When working on my projects and talking to investors, I often hear: “Just post it on Hacker News or Reddit and show that people love it.”
Unless you're building a start up where the potential customers are specifically HN and Reddit readers, get the hell away from those investors. They're idiots.
As lovely and wonderful as the readers of HN and Reddit are, being loved on HN or Reddit means essentially nothing. People here are the magpies of the internet - we love seeing the new shiny thing but that does not tell you it will be a success with the people who might want to buy it. For every Dropbox posted here there are hundreds of Show HN posts that didn't really go anywhere despite having tons of very positive commentary.
If you want to show investors that your start up's product has potential post about it where your customers go and get feedback from people who might give you their money. If you really want to prove your start up has potential, sell to those people and actually get their money. If you can get a sale based on your prototype/proof-of-concept/MVP product that is worth more than a million "Yeah, looks ace, I'd buy that if it was <price that's far too low>." posts from us.
Ideally you'll be working with the investors and leveraging their expertise and connections. If you're choosing an investor that you'll be working with for years, it's worth looking for things in addition to money.
Also, people here are probably too technically inclined to understand what normal people want. If you look at the $500/mo side projects thread, there's a bunch of projects where HN would probably say: 'but anyone can do that themselves using X'.
Like the person creating coloring pages from images using Stable Diffusion. Many HN users would just do it themselves, but many parents have no idea how to do that.
Makes me wonder how many potentially successful businesses never get built, because too many people are trying to build the next big YC project with AI or whatever tech is hype today.
The magpies of the internet sounds like a really cool name for what its worth, dont mind if I steal it :)
I played inscryption (a really good game) and magpie had the sigil of being able to take any card from the deck and oh my, it was a beauty seeing a magpie or the sigil because that meant that I could then get any overpowered card I had from the deck.
I am sure people might not understand it if they haven't played the game but everytime I hear magpie, Its almost obligatory for me to mention inscryption. (also the same goes for stoat and ouroborous too)
I love HN. And the Show HN graveyard is huge! Many a time I’ve searched, found a post I thought sounded cool, and it’s dead… sometimes in just a couple of months.
Of course, the Dropbox post has a meme-level example of an HNer predicting its popularity :) [0]
That said, it also often happen that you share something and it is not picked up, even though after 10 years I think I can predict what HN loves. Sometimes a repost after 2 days will hit the front page, certainly not always.
Unless you're building a start up where the potential customers are specifically HN and Reddit readers, get the hell away from those investors. They're idiots.
As lovely and wonderful as the readers of HN and Reddit are, being loved on HN or Reddit means essentially nothing. People here are the magpies of the internet - we love seeing the new shiny thing but that does not tell you it will be a success with the people who might want to buy it. For every Dropbox posted here there are hundreds of Show HN posts that didn't really go anywhere despite having tons of very positive commentary.
If you want to show investors that your start up's product has potential post about it where your customers go and get feedback from people who might give you their money. If you really want to prove your start up has potential, sell to those people and actually get their money. If you can get a sale based on your prototype/proof-of-concept/MVP product that is worth more than a million "Yeah, looks ace, I'd buy that if it was <price that's far too low>." posts from us.