Again congrats on your successes, I don't think hackernews should be a marketing tactic for most businesses but it could probably work for a small select few. (Github, Sublime Text, Twilio, SendGrid etc.)
Getting Basecamp linked up with any mention of Ruby on Rails helps too. Outliners (like 37Signals) work hard and do great work but they're not the standard we should compare ourselves to. Well unless you always want to fall short and feel like shit.
1) Creating any business is hard, unless you sell blue meth.
2) Creating two businesses is even harder (bootstrapping + consulting to make a living).
3) Technical hurdles are getting easier but rarely does the best product win. Marketing is hugely more important that product, although I wish that wasn't true.
You'll find that unless you sell an impulse purchase (sub $35 price) targeting developers HackerNews traffic doesn't equal sales. Being that we sell accounting software for small business the traffic really doesn't affect our revenue. Overall programmers are highly critical of software applications, giving the most judgement support requests and demanding features deeming them "easy to build".
We should certainly proof the article better, but it was an experiment. We paid $150 for the graphic, it was done and an overseas fellow in a couple of weeks. I sent him three emails so the overall work was about 15 minutes and cost 150 dollars.