What front page do your customers read? Unless all you're doing is selling to Silicon Valley, neither TechCrunch nor Hacker News are necessarily going to be the answer.
I've gotten LiberWriter on the front page here a few times, and the number of new customers was astounding:
Absolutely zero.
The typical LW customer is not at all tech-savvy, which is pretty much the polar opposite of your average HN user. I get far more mileage out of hitting forums where writers actually congregate.
Not to complain, mind you, I posted to talk about aspects of LiberWriter that I found interesting that might be worthwhile for others, not to troll for business.
I agree. For Strangers for Dinner, I started by doing a Show HN. It was riding on the hype of being an introvert at that point (lucky me), so it had a lot of sign ups but it went no where.
Which is why for Fork the Cookbook (http://forkthecookbook.com), I've yet to do a Show HN. We even went so far to prevent anyone in the team from calling it Github for recipes, even when Fork the Cookbook IS Github for recipes.
We prefer to focus on our core target market, and work from there. Haven't been very successful yet though. Our forking rates were higher than expected (85% of the people who sign up have forked a recipe), and from that 85%, only a handful (about 5 or so) were from HN. Thoughts and ideas would be very welcome
Absolutely zero.
The typical LW customer is not at all tech-savvy, which is pretty much the polar opposite of your average HN user. I get far more mileage out of hitting forums where writers actually congregate.
Not to complain, mind you, I posted to talk about aspects of LiberWriter that I found interesting that might be worthwhile for others, not to troll for business.