Part 3: Choose Winning Topics

Critical to choose the right topic

• Success = Topic choice + channel

Who are your readers?

• Who would be interested in your article?
• What background knowledge is required?

Estimating audience sizes

• Developers: 85% of Hacker News*

Estimating audience sizes

• Developers: 85%
  • …who know Haskell: 5%
    • …who want to understand Monads: 10%

Translation: your article appeals to 0.4% of HN readers

Sometimes 0.4% is enough

Minimize dependencies

• How can your article appeal to readers without specialized knowledge?
  • Example: How I Stole Your Siacoin
  • Example: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

You don’t have to be an expert

• Experts struggle to make their writing accessible
  • “Curse of Knowledge”
  • Beginners relate better to beginners

Don’t overstep your expertise

• Write what you know
• Admit what confuses you
• Admit what you do poorly
  • Example: GreenPiThumb: A Raspberry Pi Gardening Bot

Don’t let existing articles discourage you

• Two authors can write about the same topic
  • Cover songs and medleys

What HN likes

What HN likes

• Cool SaaS products (Show HN)
  • Show HN: Monica, an open-source CRM to manage friends and family
  • Show HN: Tara - A free Jira alternative, now with Gitlab

What HN likes

• How I built this
  • Crafting “Crafting Interpreters”
  • How We Bootstrapped Our SaaS Startup to Ramen Profitability

What HN likes

• Firsthand accounts of working on a startup or side business
  • 6 months in and $1k MRR: my biggest mistakes so far
  • What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project

What HN likes

• Interesting data analysis on publicly available data
  • Analyzing 1.1 Billion NYC Taxi and Uber Trips, with a Vengeance
  • The NYPD Was Ticketing Legally Parked Cars; Open Data Put an End to It
  • Show HN: Comments by Top HN Posters Analysed by IBM’s Watson User Modelling API

What HN likes

• Results of independent experiments
  • (Especially on tech business questions)
  • We built voice modulation to mask gender in technical interviews
  • The one-salary experiment, ten years in

What HN likes

• A beginner’s introduction to [topic most HN readers don’t know about]
  • An introduction to RabbitMQ
  • Random Forests for Complete Beginners

What HN likes

• Best practices for [popular technology]
  • Docker Security Best Practices from the Dockerfile
  • Go best practices, six years in

What HN likes

• Rants about well-known tech companies or popular products
  • Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You
  • MacBook Pro Keyboard Drives Me Crazy

What HN likes

• Rants about software technologies, programming patterns, or business strategies
  • Scrum is fragile, not Agile
  • Why I Love Tailwind

What HN likes

• Re-examining vintage technology
  • Rediscovering Lotus Agenda (MS-DOS, 1989)
  • Show HN: Disassembling a C64 Game from Scratch: Jeff Minter’s Gridrunner
  • Show HN: I Rebuilt MySpace from 2007

What HN likes

• Basically anything novel that involves a Raspberry Pi
  • Show HN: I hacked my microwave with a Raspberry Pi
  • Building an LTE Access Point with a Raspberry Pi

What HN likes

• [Insert well-known tech company] did something shady or unprofessional
  • Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-source Android app
  • How Instagram closed my account and gave it to a football celebrity

What HN likes

• Eclectic topics sometimes, like bees or historical events
  • Cat Gap
  • Bees Are Bouncing Back from Colony Collapse Disorder

What HN dislikes

What HN dislikes

• Pure tutorials
• AMAs
  • Unless you’re super famous
• Videos (usually)
• Mainstream non-tech news

What HN dislikes

• Controversial social issues
  • Race, religion, gender, sexuality
• Impersonal, corporate-speak blog posts
  • Unless you’re too big to be ignored, like Google or Apple

How I choose topics

How I choose topics

• What’s an interesting thing I learned from a recent project?
  • My Eight-Year Quest to Digitize 45 Videotapes
  • TinyPilot: Build a KVM Over IP for Under $100

How I choose topics

• What recent experience makes an interesting story?
  • How I Stole Your Siacoin
  • Adventures in Outsourcing: Cooking with TaskRabbit

How I choose topics

• What’s an idea I’m passionate about?
  • How to Make Your Code Reviewer Fall in Love with You
  • Why Good Developers Write Bad Unit Tests

How I (shouldn’t) choose topics

• I spent so much time learning this that I have to share it
  • Audience be damned!
    • Don’t try this at home
• Example:
  • Hiring Content Writers: A Guide for Small Businesses

How I rank ideas

How I rank ideas

• How excited am I to write this?

How I rank ideas

• Do I have something unique to contribute?

How I rank ideas

• Is there a critical mass of people interested in this topic?
  • And can I reach them?

How I rank ideas

• How long will this remain relevant?

Topic consistency

• Not important for Hacker News
• Useful for other blogging goals

Next Lesson

Part 4: Find a Plan B