How a perfect launch day looks like

On December 9 I semi-officially announced meshedsociety.com with a blog post detailing my motivation (“Fighting the language fragmentation“). As the above graph shows, I could not complain about a lack of attention that day. That despite me not really having a well-planned launch strategy.

Even though I was able activate some of my social media followers to have a look at meshedsociety.com, the main driving force behind the influx of visitors was a post I made at Hacker News, the Bay Area tech industry’s most significant site for user-contributed news and links.

After I added the link to my blog post to Hacker News, it took only a couple of minutes until the entry hit the front page of Hacker News. That hardly ever happened to previous contributions of mine. This time I must have had luck with the choice of headline I made, describing my link entry: “After 7 years of blogging in German, I am switching to English. Here is why”. My guess is that the combination of a clear (implied) statement (that blogging in English is superior to blogging in German) as well as a trigger to capitalize on people’s curiosity and desire for information (“here is why”) turned out to be highly effective. Continue Reading