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- 🍐#126 "Nightmares" on Hacker News, learnings from ex Vercel VP marketing, and a great launch video ad
🍐#126 "Nightmares" on Hacker News, learnings from ex Vercel VP marketing, and a great launch video ad
Jakub Czakon
September 07, 2025
Hey,
Your pear🍐 has been enjoying family life recently. A LOT. Can you guess which European city has such a nice beach view?
This week on the agenda:
Getting on top of HN seems may is a “nightmare” (or is it)
Learnings from ex Vercel VP marketing
Cool launch Twitter/X ad from JetBrains
+ a few bonus links at the end
Total pearusing time: 6min
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Developer marketing insights
1. Getting on top of HN seems may is a “nightmare” (or is it)
Just saw this story on top of HN:
With the first comment being:
And figured I’d share something that seems to me to be a clear pattern for HN.
Attaching to a feeling of frustration gets you upvotes/comments even if people never read the post (this time I think they skimmed through the post).
While infuriating is probably not the strongest word to use looking at HN search results the are a few strong candidates that hit the feeling.
Other candidates that I really like include: “nighmare”, “horror”, “pain”, “wrong”, “bad”.
Obviously stuffing those words in your blog title to try to get to developer emotions may is not enough for this to work. Ideally you speak to a problem that people actually experienced.
But it can move the needle especially for those people who will only read the title and go to comments (most HN readers? definitely many).
So while Lago could have written “How to build billing correctly” they went with “Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers” and got 777 upvotes and 359 comments. If you want to hear about that story Ahn Tho, Lago’s founder talks about it on Scaling Dev Tools:
As I shared some time ago when going deep into Tailscale Hacker News strategy creating content where you go deep on the problem sprinkling your product around but not breaking the story with it is the way to go.
And if you can increase the chance of going to the top of HN by charging it emotionally why not. Also “negative charge + problem” just works so much better than “positive charge + solution”. Especially on HN.
Below are some results from Algolia HN search -> try and filter mentally to just look dev tools and problems/concepts. Sometimes results get mixed up.
Nightmare
Horror
Pain
Wrong
2. Learnings from ex Vercel VP marketing
So this post went viral recently:
Things I took away (but do read the entire post). :
1. Don’t slow down product launches. In hypergrowth, launches drop with little notice but that’s the fun! Be flexible, give the team permission to drop other work, and then spend time on “the land.”
Better to accept this reality and adjust/plan accordingly than get angry and fight it to “have a clean process”. It is great that people ship faster than you can plan.
3. Founder-led comms only works if it’s authentic. Feed the CEO angles, narratives, and evidence but don’t ghostwrite everything. Be their sounding board not voice. Oh and CEOs beef in public on X, don’t freak out.
Your founder (or SME) needs to be the source of insights and how it is said. You can make it 10x more efficient with a better process (I talk about it in LinkedIn CEO/Founder playbook). But 10× 0 value is still 0 value.
5. The biggest growth wins often come from product improvements, not experiments. Faster pages, simpler upgrade flows, better account structures.
Bigger changes make a bigger, step change possible. And product changes are typically bigger than marketing/channel changes. Caveat being that at early stage with no channels working finding a distribution channel or a way to message your product will have more impact imho (I talk about those early stages here).
3. Cool launch Twitter/X ad from JetBrains
Saw this launch tweet from JetBrains the other day:
I liked the combo of:
clear, simple to the point copy
combination of basic screenshot video with…
… meme b-rolls
It made it engaging in the feed while delivering the core product marketing message.
I’d probably name the product JetBrains AI and not Junie:
this another name for people to remember.
“Junie” doesn’t really convey anything while you can probably guess what “JetBrains AI” does.
But anyhow, the ad itself was great imho. And got eyeballs/engagement for sure.
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