I’ve hit the front page of Hacker News 10+ times for Figma and other companies, and picked up five tactics along the way:

1. A post has a good shot if it picks up 10 to 15 upvotes in its first 30 minutes. I’ve seen advice suggesting 5 or 6 upvotes in the first five to ten minutes, but that feels risky to me. A big announcement from Anthropic or OpenAI might pull that kind of traffic on its own. A regular blog post from a less high profile company is usually slower. 

2. If you’re going to ask friends to upvote, don’t send them the direct URL. Make sure each person actually uses Hacker News regularly, not just for this one favor. Have them go to /newest and search for your title with cmd+F. Make sure they’re not all on the same Wi-Fi network, use personal hotspots instead. I actually prefer asking friends to upvote a couple of unrelated posts they like as well.

3. If they leave comments, the comments should sound like Hacker News comments: well considered, and slightly critical. Nothing screams a shadowban like a low effort, “Great work!” comment.

Do any of this too often, or make it too obvious, and your account or domain can get shadowbanned. After your account or domain is shadowbanned, your posts will be invisible to anyone browsing. You will receive no votes or comments. You can email the moderators and plead your case, but I’d imagine the things that got you banned in the first place tend to make that a hard case to plead. (I have never had to try to rescue a domain.)

4. For my own blog, where I write every day, I post to Hacker News at odd hours, like 9pm ET. If it doesn’t take off right away, a moderator sometimes picks it up for the second-chance pool.

5. For every post about yourself, submit nine good posts from other people. This ratio keeps you from being too self-promotional, and it refines your taste for what the community actually wants.

Real traction looks messy from the outside. If you check a website’s post history on Hacker News, most of its submissions sit at 1 to 3 points, even for more popular websites. A post at 20 or 30 points stands out. A history where every post lands at 20 or 30 points looks suspicious.

My first submission on behalf of Figma did not hit Hacker News directly. It hit the top of the r/programming Subreddit first. Then four different people found it there and submitted it to Hacker News over the next couple of days, and one of those hit the front page. I didn’t know them or ask anyone to do that.

A good article can hit the front page with none of these tactics. But executing all of them perfectly won’t save an article that isn’t any good.

If you’ve got a good technical article or eng blog that doesn’t have enough readers, let me know. I can help you assess whether it’s the content that’s the problem (and how to fix it), or help you find more readers.

I’ve shared most of that advice before here. I also wrote the prequel to this one a few weeks ago, when I wrote about hitting the front page of Hacker News for Figma during its annual conference. 

A lot of people are executing these types of campaigns behind the scenes—with really good content, of course—to great success. It feels fair to open this possibility up to everyone.

While I led with the promotional tips, they tend to distract away from how to write something actually worth sharing. The subject matter being shared is 80% of the work. The distribution can help unlock a good article’s impact, but it means nothing if the article wasn’t worth reading to begin with. That’ll probably be the subject of my next post.

For this blog, I don’t ask friends to upvote at all. I just submit a post and close the tab. Seven of these blog posts have hit the front page completely organically. It feels a lot more rewarding knowing that these posts thrived on their own, without me needing to give it an extra promotional boost. Plus, I know which ideas resonate, and what to explore further.

The post 5 tactics for hitting the Hacker News front page appeared first on Herbert Lui.

This was the perfect opportunity for me to try The Consistency Journal as a structure. It kept my experiences of despair and doubt at bay. Instead, I focused on what I was working toward, as well as small wins and new ideas. 

One note I made was to try using my writing to support my sales. I’d done this to great success once, with my series on Slack’s copywriting, content strategy, and blog leading to multiple inbound leads. I stopped for no good reason other than a lack of focus and dedication. It dawned on me this was worth trying again, and I was ready for it.

This note had been sitting in my journal for almost a month, and I felt very blocked even prior to writing that note, so I made time to execute on it with greater immediacy.

I shifted my focus to write at two outlets: a newsletter which I sent to clients and prospects (with permission), and LinkedIn. I’d struggled to introduce my services at LinkedIn, and getting clearer on my strategy as well as finding the Guild95 community was the supportive context I needed to get unblocked. I told stories from my professional experiences.

Each of those posts and newsletter editions took at least two hours to write and edit, even with AI assistance. It felt like a gamble. However, after posting just a handful of times, several prospective clients have reached out asking me to chat. I’ve signed a contract to start a new project. 

My talent isn’t in sales, it’s in writing. I realized that I had an advantage when I focused on my writing, and using that to drive sales. I was energized by the process of writing these stories, and also pulling them together into a book or another larger body of work at some point.

If you’re a designer, then use your design to drive sales. Explore interesting concepts, or do self-initiated makeovers (e.g., redesign a feature in a popular app, or come up with a cool campaign, etc.), and publish it.

