I had the pleasure of talking to Eyal @ CTO at Metalbear and the maintainer of Mirrord. I got some crazy insights.
You can watch the full video here:
Getting on Hackernews five times
The team at Mirrord had a secret to get into Hackernews.
They knew that if they published their post on Hackernews, the chances they would get in were rare (They have tried multiple times and failed.)
So they would go to Reddit and promote their content there, wait for a bit, and let somebody else with a higher Karma post their article on Hackernews.
But you have to understand that their content was super technical. It was not about building another “todo” app or how to use Kubernetes.
Here is an example of their post.
You can see that the person who posted them is the Founder/CEO of Pipedream with 130,687 karma.
They have managed to nail it like that multiple times.
Want a free trick? Copy their article to your tool and release it on various subreddits.
The Kubernetes trick that blew my mind
Honestly, I didn’t even know it was possible. They went into the Kubernetes blog and contributed a blog post (Their blog is open-source). They have made a comparison between their tool and other tools. This article still keeps sending them traffic daily - mind-blowing 🤯
Try it out, visit their website repository blog, and contribute your blog. Maybe you can even contribute to an existing one.
Running Google Ads
Honestly, every founder I talk to is usually unhappy with ads, but we all do it (at least try.) Mirrord ran ads mostly on their competitor’s names as it’s usually the cheapest and most targeted. I find ads very problematic because most developers have an ad blocker, so measuring the conversion is hard.
I recently ran my ads on Reddit and couldn’t use the pixel properly.
You want a platform that has a “conversion” API. Unfortunately, Reddit doesn’t have it yet - Twitter does.
And even with that, it’s hard to get it.
Developers tend not to click on ads and then search for the brand on Google (we have all done it)
I don’t recommend people run ads in general, only when you are in a scaling mode (you have maximized all the other channels)
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