🍐#116 Writing good Hacker News post titles and examples of marketing through free tools

This weeks joke is dry even for me ;)

Author

Jakub Czakon
June 15, 2025

Hey,

Pear wanted to play with agents and automation. So they setup their AI workflows on Zapear 🍐 ;).

This week on the agenda:

  • Why “Getting a paper accepted" is a good Hacker News post title

  • Marketing through tools and engineering as marketing

  • + a few bonus links at the end

Total pearusing time: 6min

Before we start a word from this week’s sponsor:

Takeaways from my convo with the founder of daily.dev

Spoke with Nimrod Kramer, the founder of daily.dev last week and really liked how he explained the value of running ads there:

  • Discovery intent: devs signup to stay up to date with the latest. So they want to find new tools. You can see that interest in CTRs.

  • Quality of users and interactions: in many ways the discussions are similar to the programming subreddits. High quality, in-depth, focused on specific problems. And they already have 1M devs on the platform.

  • Great ad targeting: but the targeting is soo much better than Reddit. You can go deeper than just a subreddit and look for tech stack, seniority, and more.

Combine those three things and it does sound compelling.

And from June 1 to August 31 you can get two sponsorships for the price of one. Space is limited, book a meeting here.

Developer marketing insights

1. Why “Getting a paper accepted" is a good Hacker News post title

If you want to get your post to do well on HackerNews you may want to break some "marketing rules" you'd expect to work elsewhere when it comes to titles.

And the titles are really important on HN.

People will start a discussion and fight viciously on both sides of the argument without even reading the article.

I even tested it one time by putting an article "Why people on Hacker News comment without reading" on HN. It went to the first spot in 5min and got a few people talking before it got flagged ;)

The article obviously had nothing in it. Just an ask for people who clicked out not to comment saying it was empty.

The point stands though. Titles are crucial imho. They set the tone. Good titles give you a better chance.

This is an interesting example.

And no, in this case, Karma didn't play a role here:

  • ssivark 5804 Karma got 2 upvotes

  • gregsadetsky 5625 Karma got 3 upvotes

  • stefanpie 1223 Karma got 219 upvotes

What I think mattered was the titles. Very similar theme but a vastly different vibe.

  • "Your Paper Is an Ad" is punchy, authoritative

  • "How to Get Your Paper Accepted" is actionable, authoritative

  • "Getting a paper accepted" is understated, builds curiosity, it feels like a story

Imho this is what happened here. The Hacker News crowd lives on good hacker life stories, on feeding curiosity. On titles that don't feel like a marketer would post.

So when in doubt go understated.

btw I have a good story of helping an infra startup get to the top of HN Show if you are interested. Added a bunch of links to resources/learnings in there too.

2. Marketing through tools and engineering as marketing

With “AI taking over” and budgets being shifted to live events and all that gloom and doom about SEO, figured I’d talk about a strategy/direction that will live (at least for a while) in the AI-first world. Building tools.

In the book ”Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth Hardcover” the author talks about (I believe) 15 different channels. And engineering as marketing, aka building useful free tools that get awareness and signups, is one of those channels.

Recently heard on the 20VC podcas with ElevenLabs Head of Growth Luke Harries about how they built a ton of simple tools to target keywords like “speach to text polish” which sure enough ranks this free tool in the top. And obviously drives demand their way. Nice.

In the book “Product-led SEO” Eli Shwartz talks about building those tools and how SEO should be part of product not a marketing afterthought. Especially when you want to be actually useful to users.

But this channel always had that painful part too it -> getting engineering resources.

With all the lovables, replits, and v0s this is not completely the case anymore. You can build (some of) those tools yourself. And I think, we as marketers should definitely explore the channel WAY more heavily.

Here are some examples from the world of dev tools that were created before the AI wave (but there is not reason why shouldn’t these and many others be created now).

Need more developer marketing insights?

1. Work with me 🍐

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I feel like we are in a much better place to start our website rebuild. "

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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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