If you’re a software developer, then use your programming skills to drive sales. Demo your work in a video, transcribe the text into a text post, and publish it. 

Lead your sales with your talent. Instead of spending so much time looking for clients, they’ll find you.

The post Talent-led sales appeared first on Herbert Lui.

My friend gave the client’s website a facelift, of course; plus, along the way, they made it more efficient so the website loaded instantly (it took half a minute before). They also set up a pick up service for the client, which was there but not working before. All this, for a simple website redesign. It blew my mind.

After the explanation, they told me it was a struggle finding more clients; everyone seemed to either have a website, or didn’t think they needed one. 

This first client happened to be the exception.

Most people aren’t interested in your product, service, or business. Marketing is about finding the exceptions. 

When you find enough exceptions, the process starts to feel less exceptional; your business has found product-market fit. 

Sometimes, it’s more useful to help the exceptions find you.

The post Marketing is about finding the exceptions appeared first on Herbert Lui.

In the release notes, you’ll find a 10-page original manga, hand drawn by graphic designer Melanie Schmidt. She writes, “Every line was refined digitally before I switched to analogue for the shading, because apparently I enjoy making my life unnecessarily difficult.”

Going beyond requirements is a gamble. While it can feel tough in the moment, you’ll at least have a three dimensional business card you can point to. And sometimes, like this time, it really works. 

Remember, as Hank Green says, “You aren’t just working on the thing you’re making right now, you’re also working on everything you will ever make in the future.” The reward for doing this work well is more of this type of work.

If you’re a manager, giving your team the freedom to be extra creative is a very simple way to make them feel fulfilled and to get some extra attention for the business.

The post Extra creative appeared first on Herbert Lui.

Inverting this relationship is useful: to support a person creating media online, show them love. If their work resonates with you, email them to quickly say thanks. Better yet, say something nice in public. Share it with your friends. Show love while you can.

Who knows? Your contribution might give them the energy it takes to keep going.

The post The Love Metric appeared first on Herbert Lui.

A lot of other stuff went on though, and here’s one of the stories (I recently shared at LinkedIn as well):

Three years ago at Config 2023, Figma had just hit the front page of Hacker News with 500+ upvotes. My boss’s boss found me and asked, ‘How did we do it?’ I blurted out,

“I don’t know!” The blog post my coworker wrote was great, and my mind went to how much care our team put into it, so I added, “The content was really good!”

Everyone cheered. I felt strange about it, accepting credit when I felt I had little influence on the impact. Then again, this wasn’t the first time it happened.

A month before Config, I submitted one of Figma’s earlier blog posts to Reddit. Someone cross-posted it to Hacker News, and those few clicks turned into tens of thousands of pageviews, ending up the 4th most popular Figma post of 2023. That success led us to try hitting the front page with Config’s Dev Mode launch.

Over the next year at Figma, I paid close attention to better understand how these lucky outcomes happened. I worked with our team to hit the front page of Hacker News 7 more times. More recently for my client, Greptile, I’ve ghostwritten 3 blog posts that have also hit the front page.

One way to think about luck: It’s what we call positive outcomes when we don’t understand the causes.

If someone were to ask me again, I know now the honest answer is we wrote a clear, useful, blog post and shared it with people who needed it. The distribution side is its own craft as well, which I’ll write about more in the future.

Organic growth feels like luck because there’s less you directly control. What you can do is influence the conditions. The biggest constraint on that influence is the quality of the writing itself.

You can execute on content distribution (e.g., submit something to HN, post it to r/programming, or email it to readers) and none of that matters if the writing isn’t at least useful to the people reading it.

I now work with content and growth managers at AI dev tool companies on exactly this problem: writing executive content, ebooks, reports, product announcements, blog posts, and helping the work find the audience that it deserves.

That’s what led me to set up this distribution workstream. There’s a lot more to write about, including how I think about distribution these days (including finding spaces to discuss ideas, and selling 5,000+ copies of Creative Doing).

The post Creating the conditions for organic content growth  appeared first on Herbert Lui.

TL;DR: When you start a new blog or publication, your metrics will disappoint you. That disappointment leads to doubt, and often kills a content practice before it has a proper chance to make an impact. A more useful signal in the first few months is author satisfaction, and it’s something you can actually pay attention to.

I write about content strategy, and I’ve helped companies like Figma, Shopify, and QuickBooks build it. This piece is about an early part that usually gets overlooked:

In my first few weeks of high school, my gym teacher took our class outside. Amidst a backdrop of changing fall colors, he paired us off to practice throwing and catching footballs. 

