Awesome Indie vs Hacker News

The /show page held 30 posts when I sampled it. The median score was 3 points. 24 of the 30 were under ten points, 17 had no comments at all, and the top post had 160. That is the distribution people mean when they say Hacker News is a lottery: one big winner, a long flat tail, nothing in between.

The part that matters for the comparison is which page that is. Every Show HN goes to /shownew, and it only reaches /show after clearing a small points threshold. So those 30 posts are already the ones that passed a filter, and the median is still 3 points and zero comments. The full picture, including /shownew, is worse than that.

None of which is an argument against posting. The expected value of a free submission with an uncapped ceiling is good, and a Show HN that works beats every other channel available to an indie maker. It is an argument against planning a launch as though the outcome were knowable, and against having nothing else running that week.

Show HN has its own guidelines, and they rule out a lot of what makers try to launch. On topic is “something you've made that other people can play with”; off topic is “blog posts, sign-up pages, newsletters, lists, and other reading material”, because those cannot be tried out. Landing pages and fundraisers are out. The project must be non-trivial: “don't post quickly-generated one-offs; anybody can do that now”. It also has to be your own work, with you around to discuss it. If it is not ready for people to try, the instruction is to come back when it is.

Two more that catch people. Version bumps generally are not substantive enough for a Show HN, so this is close to a one-shot channel per product, and deleting and reposting is against the site guidelines. And asking friends to upvote or comment is not allowed: “that's not ok on HN”. Whatever audience you have assembled, HN is not where you spend it.

Awesome Indie is deliberately the opposite on that last point. A launch day is something you are expected to tell people about; the integrity work happens on the vote instead: one account, one upvote, vote rings and duplicate accounts removed. If you have a list, a Discord or a following, that is the board to spend it on, and the Show HN can stand or fall on its own.

A Show HN gives you a thread. It does not give you a page: no product page of your own, no categories, no maker profile, no badge, no screenshots you control, no rating, and nothing that is still working next month. When the thread falls off the page, the traffic stops that day.

That is exactly the gap a launch board fills, and it is why the two belong in the same week rather than in a choice. After a Awesome Indie launch there is a permanent product page, a place in 148 categories, and three more rankings to appear in: the week, the month and the year, across 1,400 launch days archived since 2020.

It is also the smaller audience by a wide margin, and pretending otherwise would be silly: 9,438 makers in 80 countries and 3,360 products launched, all published on the Open Analytics page including the flat months. Hacker News on a good day is a different order of magnitude. The point is not to replace it. The point is that the day after a Show HN, whatever happened, there should be somewhere for people to find the thing.