Brendan

P.S. If you might like to connect, I’d love to hear from you. Please shoot me an email below or give me a quick follow on Twitter here.