My partner threw a football that didn’t make it to me. I ran to catch it. It bounced up off the ground at an awkward angle, in the strange way that footballs do, and the sharp end hit me right between the legs. I’d been punched in the stomach before and had the wind knocked out of me, I’d also been hit in the forehead with a volleyball pole, but this felt way worse. I got up and pretended I was fine, to avoid drawing attention, but in the back of my mind, I wondered if I’d need to go to the hospital. (No, it wore off, and I was fine.)

Early into kicking off a content practice, clicking into your metrics feels exactly like that. You publish twelve blog posts in a couple of months, and you click into Google Analytics, and the low numbers make you feel shook. You put on a brave face, but you wonder, is this project actually going to work? Is it worth my time to continue prioritizing this?

Pageviews are a common dimension of success. It’s a signal that people are actually reading the content. (I say “reading,” but you can substitute “viewing” for videos or “listening” for podcasts.) It’s easy to understand and measure. More pageviews are generally better. Going viral is “good.” 

But early on, even a leading indicator like pageviews, or a lagging direct measure like sign ups, aren’t signaling the underlying progress you’re making. 

There are many reasons people in companies decide to establish themselves as leading thinkers. For starters, it’s good for business. When you have a reputation, prospects trust you and you can close deals faster. You stay top of mind with them, so your business is on their consideration list when they’re in the market. The list goes on… (Easier to recruit people, creates a halo effect for your future products, a more reliable marketing channel for you, not so reliant on paid ads or platforms, getting publicity is easier, etc.)

David Heinemeier Hanson is a leading thinker. Known more widely as DHH, he’s the CTO of Basecamp and co-author of several books. A few years ago, he started a new blog. After writing a few essays, he started checking his metrics, and realized almost nobody was reading. He decided to stop. He says, “In the beginning, it’s always disappointing.” This period of disappointment is more often the case than not, even with prominent leading thinkers like DHH. He says:

“The only way to get through that is this authentic yearning to just talk about what you’re doing. That’s the other thing that I found makes it so much easier, is if you stop setting the goalpost of, “I’m doing this because I’ve got to promote the business [or] because I’ve got to grow it. I’m just going to talk about what interests me. I’m going to write to me… as though I was a reader, and if I was watching someone else, this is what I would want to know. Then it’s a lot easier. It’s like a journal. You stop caring so much about those specific outcomes, and suddenly it starts feeling like there’s a human on the other side and that is probably the only way you’re going to connect to anyone these days if you’re not shoving it down their throat with ads.”

As a result of this shift, DHH shifted his focus away from metrics and towards the writing process. He wrote hundreds of posts in the years since, and finally reached a number of people he feels good about. 

DHH uses the words, “authentic yearning,” to describe what I would call author satisfaction. Tyler Cowen, who writes every day at the most popular economics blog in the world, describes it in a different way, “If I keep on doing it, I figure I’ll get somewhere with my writing and most other people don’t find it that fun. So, it’s a competitive advantage just to be choosing things you’re intrinsically interested in.”

This experience of satisfaction feels different to DHH and Tyler, and it’ll probably feel different to you as well. It isn’t as clear, tangible, or easy to measure as quantitative metrics like pageviews or sign ups. But I think it’s much more useful as a gauge of early success, as well as a signpost for whether you’re heading in the right direction or not. 

With practice, you feel a clearer sense of what satisfaction means to you. I recently interviewed a co-founder of a company with seed funding for a blog post. In our first meeting together after I sent him the draft, he said, “Wow, Herbert, you made me sound so smart!” That, to me, can also be how satisfaction sounds like. He even volunteered to cross-post the article to LinkedIn.

Satisfaction is tricky to measure; it’s more useful to evaluate it. Measurement is about getting specific dimensions, like pageviews and sign ups. Evaluation is about finding the value of something; appraising it. While metrics may provide you with dimensions to inform your judgment, they don’t replace it. Startup advisor Shreyas Doshi describes it like this, using the analogy of parenting: you don’t have metrics to tell whether you’re becoming a parent, but you can tell you are by evaluating it.

Similarly, if you’re a growth manager working with your team members on content, you need to evaluate how the authors feel after they publish their work. Here are some aspects to consider:

• Process: Do they enjoy writing it themselves, or do they prefer working with a ghostwriter? 
• Expression: Did they say what they wanted to say? Do they feel like they represented themselves and the team well?
• Further actions: Are they volunteering to share the post link to their network? Do they show interest in publishing again? Are they sending you more ideas and drafts?

And of course, you can ask yourself these questions as well as you write your own material.

Success in content strategy rarely shows up in the form of clearly defined metrics. It’s more useful, and reliable, to start with keeping author satisfaction in mind. 

