Yesterday, I released something on Hacker News for the first time ever. Lesson learned.

I’ve been working on my note-taking app with Excalidraw sketches for the past two weeks. I set a boundary for myself: I had only two weeks to work on it, then I had to stop and release it somewhere, even though I didn’t know where. I had no plans to make a ton of money; I just wanted to have a project like this for myself and to get a feel for how solopreneurship works.

First, huge kudos to Marc Lou for his post: How to launch a startup on Hacker News. I didn’t even know that I should name my post in a specific way. To launch there, you need to start the title of the post with Show HN. It also seems like HN users prefer short, straight-to-the-point titles.

One insight I gained is that people are not very happy about sharing their emails or going through a sign-up process. This wasn’t obvious to me until I saw a video review from one user who basically said, “sorry, but no” after seeing the login screen. Lesson learned: I’ll create demo pages for all my future projects.

What lessons have you learned from launching your side projects?

Link to the launch post, if you’re curious