@stangeek launched on HN, got no success, but a lot of advice:
As readers came and went (15k+ in total!), I started to notice an interesting side-effect of having hackers with brains read your prose: a number of comments were posted both on my blog and on HN, which were making concrete suggestions to improve our product and strategy.
And we started to feel accountable for these suggestions: after all, if people were taking the time to comment and suggest, it meant they cared (even a little bit), and they deserved to see their suggestions implemented. We spent a month working on this feedback, and there you go: we jumped from 27 downloads to... 57,523 downloads a week after we released our v1.1!
This is the same reason why you want to go to networking events and tell fellow entrepreneurs about your startup - the advice can be invaluable. HN is a good substitute if there are no decent entrepreneur meetups near you though.
