Well, that post ended suddenly. All I got was "Hacker News doesn’t create sustained traffic" and "Capitalize on hitting the front page" (conveniently, both in huge text). Everything else was fluff.

It seems like you were headed in the right direction with the stadium pitch bit, and you told us that Mint blogged about financial topics, but you failed to provide a solid set of marketing ideas. Should startups email bloggers? Join relevant forums? Participate in Twitter and Facebook? There has to be more to it.

I appreciate what you're going for, but I've noticed that much of your content (blogs + videos) just barely scratches the surface. Dig deeper.

I started to write a reply but it became a bit long so I turned it into a blog post. http://dbasch.posterous.com/marketing-for-hackers-a-5-min-in...

Thanks for the great insight and ideas. Your twitter link is broken, though :)

Ha, Yeah I was looking for the "next page" button - seriously thought I was missing it

Thanks for the feedback guynamedloren. I'm still experimenting with what kind of articles work the best for TSF, so I sincerely appreciate your thoughts.

All the best.

Drive by traffic isn't a basis for a real business. For my business to pay for the servers and then some, I need the equivalent of frontpaging Hacker News every day. If I want to quit my day job, I need maybe 5-6 times that.

Hacker News, Reddit and all that look pretty big when you're just starting on the journey, but you really need to look beyond them for sustainable and profitable traffic.

Barf. Sad, to see Hacker News being used as a marketing channel.

I don't view startups trying to get on Hacker News as a bad thing. Especially if the startup is providing information on how they solved a problem (Like I mentioned in the article about "Stadium Pitches").

Agreed.

I still think you should change your username, though :-)

Hacker News is seen as a social news site, thus a marketing channel to many people, just like Digg, Reddit, Huffington Post, and so on.