In the previous edition, I suggested that content strategy success is the sum total of teaching someone how you think. When I think of my favorite teachers, they didn’t just try to go through the motions; they aimed to transform their students, which evoked a sense of satisfaction in themselves. They related to students using their own lives, or selected reading material they felt enthusiastic about. That’s the type of satisfaction you can measure success with.

The post Don’t check your blog metrics yet appeared first on Herbert Lui.

In Canada, where I live, there are just over 40 million people. 10 million of them are between 20 to 40 (let’s assume 0 to 19 years of age won’t qualify for the Top 40 Under 40). 

100,000 are in the top 1%. That’s enough people to fill up a stadium. A lot of exceptional people didn’t make it into the Top 40 under 40.

When you zoom out to the world, there are 4.9 billion people in this world under 40, which makes 1% 49 million people. Again, whatever dimension you want to use to filter for the top 1%, that is a lot of exceptional people who haven’t been honored yet.

When the team at Basecamp chooses to skip the Fortune 500, and broaden their focus to serve the Fortune 5,000,000, they’re tapping into a similar dynamic.

When you’re doing anything counter to the prevailing convention—in my case, reading and writing books—it helps to just zoom out for a sec, from the top 0.001% that are honored in public, and remember the top 1% that haven’t been yet. 

The post Top 40,000,000 under 40 appeared first on Herbert Lui.

A few months ago, I showed a friend an early sample of The Consistency Journal. As we caught up, he mentioned he’d been having trouble with a blog post at work. The technical writer they’d been working with couldn’t take the draft where it needed to be. “I don’t even know if you have bandwidth for this,” he said. “But if you do, would you be able to have a look?”

I’d edited dozens of articles as a content strategist at Figma, as well as my book Creative Doing, so I was delighted to. While the draft had real technical depth, it read like a personal investigation. The topic was already interesting to someone outside the work, but the draft didn’t reflect that yet. I made the draft more compelling by tightening the structure, making the author’s reasoning clear, and tying it back to why it mattered to his team. He and his CTO signed off. They published it, submitted it to Hacker News, and it hit the front page.

A few months later, we expanded our work together to cover product launch posts, opinion pieces, and articles that people search for.

One of my favorite marketing mottos, which I learned from Kathy Sierra: “When you can’t out-spend, you’ve got to out-teach.” If you’re not in a position to outspend your competitors, you get ahead by teaching your customers what you know. The problem is, you’ve usually got more worth teaching than you realize. You assume your own expertise is obvious, or you’re too busy running the business to prioritize sitting down and writing it out. That gap is usually where I can help most. I work best when I’m embedded enough to see the whole picture: what’s already working, what’s missing, and what content opportunities are worth building from zero to one.

If you’re leading growth or marketing at an AI company with seed or series A funding, and you have a launch coming up and not much content infrastructure yet, that moment is also the first real opportunity to build trust with people who haven’t heard from you yet. That’s exactly the kind of problem I’m well suited to solve. 

It took me a couple of hours to write this post, which took place the day before I posted it. The first hour was coming up with the concept and tying in a specific moment to what I actually do. The second hour was spent editing it, and maybe even a bit of a third hour editing an accompanying video that I didn’t end up using. 

I posted the draft to the group at Guild95 and got some really great feedback to use a photo of the Hacker News post. However, I’d tried that before and knew people didn’t seem to like looking at screenshots of Hacker News.

The day I posted it, I worked at the Toronto Reference Library and happened to have both my laptop and The Consistency Journal. So in a moment of creative doing, my mind saw an opportunity to take a photo of both my laptop displaying Hacker News and the Consistency Journal. The library made for a great backdrop, and I felt very satisfied with the post.

Last year, I wrote about the increasing need to promote my work. I’d hoped to start when I had 10 posts queued up, but alas, what usually happened was my posts got more and more ambitious. So, I just started even though I occasionally fall behind writing every day here.

The post Introducing my business writing services at LinkedIn appeared first on Herbert Lui.

As far as I know, you can only call them by phone. They charge a consistent, flat rate and only accept cash when you get to the airport. They give you a precise estimate of time, and show up 10 minutes early. (In other words, they’re reliable. No surge pricing, no cancellations, no delays.)

My family found out about them through friends. They’ve been in business since before mobile carshare services like Uber and Lyft, and will probably be around after. It’s similar to GoGoGrandparent, a business that helps seniors use rideshare services.

There’s good business advice to focus on a very small group of people, and making the best service for them. Whenever I hear that, my mind goes to this car service business. It’s too small a market for the carshare services to tackle, and big enough for at least a handful of local businesses to serve. 

To their customers, this business is the best in the world.

The post Be the best in the world, for a few real people appeared first on Herbert Lui.