TechCrunch vs. Hacker News: Which is a better front page to launch your startup?
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Re: TechCrunch vs. Hacker News: Which is a better front page to launch your startup?
#2Minor nitpick: 2nd and 3rd graphs say TN instead of TC
I always wonder how much of this data is skewed (engagement especially) by the amount of apps that are built on top of HN.
Re: TechCrunch vs. Hacker News: Which is a better front page to launch your startup?
#3HN Hands Down any day if you're looking for developer traffic.
Re: TechCrunch vs. Hacker News: Which is a better front page to launch your startup?
#4Getting upvoted on HN seems like a bit of luck. I've seen really bad posts get upvotes, and some better ones get nothing.
So just posting on HN is not a launch strategy unless you know people who will upvote your submission.
Re: TechCrunch vs. Hacker News: Which is a better front page to launch your startup?
#5Why not both? It's not exactly hard to submit something to two different websites.
Re: TechCrunch vs. Hacker News: Which is a better front page to launch your startup?
#6None of them will bring substantial traffic, users or virality (but HN brings you slightly more, if you are doing good ~20-30K visits while TC hits you ~5-10K).
If you are raising money or raised already and prepare the next round being on TC is a must. Not only once, better several times. Consider also Mashable, maybe not the same brand but you will get much more traffic and virality than with TC.
Regarding hiring devs HN is of course better.
To get on HN on the front page is much easier than with TC.
Re: TechCrunch vs. Hacker News: Which is a better front page to launch your startup?
#7What you post on HN matters a great deal: when we had a general start-up related article hit the front page we got traffic but few leads (like in OP's example).
But when we launched an interesting feature and hit the front page -- with the story's title obviously aimed at our target market of app publishers -- we got massive amount of leads as well.
Re: TechCrunch vs. Hacker News: Which is a better front page to launch your startup?
#8I write for a startup and have been on HN front page a few times, most visits from HN in a day was around 1300 for an article about Facebooks Social Graph: http://www.applieddatalabs.com/content/how-facebooks-graph-s...
This article misses an important benifit of getting large amounts of traffic: Google starts to recognize you through author rank and links as a qualified source of information.
Ever since my articles have been on HN, search traffic has steadily grown. This could be because of something else, but the common connection is large amounts of traffic from you guys.
Re: TechCrunch vs. Hacker News: Which is a better front page to launch your startup?
#9I suspect I might be old fashioned but I'd take actual leads and conversions over paying 20 cents each for random hits any day. By such a measure, it seems TC won hands down. But as several other people are saying, both would be better ;-)
Re: TechCrunch vs. Hacker News: Which is a better front page to launch your startup?
#10Given that the two links pointed to completely different pages it's hard to draw any conclusion. It's well known that landing page has a significant impact on conversion, so even if the same audience from TC was split across both links (front page vs blog article) the conversion would likely be significantly different.
It also varies highly depending on the time of day and business of both. Hit either on a busy news day and you'll get wiped out. The time of day also has a huge impact on whether the audience is primarily European / East Cost (US) / West Coast (US) which depending on the nature of your startup can make a huge difference.
While the article makes interesting reading I wouldn't recommend trying to apply the findings to your own startup.