I think the hardest part of bootstrapping my startup as a developer is to figure out how to get people to visit my website.
There's no money to buy ads.
It's quickly removed from communities as spam.
Also, I don't like to promote. This is not in my nature and I don't enjoy doing it. I want to build products instead.
I know HN can be very useful as I've had a few somewhat successful tries. I don't remember the exact traffic numbers but it was in thousands of unique visits.
A few years have passed and I tried again with my new project yesterday. I can't consider it a major success because it didn't stay on top of the Show HN for very long and I didn't get any comments.
But still, it was a small success. There were 400+ people who visited my site and I even made one sale for €2.32! My website stats are public so you can check them out on my Plausible dashboard.
I think there are only two things that matter.
First, the thing you submit must resonate with the audience. You can't trick this. You'll need to be an active member for a while to understand what they like and what they don't like.
Second, you'll need to submit at a time when there are enough active people on HN to notice your post, although you might argue it's easier to get noticed at times when there's less traffic.
I posted at 8:30 eastern time because this was what Google told me when I asked and it seemed reasonable. I've used the same time before and it has worked, but only when the topic resonated.
Yes, there are major success stories about startups succeeding on HN. One of them is Plausible who got 300 comments and 50,000+ visitors with their first HN post.
After that they had several other successful ones and are now making more than $100,000/month in revenue. They're bootstrapped and profitable and always have been. HN traffic has played a big part in their success.
I even made this little chart to remind myself how important it is to promote your startup. Here you can see how Plausible's MRR really took off when co-founder Marko started posting on HN.