How to promote an open source project on Hacker News - Lessons learned from our failure

I worked hard during two weeks preparing our launch on Hacker News and got up at 5am to submit the link to "Show HN". Result: we got 12 upvotes but the post NEVER showed up on the main page, despite that it was ranked Top3 in the Show HN category and stayed Top5 for 5 hours (8am - 1pm PST).

I spent half day analyzing the top posts to understand the pattern or reason. I also did a lot of researches about promoting on Hacker News and didn't see many posts. So I want to share the lessons that I learned. Hope other founders can benefit from my failure. While programming is fun, promoting is hard. I will also write a blog with more details.

Lesson 1: Have a nice page to present your project, for us we use Github directly. I will put detailed tips in my blog about how to have a clear and simple Github READ.ME. It's the baseline for every product launch on whichever platforms.

Lesson 2: Karma points do matter - you may not need a lot of karma but if you have more, it helps to push your post to the front page. Don't submit a post to promote your project when you only have 1 or 2 Karma like me. (The HN moderator specifically replied to me that "HN doesn't prioritize the posts based on Karma" - I don't believe this statement is 100% accurate and I proved it by submitting a BBC news link. My BBC post never showed up on the front page. One day later, the same news showed up on the front page as Top3 and the person who posted it have 6171 karma.)

Lesson 3: "Show HN" category rarely shows up on the front page and it has lower priority compared to other posts. If you want to show your project, it's better to write directly a post explaining the story behind and add a link to your project. I spent hours looking into the front page posts - most of time only 1 or 2 posts having the tag "Show HN".

Lesson 4: Time matters. I read some posts about the stats but they have contradictory results based on different data analysis. I don't know what is the best time to submit the post, but 5am-8am PST on weekdays seems reasonable as timing if your audience are developers in the Bay area. The stats shows most traffic happens from 9-11 am PST. It makes sense to submit the post and get on the front page, so people can read it when they wake up.

Lesson 5: if you ask people to upvote for you, then critics or questions are better than compliments. The reason: people in HN like critics and then you can elevate/trigger the discussions. Most of top posts have long sentence discussions, instead of "wow, great project or great article".

If you also have some insights to share or questions, feel free to share!