What the Hacker News Front Page did for my app
Published: 2017-06-06 13:22:23

---
title: What the Hacker News Front Page did for my app
published: true
description: How I got tons of feedback on my app through Hacker News
cover_image: https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/ovoall1kk3f1abojy96g.png
tags: 
---

On Sunday night, I posted a "Show HN", for a side project <https://www.findlectures.com>: 

![HN Submission](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/2u0nju1mga2ys01vf2bx.png "HN Submission")

Luckily, I made it to the front page before WWDC coverage started. While the site was on the front page, I had roughly 50 concurrent users at any point.


![HN Traffic](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/ovoall1kk3f1abojy96g.png "HN Traffic")

Previously the site was featured on TNW and Lifehacker, roughly concurrently, which was about double the traffic from HN:

![TNW and LifeHacker Traffic](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/pzdwg7ey0he8mpoaslkw.png "TNW and LifeHacker Traffic")

Side projects by their nature tend not to be polished - during this event, the folks on HN reported roughly fifteen issues, including a critical CSS issue on mobile, and an out of memory error on my Solr server. 

During the previous traffic spike, I gained an appreciation for being able to quickly deploy changes (basically, use Heroku), so I was able to fix these quickly.

Since the last spike I have been instrumenting the site to get more feedback, which really paid off.

I have an [email list of my "best of" talks](https://www.findlectures.com/emails), and on sign-up, it asks people if they have favorite speakers, or topics of interest.

![Email Signups](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/7laf532fanupuo7nfo8n.png "Email Signups")

Of email signups, 50% fill out the feedback form, which is about 100 times higher than I expected. From Hacker News, I got about 75 messages recommending speakers I should index.

![Typeform Image](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/z4e1nuy1xo5ppln5syg0.png "Typeform Image")

Most of these notes were positive. A few were less so, and it's important to  remember that is difficult for commenters to be empathetic through a screen, so a few people will forget that there are real people behind a project.

![Typeform Image of a piece of feedback](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/56xnpcczsbzhe09l93pw.png "Typeform Image of a piece of feedback")

In the emails I send out, I also request feedback on the individual emails. On average 1% of recipients use this each week. I got an 3-4 notes from Hacker News readers who signed up, which is higher than normal (if you want to replicate this, use this [awesome demo from codepen](https://codepen.io/cvasquez/pen/oxBvMP)).

![In Email Feedback](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/oe12u5fy60knuzn7n825.png "In Email Feedback")

I recently added an functionality to get feedback on individual videos. There was no way to know if anyone would use this, but during this traffic spike, I was pleased to see several people make it through the different paths.

![Video Feedback](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/wjyd10ul7mxg7fm780w0.png "Video Feedback")

![In Email Feedback](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/39b9j5bfi8saivc3nu4r.png "Positive Video Feedback")

![Negative Video Feedback](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/zg7r27uamuv53g2h4uqh.png "Negative Video Feedback")

I'm also logging how far people get into videos, in Google Analytics, hoping that I can eventually train a machine learning model to improve the ranking:

![Google Analytics Events](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/uabxboe15jeotctkxgow.png "Google Analytics Events")

In the end, the effect of the HN Front Page is over a hundred pieces of qualitative feedback, as well as several bits of data that I can use to improve the site for the future.