[benologist]

42floors and others target HN because it's easy to pretend this is the target audience for virtually anything and watch those pageviews roll in.

There's a very simple way to tell if HN is really your target audience ... is writing startup bla bla that has nothing to do with your company the only way to get your company on the front page?

[namenotrequired]

42floors are in the business of office spaces in startup hubs. To me HN, with its largely startup-minded audience, seems to be a great place for them to advertise.

[benologist]

It would be very difficult to for any service to have no audience on HN, not because HN is relevant to whatever they're peddling but because HN has a large audience.

Startups pooping out startup-fluff advertisement-articles chasing that precious 0.x% clickthrough rates to their homepage is boring and a stupid 'plan b' for growing your business.

Companies that actually have relevance to this community have no problem getting traction here based on what they do - that's why we don't get spoonfed "how to be an entrepreuner!!!!!!" each week from Github, Dropbox, Parse, Amazon etc.

[namenotrequired]

Those companies are relevant to almost all of us because they're (at least partly) B2C. 42floors is B2B, they rely on lower quantities of customers that each pay more.

In other words, it's not that the majority of us are in the target audience of 42floors. But a large portion of the people they do want to target - people that want to or are starting a startup - do happen to be here. It's like precision vs. recall. That's why I believe HN is especially interesting to 42floors.

[benologist]

I don't think that's accurate at all. Startups are just a small subset of companies that require office space. On top of that startups looking for office space are an even smaller subset, and those who have founders or employees lurking on HN an additional step down the funnel. People who "want" to start a startup are even further removed from requiring office space. This is rounding error stuff.

The reason the companies I mentioned have actual and natural 'hn marketshare' isn't because they're b2c vs b2b (which is incorrect anyway), it's because they actually do provide tools, services, platforms etc that HN users in enormous numbers need/want/use.