How GlassFlow got to the top of Hacker News Show HN

Armend, the founder of GlassFlow, reached out on LinkedIn saying that they are getting ready for the HN Launch and see if I could help. Replied: “send what you got my way and let’s see if I can help”. A few days later they were on the first page. Here is what happened.  

The first draft of the HN Show was ok. It wasn’t there yet, but I knew the story + product had HN potential if we put some more love into it. Very smart guys tackling a very infra/backend dev problem with an open-source solution and a GitHub repo they wanted to promote. Perfect storm. 

So I cross referenced it vs my guide on How to launch a dev tool on Hacker News and it came out like this:

• ✅Title
• ⚠️ Friendly intro (who you are)
• ⚠️One-liner that plainly says what it does
• ⚠️Problem: why is this hard / painful?
• ⚠️Back-story: how you discovered the pain
• ⚠️Solution details (how it works + what’s different)
• ❌Easy way to try it (link, quick-start, demo)
• ❌Pricing / business model
• ✅Explicit invite for feedback

Plus there were a few tone-of-voice problems like bullets or going for  “business/founder speak”  instead of building the inside-tribe rapport and talking hacker-to-hacker about what you tried. 

But most importantly it felt like the technical depth was missing. They weren’t telling the interesting technical bits that feed into the curiosity of the HackerNews community. They didn’t articulate what the pain really was in a way that the HN dev can empathize with. 

This is hard and easy to forget when you are deep in the weeds of solving the problem. But it builds trust shows that you “debugged”, tried different things. That you were in the position your ideal dev user is in right now. 

To fix that and flesh it out I referenced another post I wrote on How to market on Hacker News (learnings from Tailscale) where amazing folks over Tailscale have used a following framework for “agitating the pain”:

• Problem
• Obvious solution
• Why obvious solution doesn’t work
• Introduce the product
• Share how it works exactly
• Ask for feedback/trying/action

And there was enough space to do it. Some of the best HN Show/Launch posts where 700 words + (like this one from fly.io). I know founders/marketers feel like “this will be long” but if it is valuable HN devs don’t mind at all. 

I suggested a bunch of quick changes (including a revamp of the title which is small but important thing to tweak) and a bigger rework around the pain, things they tried to solve it and how exactly does GlassFlow solve it with specific technical details. 

Plus I asked them to prepare for success with really looking at auditing their core developer journey to make sure that when people do get interested they are able to get started. That first experience makes or breaks dev tools. 

They made a great decision to postpone the launch by a few days and put in more work into this. And they  have done a great job adding a ton of technical specifics speaking to the pain, alternative solutions and what exactly their tool does to get the job done. 

This is the result:

Thanks to that they got #1 on Show HN for 12 hours and I think they stayed on the front page of HN (they were #3 at the one point) for ~8h gaining a ton of traction as a result. As they mentioned later the quality of people/discussions they got from it was fantastic. 

This is what Armend had to say about this:

"""
When preparing our Hacker News post, I already knew that the one resource I needed to check was Jakub's article about it.

After drafting my first version, I asked him for feedback.

What he provided in a very short time was on point.

He guided me from a draft that was too high-level into a more technical but more straightforward explanation of GlassFlow, which was perfect for the Hacker News crowd.

We reached #1 on Show HN and stayed there for over 12 hours. This wouldn't have happened without Jakub's feedback.
"""

Armend Avdijaj, Founder & CEO, GlassFlow