I'm submitting to Show HN on April 7th or 8th. That's 5 days from now.
I've been drafting this post since day 3 of building.
The first draft said: "Show HN: Korean web scraping API suite."
That felt like shouting into a void.
The second said: "Show HN: I built 13 scrapers for Korean websites with no English docs."
Better. But who's the "I" here? Why should anyone care?
The third: "Show HN: Naver, Melon, Daangn — Korean data APIs for a market that doesn't have them."
Technical. True. Still felt like a product pitch, not a story.
What Show HN Actually Is
If you've spent time on Hacker News, you know the pattern: a Show HN post lives or dies in the first 30 minutes. If it catches velocity, it hits the front page and drives hundreds of clicks. If it doesn't, it disappears in 10 minutes with 2 points.
The posts that work are almost never "look at my product." They're "here's something that didn't exist before, here's exactly what I measured, here's what surprised me."
Numbers help. Specificity helps. "I was wrong about X" helps.
I've been building toward this since Day 1 without realizing it — logging runs, tracking users, noting every weird pattern in the data. I just didn't know if any of it was interesting enough.
The Number That Changed the Draft
Month 1 is done. Here's what I actually made:
- 14,472 total API runs
- 91+ users
- $64.80 gross / $47 net (after Apify's 30% platform cut)
When I first got that number, my instinct was to hide the gross and just say "$47." Less embarrassing.
But then I thought: every developer who's ever launched a paid product has done this math. They've seen the gross and felt the sting of the platform cut. That's a real thing worth showing.
So the latest draft title is:
Show HN: 13 scrapers for Korean websites – 14K runs and $47 net in first month
The "$47 net" does two things: it's specific, and it admits the gap between gross and net. That gap is the story — it's not failure, it's how platforms work, and most people building on Apify or Stripe or App Store don't talk about it openly.
What I Still Have to Figure Out
The link. HN posts can link to a URL. I have three options:
- Dev.to post — more narrative, better for discussion
- GitHub repo (korean-data-mcp) — more technical, attracts different crowd
- Apify actor page — more product-y, least engagement
I'm leaning toward the Dev.to "Month 1 Revenue" post. Stories move better than product pages on HN.
The timing. Best submission time is ~9-10 AM US Eastern, which is 10-11 PM KST. I'll be awake. I can respond to comments in real time for the critical first hour.
The first comment. Many successful Show HN posts drop a self-comment immediately after submission — usually a quick "founder here, happy to answer questions" or one surprising thing that didn't fit in the title. I'm drafting mine now.
Why I'm Writing This Post at All
Building in public is supposed to mean sharing the messy parts, not just the wins. But it's easy to wait until you have a clean story — a big revenue number, a viral post, a clear win.
The truth is: Month 1 was $47 net. My Reddit strategy failed 5 times in a row (all spam-filtered). The platform does more for discovery than anything I manually built.
None of that is polished. All of it is real.
If I wait until it's pretty, I'll wait forever. So: Show HN, April 7th. Let's see what happens.
The Korean scraper portfolio: apify.com/oxygenated_quagmire
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