Ask HN: How to Advertise to HN Users?

How do you advertise to the very smart and technical users when they run ad blockers?

In my opinion your site would need a really good technical write-up on a blog section that walks through how your application solves problems people have been handling manually so that it creates it's own compelling reasons even without having to describe the reasons in sales speak. In other words if the technical people here read your technical write-up they should already have ideas in their heads about how it solves management, audit, compliance and other facets of ssh private key management and public key trusts/identity mapping making their lives easier and freeing up time for them and their management teams.

There should be a way to try out your application and ideally a step-by-step instruction for how to self host it. To increase adoption provide people with Ansible, Chef, Docker, Cloud init and other pre-baked scripts so they can just about drop it into an environment with minimal configuration, fire up the required servers and tie everything into it.

Excellent advice. Lots of technical stuff on there already, but you're right, a blog would be useful. Maybe content stuff like "Stupid SSH tricks" too.

Another reason I suggest a blog is that you can have "sit downs" with people doing SOC1/SOC2 audits, PCI audits and the even more enjoyable FEDRAMP audits. Each blog could have a video showing the real audit and how your solution makes the account management pieces easier. This could be compelling not just to technical people but also to managers and directors that are obligated to pass these audits.

So for example, a person changes teams or leaves the company. You make a change in your app and can show that their public keys are no longer mapped to specific shared service management accounts and their user accounts are effectively disabled as it pertains to ssh key trusts.

> even more enjoyable FEDRAMP audits

ha, that's excellent. This is a really good point. We have already helped a lot of companies going through their SOC2 or ISO 27001, so that's an excellent suggestion. Not sure if companies would want to share their audits on video, though!

Maybe we should do more videos, too.

During the sensitive output you could flip the camera perspective to the unhappy look on their face before and the happy look on their face after you have simplified their lives. Or just use a staging environment for PCI/Fedramp as they hopefully don't just have a production environment unless they are wearing the t-shirt. I don't always make changes live but when I do, I do it in production.

I would look at companies that use a company blog for marketing and generate large amounts of content (e.g. "content marketing")

https://www.pinecone.io/learn/

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=pinecone.io

https://www.uber.com/en-SE/blog/engineering/

which I think is completely positive. Less positive is the kind of spam where you get other people to blog ads for your product, for instance TripleByte sponsored endless blog posts with "hiring is broken" as a major theme to the point where it was outright annoying.

Thanks Paul - yes, agreed! content marketing == SEO. Is there any way to do ads also or are ads basically dead?

HN doesn't have paid ads. The conventional wisdom is to "git gud" at running ad campaignsd on Google and Facebook.

We have done both of those, but results were meh.

Seems like content is king. That's probably a good thing, since it's how we can effectively compete against competitors whose ad budgets run into 7 figures.

> There should be a way to try out your application and ideally a step-by-step instruction for how to self host it. To increase adoption provide people with Ansible, Chef, Docker, Cloud init and other pre-baked scripts so they can just about drop it into an environment with minimal configuration, fire up the required servers and tie everything into it.

I know it's not exactly what you asked, but just by the way, installing Userify for the first time can be as easy as

  curl https://i.userify.com|sudo -sE

and then it has pre-built recipes right in the dashboard for Ansible, Chef, Cloud Init, etc. I guess we need to talk about that a bit more!

(It also includes a 20 server license for free, so you can use it for a decent-sized project or startup without paying anything.)

Tech blogs are the standard way tech companies advertise to engineers. You must understand a tech blog is not meant for you to "tell" tech blogs exist for you to "show."

If you think of your blog as an advertisement with technical info you will fail. If you think of your blog as a public display of technologies and processes that people might find useful or relevant to their work, it can succeed.

After tech blogs, getting other people to mention you or display artifacts related to your company seems valuable.

Showing up at things like DefCon or other conferences and interacting with people in good faith seems productive.

I think the engineer crowd is a crowd that will smell bullshit and recoil, but if you're not a pest and show (not tell) that you can reduce workload, I think all of us would like less problems to think about.

It's good advice to show, not tell.

This can clearly be seen as a covert ad - I'm not complaining, but if you were not doing it on purpose then consider doing so.

I find write-ups in technical articles/blogs by people who use stuff and find it valuable and can articulate why to be salient.

Do you have a wide enough group of users with such output that you could suggest such write-ups from without twisting their arms too hard? The border with edvatorial is grey, but it's worth considering.

Fair point, and I appreciate this, but no, I'm intending it (mostly!) as an honest question.. How do we actually advertise to fellow HN'ers without irritating them.

Most of our customers aren't journalists. They usually work in companies and don't write things like that, except for this sort of advertorial, https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/apn/how-to-centralize-ssh-key-m... .

Partner write-ups are in a safer space to me compared to the pro analysts (like Gartner and Forrester). Those will be talking mainly to the less technical users (personally I take paid write-ups with a grain of salt anyway.)

We do have some great case studies from customers that we're going to put up soon, but those would be mainly for our website. (Does anyone actually read case studies at CIO or places like that?)

It's a bit weak to say this, but I hope that good case studies with good (above board!) SEO should surface in organic search results when people are looking for info. I aim for that in any case, but that may be a reason that I'm not a billionaire! B^>

Sponsor tutorials to win over those in learning mode. They are the group who is open to change and willing to try/learn about new products.

For the busy experienced developer try solving a problem using your tool and spread on hn, twitter, discord, github, reddit.

The problem you have is the market has caught up to you. To continue to do well you need to become a marketing company instead of a pure leading edge tech company

Put this (or something like this) in your About section of your HN handle:

CEO of userify.com (innovative SSH key management, self-hosted and saas)

Then participate regularly.

Done, thanks Doreen! I'm mostly a lurker but btw really appreciated your comments and insights over the years, and your story is very inspirational.

A recent article explained how to effectively use information marketing to reach the HN audience (and beyond).

How to hack Hacker News (and consistently hit the front page): https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/35912649