This happens all the time, it’s a good thing to really keep in mind. All of my best projects were dismissed initially and continue to be. There is a reddit post where I announced Blockheads to a handful of “looks like a crappy Minecraft ripoff” comments. It went on to be played by 50 million people.

What the actual f. I am one of those 50 million people, played Blockheads all the time as a teen and had no idea I would randomly stumble over the dev around here. Great work indeed, thanks for the fond memories I made on my 4th gen iPod touch, playing that game :)

Aw thanks! I always love to hear this, makes my day every time :)

If those announcement posts don't take off, how do you end up finding a community of users/players?

It’s different every time, but basically “marketing”. No matter where you are showing your stuff, it’s in a subset of the population, chances are HN won’t be buying your app subscription. You need to get it in front of your actual audience.

As someone who has a small bit of skill in marketing nowadays, where would you advice me to deeply learn it? I think I have enough knowledge now to have developed a taste of what is actually good but don't know where to find a good curriculum to get started.

See also "Product Hunt". Oddly it's been about a year since I've noticed anybody who mistakes a Product Hunt launch for a marketing plan but that used to be endemic.

I think HN is a very particular group of people and not representative of the market for a lot of the products we make. We tend to like open-source things, ask lots of technical questions and complain about minute things. Also, Show HNs tend to perform better if they are quick to use (no sign in required, don't need to download, etc.).

It's also a pretty big lottery. Two nearly identical projects can get very different receptions depending on the phase of the moon.

If there's a non-lottery option for $6m in revenue and $4.5m profit over a few years, I wouldn't be alone in wanting to find it and work that option.

As per the old efficient market jokes: https://hackertimes.com/item?id=28029044

Yes, this was in a marketing niche and I knew it wasn't a good fit

mine got lot of upvotes and huge traffic but it died after few days. I think it has more to do with novelty of idea rather than commercial interest.

what channel did you find success in?

Affiliates. They made it blow up overnight with an existing audience

So the affiliates obviously get 25%.

30%. But it brought tons of word of mouth and such after the ball got rolling so the total affiliate commission compared to our revenue lifetime is closer to 10-15%

Interesting, may I ask what network exactly you used?

We don't use one. Got connected through with the first affiliates in a paid/private community in that particular niche

This is helpful. Just to clarify, so you had created your own affiliate network and run this manually? Tracking, payouts, etc?

There's software for running your own program so they handle most of that except the actual payment part, monitoring for fraud, etc. Plus they don't give any visibility to your program which a network would help with to an extent

Can you recommend this software? It's definitely not considered an ad, but just to understand what exactly you find useful.

If you search something like saas affiliate marketing software it's the first non ad result

yes - please recommend affiliate software that is actually good, lots of people here woudl love it to get off the ground

Show us the Show HN!

Our revenue isn't public and this is a throwaway