We just passed 5k in sales on our store today with 2,868 visitors! This is by far our best single day post-Kickstarter and is actually higher than the average funding / day we had through our entire campaign! Thanks so much everyone who shared this!
I guess all you have to do is spend all your money, work for a year to get it back, and then write about it.
Next week, I'll make another post with all the graphs/numbers from this, crazy-ass day, and how long it took to return to normal. I can't imagine it will rank again, so you can follow @JohnTeasdale_ or @ContenderGame if you don't want to miss it.
My friend just texted me that we were #1 on HR. Had to check for myself. I'll post an update here at the end of the day with any numbers I can scrape from our analytics.
You're getting a lot of advice and offers for private discussions because of this post. At some point down the line I'd be curious to know how all of this affects your sales. Were any of the offline discussions helpful? Did you make a switch to a different X company (fulfillment, shipment, whatever)? I'm sure being at the top of HN will give you a spike in sales but I'm just curious what the overall affects will be (in the longer run) so please post a follow-up after the holidays. thanks!
I really cant offer advice because I lack the necessary context. What I aim to do is to serve as a fresh set of ears and eyes that have previous experience selling shit online. Ive helped others discover things that later down the line helped them sell or market better. So, I really like your comment because it brings transparency to the whole thing. I feel thats something we could all potentially benefit from.
Especially given that their final conclusion is "just trust that our game is great, because it really is Fun to Play for All Ages." I thought this was a good and interesting post, but it's so transparent I thought they would at least hang a lampshade on the fact that this is clearly another strategy they're testing.
Hi, I'm Justin. I co-created the game with John. It certainly crossed our miiiiind that a post like this would give us some "earned media" but we certainly would have wished it was a rosier story.
Would've been funny too. Just add, "Submit <title of this post> to HN and hope it makes the first page" to the end of the list of strategies tried. Result: We'll see
That's not necessarily true. Getting content marketing articles up on the front page of big news sites (like Hacker News) can be an important spark to longer term sales. Once your article hits one big site, the other bigs sites tend to pick it up and you see lots of viral spread on Twitter. If viewership is wide enough and your product worthwhile this can be a big enough spark to initiate organic word-of-mouth marketing. In addition all this aggregation of your content drives increased link ranking back to your site, which improves SEO. That last part works better if the article is hosted on your own domain, though.
Source: I recently finished researching a ton of successful startups to determine what common factors they share (and wrote an article with all the data and analysis).
