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Comment by mrskitch | Hacker News Reader

I’ve actually had the exact opposite happen: my ShowHN posts got nowhere, but the product itself became successful. I’m sure that the opposite is also true as well, but figured folks needed to hear that, just because your ShowHN post got nowhere, doesn’t mean there’s not a market fit for what you’re building. It just might not be interesting enough for the HN crowd, or you don’t have any name-recognition.

For those who are curious the product is browserless.io. Rev chart is here: https://www.indiehackers.com/product/browserless/revenue

EDIT: here’s my ShowHN post for posterity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15722617

View on HN

Even if the type of person who browses HN religiously is your exact target market, just posting at a bad time or being unlucky enough to post right before other relevant big news comes out is enough to get buried.

This is a good point. My lessons from this are to pick a time when traffic isn't as high so you have a chance of gaining some visibility. Getting on the frontpage during non-peak hours is better than getting on page 2 during peak hours.

My counter-example of a "successful" post with a failed product.

I did more than a couple of Show HNs. The most upvoted one (49 upvotes) was one of the first ones with a mostly crappy product [0].

I was just starting to learn to code, it was an ugly, amateurish CRUD, lacking a lot of basic features.

Unsurprisingly, it went no where. Not because of the software quality, but the product itself.

It was an idea of organizing sales prospects info based on my own experience as a salesperson and the way I organized myself using Excel sheets. It was a neat idea and I believe that's why it was upvoted.

I even had one of those "why should I use this product if I can do it myself with excel?" comments [1]. Turned out this one was right, as it was an excel sheet turned - unnecessarily - into a web app.

The evidence is that I got only one or two signups, who never came back after the first visit.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7768857

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7769115

It could be the way it's presented too. What does "headless Chrome as a service" even mean?

When I look at the Github link, I actually understand what it does: "Severless Chrome on your own infrastructure. Each session gets its own clean Chrome context for total isolation. After the session is complete Chrome is shutdown. You can also think of it like a database connection where your app connects to browserless, runs some work, and gets results back."

But it's fair. Titles are hard and HN shuns clickbait.

Great point. It's a hard thing to try and succinctly summarize, plus the title _has_ to be somewhat appealing or no one will ever visit it.

It's a bit "damned if you do, damned if you don't" since lots of folks won't click on click-bait-ish links but will gloss over more terse titles.

Also you didn't respond to the person who did leave a comment. Tough to have a post take off that way.

Hrm, it must have slipped past me, I'll take a look!

EDIT: yeah, this is my bad. Totally missed it and it's a great comment too :(

it's not all bad, you still can :)

Appears it's locked now? Can't seem to reply :(

Heh. I recall that ShowHN actually... and while I have no need for it, when it was posted I thought "Neat. Someone will want that"

So, I guess it would be a good-faith action to simply encourage others who are ShowingHN something and tell them what you think, regardless of that product being something you want/need.

I try to do this frequently, actually, I try things out and then give feedback.

On several I've noticed simple typos that can be fixed, and in those cases it is typically where you just need fresh eyes to see something to have it stand-out - because the creators stare at it constantly and thus small things can blind them.

so how do you compete with Google? Headless chrome is supported in Google Functions

That's a good question. We've been doing this for ~year, whereas Chrome on App Engine/Functions has _just_ recently come out. So we've got a bit of a head-start and our infrastructure is pretty hardened at this point. Also a few other points:

- We've got some REST-based API's that make it dead-simple to interact with Chrome for the majority of the use-cases out there. Plus you're not restricted to having to maintain node-based infra if that's not your stack.

- A lot of good tooling has been developed, for instance a live-debugging tool that lets you visually see the browser (located here: https://chrome.browserless.io/).

- The nature of a lot of folks' business restricts them from using big cloud providers like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. Just because one of them pivots into your market doesn't mean that they're going to squash you.

- Finally, I've written a driver + am actively involved in puppeteer's repos (plus others). So, in a way, when you sign up for an account you get support from me as well, which has a _ton_ of value if you've never done headless work.

Anyways, hope that helps

Can vouch for this. Joel is a machine. Not sure how he’s able to do all of this single handed but Browserless is one of those niches where someone who legit listens to their customer does a much better job than a ~trillion dollar company.

It’s simple. This is browserless’s bread and butter. For GCP, it’s just another feature for someone to get a promo.

One feature that's not available or easy to use is audio from the chrome session. Browser page navigation works well in most places, sound not always. We've been having issues with pulseaudio s/w channels just going bad.

BTW, anyone know of a simple SPA checker/monitor?

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