Item — HN Reader

> I think 'Show HN' is signalling to people that you don't think anyone would be interested in the content. It is like apologizing. Make content people are interested in.

Show HN isn't for content links. From the "Show HN Guidelines":

> Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread.

> Off topic: blog posts, sign-up pages, newsletters, lists, and other reading material. Those can't be tried out, so can't be Show HNs. Make a regular submission instead.

1 comments

I would go further and say I wish I could help the poster get some "tough love" about the problems ahead.

An interest in venues like "Show HN" is a sign of marketing theatre as opposed to doing the hard work of marketing. If you contact real customers and make sales that is success. Getting the high score on Product Hunt is O.K., it's like being on the "Shark Tank" TV show. But it is the high-value customer you need to have a business.

If I was in the poster's shoes I would expect to take at least 3 to 10 specific actions a day in order to get my product in the face of someone who might be interested.

(e.g. that could be writing a blog post about the product, the problem it solves, and the surrounding environment. It could be calling a phone number you saw on a web page by a person who is complaining about the problem, set up a search engine ad, put up letter-size posters around a college campus or other hotspot, ...)

That's my basis of how I react to the post, just in that situation my head would be so full of how to talk to customers that I would have no time to get hung up on a lackluster response from 'Show HN'.