$1,500 in Monthly Recurring Revenue Came From Hacker News
baremetrics.ioThis is the first time I've come across the term "wantrepreneur" and I am immediately putting it beside "slacktivist" as a word to use often.
"While I appreciate you asking for my expert opinion on your business plan, your insistence that I sign a wantrepreneur NDA means I will pass."
Please don't. This isn't high school.
Great work on converting blog readers--typically a low-converting segment--into actual paying customers.
Although I agree that your blog should target people who actually fall within your target audience--who are almost always a subset of "businesses and people with real money"--I'm curious why you think that's the reason that article did well.
Did it have a higher conversion rate than previous, similar articles?
I think the title is misleading. Hacker News itself did not generate $1500, posting something on Hacker News helped your company generate $1500...
I think the result is better than getting Techcrunched for sure. HN is a better audience when targeted with a product that startups would benefit from.
I clicked this (original title, via the Facebook page) as someone recently posted that HN doesn't earn anything in the "why was HN down" thread after those filesystem changes
I wonder if the click-bait-ish title was inspired by that post
I'm not sure that creating a catchy headline telling HN how much they added to your bottom line and then berating/shaming a large percentage of members in your article is going to be a good longterm marketing strategy. I would recommend thanking them for the exposure and adding $1,500/month to your bank account. Todays "Wantrepreneur's" could be tomorrows millionaire/billionaires. This line of business requires a bit of luck and just because you received some (and built a great product) doesn't give you the right to put down others in the community.
If his theory is correct, this post will generate next to nothing. However, I think he misses one major point...
The first article talked about the product offering throughout, this article doesn't even mention their company/product name. There was nothing in the second article that made me wonder what they did; in the first article I was interested in what their obvious value prop was.
Tip: write each blog post like it may or may not be a person's very first interaction with your company. Write for both audiences.
Since I know Josh is probably reading this thread, I'm kind of curious, how were you able to build baremetrics so quickly? Were you working on it full-time off the bat?
I think this method of measuring the performance of retargeting is wrong. When your visitors later see your ads and convert, the value may not all be attributable to the ad. I would expect some visitors would have later converted even if they hadn't seen the retargeted ad.
A better approach would be a controlled experiment. Divide your non-converting visitors into two groups, and run ads for only one. Then compare the results.
I think the biggest factor in this is that baremetrics hooks up with Stripe.
It's very likely that someone who runs a website and is reading Hacker News will be using Stripe, so this is an incredibly targeted audience for that service. Maybe not such an externally valid case study, but interesting none the less.
>...Heck, most people on Hackers News don’t even have an actual business.
>The subject matter of the post drove businesses with real money to our site.
...from Hacker News? Anyone else find this rather contradictory?
There is a subset of HN users with successful businesses and quite a bit of money to throw at things, but I don't know how representative they are of the userbase as a whole (likely not very.) I think the followup sentence (They’re in some mystical stealth phase that they’ll likely never get out of.) is probably correct, although the tone seems unnecessarily snide (that of the set of HN users involved with startups, most can't be considered successful entrepreneurs, because the startups themselves aren't successful, don't actually exist yet, or because they themselves are employees and not owners.)
Glad we could indirectly help out!
I posted our subscription product up months ago and all in all generates $460 MRR
“wantrepreneurs”