One Year and Thirty-Five Thousand Hacker News Views Later

We love Hacker News. Individually, as an organization - we're just fans through and through.

As such we like to write with the Hacker News audience in mind.

In that regard we've met with a small - tiny, really (but very encouraging) - amount of success: The story of our form app has piqued the curiousity of some fellow bootstrappers as they follow us building and running a small SaaS business.

Here are our analytics numbers for each 3-month period this year (2020) because for some reason GA restricts segment view windows to 93 days.

January 4th - April 2nd

You can see our clear, breakaway winner here is our experience with the Stripe Atlas program, a part blow-by-blow business accounting, part love letter to Stripe and this beautiful business-in-a-box tool it's made for small businesses like us. The other top pages are just runoff from the Stripe article, my poor blog architecture post barely scraping the top 10.

April 3rd - July 4th

This period is a bit more mixed - Hacker News users love Tailwind (surprise!) and are interested in their personal stack but otherwise the top pages are just a set of basic application workhorses indicating we're starting to get some more traction in everyday use.

July 5th - October 5th

Once again our latest experience with Stripe proved a pretty interesting piece of content to the denizens of Hacker News, as enamored they are with Stripe, like all developers (including us!). This episode relies on the sending of a fateful email, but you can read through the whole thread for the full account.

October 6th - December 31st

Whomp whomp. You can see this period we did a fraction of our normal HN traffic, which happened because we made a big push to rollout our new file support system(!) (Check out the changelog for other improvements) that pretty much sucked the life out of anything else (including new blog posts).

The Full View

So what does this year look like generally, outside of just HN users?

This is what the pageviews look like for all traffic:

Admittedly, though it's interesting and I think useful in other ways to have information on application usage, let's segment it out in just this case to only show us the performance of /blog pages.

Our top three Stripe pieces account for the overwhelming amount of our traffic, at 84% of all unique pageviews.

Funny enough though, our next top contender, on the basis of strong organic traffic, is a simple, short-and-sweet technical article on a topic I found troublesome and surprisingly under-documented - adding a single page to a site powered by Hugo, the static site generator.

2021

Again, we love Hacker News. Getting anyone from HN to follow an accounting of our small business feels particularly validating.

We have big plans this year - for expanding the app, our online presence, and our internal processes. Subscribe to our RSS feed or, sign-up to the email list below, or, you know, just check back sometime for more about it all!