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- 🍐#113: How GlassFlow got to the top of Hacker News, two ideas from Buildkite homepage, and a giveaway inspiration
🍐#113: How GlassFlow got to the top of Hacker News, two ideas from Buildkite homepage, and a giveaway inspiration
Cookies, cookies, cookies
Jakub Czakon
May 25, 2025
Hey,
Supear 🍐 excited. Started playing with cutting my podcast with OpusClip for YT shorts. Already got something with 800 views. Nice! And yeah I tried Minvo and native Riverside snippets but OpusClips just seems better.
This week on the agenda:
Social proof and product section from BuildKite homepage
How GlassFlow got to the top of Hacker News
Hand-iced cookies giveaway inspiration
+ a few bonus links at the end
Total pearusing time: 5min
Before we start a word from this week’s sponsor:
Downloadable File: Customer Lifecycle Journey of Databricks
Databricks is on fire 🔥
ARR surpassing $3B and still growing 60%+ YoY growth, they've scaled to over 8,000 employees and just raised a $10B round.
We (Inflection.io) wanted to learn their secrets, so spent over 20 hours doing a lifecycle marketing review. We’ve prepared a Figma file with the complete customer lifecycle journey of Databricks and we are giving it away for free!
Developer marketing insights
1. How GlassFlow got to the top of Hacker News
Armend, the founder of GlassFlow, reached out on LinkedIn saying that they are getting ready for the HN Launch and see if I could help. Replied: “send what you got my way and let’s see if I can help”. A few days later they were on the first page. This is a (short) story of what happened:
TLDR if you are planning to launch is:
Follow the guidelines, use the format that works, tone of voice (really this is key), spend time on tweaking the title How to launch a dev tool on Hacker News
Spend a big (biggest) chunk talking about the problem and why obvious solutions don’t work. I explain exactly how folks from Tailscale do it time and time again in here How to market on Hacker News (learnings from Tailscale)
Prepare for success. The last thing you want is to land on the first page and then meet people with bad experience. I wrote about it here: How to create and audit your core developer journey
Spend time explaining how it works, what you tried, why it didn’t work. “hacker to hacker”. Use 700 words if this is what it takes to explain it. Some of the best launches (like this one from fly.io) are long.
Armend and other founders took a week to go through my notes and redo the post. And they did a great job at it. This is the final HN Show that ended up hitting the front page.
And this is what Armend, the founder of GlassFlow had to say about this experience:
“When preparing our Hacker News post, I already knew that the one resource I needed to check was Jakub's article about it.
After drafting my first version, I asked him for feedback.
What he provided in a very short time was on point.
He guided me from a draft that was too high-level into a more technical but more straightforward explanation of GlassFlow, which was perfect for the Hacker News crowd.
We reached #1 on Show HN and stayed there for over 12 hours. This wouldn't have happened without Jakub's feedback.”
2. Social proof and product section from Buildkite homepage
Didn’t find, it was an awesome share by Justin Gage. But it is awesome indeed.
Since the things I wanted to show are interactive I ended up recording a video about it for the pod.
Two main inspirations are the social proof and the diagram/product section.
Hero social proof can be more than “just logos” .
The showcased mini case studies together with logos.
Each showed:
CICD jobs to anchor on product and build times,
the result: a known app like Slack or Uber,
and “ROI” workflow improvement numbers like 60% faster etc.
Really tasteful and managed to convey so much info.
For the product sections (yes plural) they showed a single diagram.
It showed various features/products/parts of their platform.
As you scrolled you the Headline-subhead-CTA would change.
And a different part of the platform was highlighted.
I really loved this as showing diagrams together with text is hard. You either overwhelm with text or don’t say much.
Easier if I show you what I mean so you may want to watch this one ;)
3. Hand-iced cookies giveaway inspiration
So we wanted to do something funny, connected to product, unique for this event we organized a few weeks back in London.
Ended up with giving people boxes of hand-iced cookies with machine learning curve charts on them. Something our users see every day in the product.
And gifting everyone a box gives them an excuse/trigger to talk about the event/us at work the next day. Hopefully share in internal Slacks #random.
Turned out pretty well I think. Some people took a few boxes to give to “this other company in our co-work”. Sweet.
Designs:
And how it turned out (should have taken a better photo but unfortunately didn’t 😉 ).
If you are doing something in London you may want to reach out to CakeDrop they are awesome for those kind of things.
Need more developer marketing insights?
1. Work with me 🍐
"You helped us land messaging that clearly states the problem and solution in the words our champions actually use. The homepage is super crisp now."
If you want my help I do Workshops (60-minute session on whatever you want), Teardowns (audit+suggestions for your homepage, messaging, ads etc), and longer-term Advising.
2. Bonus links to check out
3. Join our Slack community
"Been here 20 min and already folks are sharing great advice."
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