State of the Noonion

The HackerNoon product team’s been busy building and strengthening the platform, facilitating our mission to publishing quality tech content vetted by a 2nd human editor in this unpredictable macroeconomic landscape (AI replacing web3 as the next big thing, tech layoffs, and dry startups funding notwithstanding).

Audience Development

Content alone does not drive readership. We build publishing functionality to curate and distribute quality stories. The following features widen and deepen our relationship with new and existing writers and readers:

AI & Machine Learning Integrations

Wouldn’t be a 2023 tech newsletter without mentioning AI once would it? 😛Jokes aside, these features are our practical use of AI across our CMS:

Business Database

2,500 businesses already trusted HackerNoon with their content distribution, so we improve their reach further by creating various company rankings and indexes incorporating them, and other industry leaders.

Web3 Integrations

Dethroned by AI though it’s been, web3 is still one of our bets for the future, including our most recent round of funding, and our upcoming documentary.

Content Portability

Writers of HackerNoon can now easily move their content in and out of the CMS with a couple of simple clicks.

For the most updated and frequent product updates, visit HackerNoon.Tech. We publish there every few weeks. Notably, check out this, this, and this.

Feature: HackerNoon's new valuation coverage via techstartups.com

Forward Research purchased $250,000 worth of HackerNoon common stock shares at $42.55/ share, a $50M pre-money valuation. This is great news for shareholders, who’ve previously purchased shares at StartEngine price of $8.20 in 2019 and strategic investment price of $11.35/share in 2020.

As part of this strategic partnership, HackerNoon now backs up its entire text library on the Arweave blockchain. Some news coverage links for reference: TechStartups, MarketWired, Invezz, Newswire, PermaNews, Arweave CEO Sam Williams, and AllyWatch.

We are not in a rush to raise more money, but will continue to opportunistically speak with other tech companies about owning HackerNoon shares. We want to align our interests with the most cutting edge publishing and technology companies.

Our 2022 revenue plateaued, totaling redacted just above our 2021 revenue (redacted YoY). While QoQ revenue increased in 2022 Q1, 2022 Q2 and 2022 Q3, 2022 Q4 was our worst revenue quarter since Q1 2021. While some of this is seasonal and some of this under our control, the massive tech layoffs and budget cuts greatly impacted our existing and prospective customers. For example, one of our previously trusted sales email lists had a 35% bounce rate due to layoffs. We have seen a slight redacted QoQ rebound in Q1 2023 and a more promising early rebound in Q2 2023. We expect to hover around profitably in 2023, moving our expenses with the growth of revenue.

Some notable business realignments we did this year to combat macroeconomic challenges:

Ahrefs Ranks HackerNoon.com as the 2,848th site on the entire internet, in the same realm as other sites pictured above like Bain.com, BHG.com, ICQ.com, WTO.org, WesternUnion.com, and McDonalds.com.

YTD, we’ve published 8,311 stories, generating years of reading time. Our stories come with translations in 7 languages, emoji credibility indicators, a lite version, quotable images, commenting, and more. All published writers now can also gain newsletters subscribers a-la substack directly on HackerNoon. With a leaner editorial staff, our focus has been on building stronger and longer-lasting relationships with our top users. See writers' testimonials here, but people continue to trust HackerNoon as a place to learn and publish, citing distribution benefit, reputation, “bragging rights”, monetary compensations, and growing job opportunities. As always, visit HackerNoon top stories for editorial picks, or the TechBeat for trending stories chosen by the people.

The entire Internet (if not the entire world) is talking about, and for good reason, ChatGPT and more broadly LLMs changing how we write, how we edit, and how we code. We’ve known this was coming, we’ve been publishing about GPT before it was cool. We have integrated AI tools to generate images, suggest better headlines, translate stories into 7 languages, and even improve grammar, punctuation, and wording. For a deeper dive on our AI publishing strategy and progress, tune in to our VP Editorial Limarc on the WhatsAI podcast.

We are not using AI to take away jobs, but rather using it to help our editors edit faster, help our writers write better, and maybe even create art that takes your breath away.

We cut costs at the top and the bottom, reducing management (Linh’s + David’s) compensation, reducing part-time staff, and eliminated all nonessential business costs. We did retain all our entire full-time staff of 17 people going forward. These are the people who make HackerNoon happen. As we walk the profitability line, we are very confident in this team’s ability.

As we are management and we missed our revenue 2022 revenue goal, Linh and I reduced our compensation. We’ll re-evaluate this in January 2024 based on our 2023 revenue numbers. Across all teams, we also audited and greatly reduced all nonessential software and business expenses to get leaner. We also moved up infrastructure reducing costs projects, like increasing the use of smarter Caching, Svetle and Cloudflare.

We’ve been building! HackerNoon shipped hundreds of product features meant to add more context and data to our publishing platform, notably with AI and Web3 technologies.

As always, we serve three primary user groups: millions of readers (averaging 4M pageviews monthly YTD), 35k+ writers, and 2.5k+ customers. 2022 YTD Revenue is at $redacted, and $redacted over the last 365 days. That’s a 34.5% growth rate YoY and 97% of total 2021’s revenue, with ≈3 months left in the year. While we remain profitable YTD and optimistic for our publishing, software and revenue growth, we did lose some customers to market conditions.

Writing Contests for three quarters in a row surpassed Billboard Top Nav as the biggest and fastest growing inventories. Here are some recent HackerNoon product updates we are excited about stable diffusion image generation within our text editor, crypto coin price pages, NFT profile images, the tech beat rankings, tech company brief rankings, and newsletter, slogging in the slack app store, Star Trek themed Noonies, the tech marketing store, blockchain game rankings, emoji credibility indicators, & technology polls. LFG.

The most fulfilling part of our past 4 months has been features and iterations to improve the experience for our readers, writers, and brands.

The HackerNoon publishing platform is making a dedicated effort to add more relevant context to content, integrate more insightful data via APIs, steer into Web3 adoption, and simply double down on the existing moments of product delight.

We’ll dig into the product development below, but some of the recent highlights are stable diffusion image generation within our text editor, crypto coin price pages, NFT profile images, the tech beat rankings, tech company brief rankings and newsletter, slogging in the slack app store, star trek themed Noonies, the tech marketing store, emoji credibility indicators, technology polls, and more :-)

Context-Building Features

Quote from an old story, generated via our new Quote Sharing Image Feature. Launched 2 weeks ago, this feature turns any highlighted text into downloadable and shareable quote images. See them used in the wild here.

Readers and writers alike trust HackerNoon as a destination for editorial quality and transparency. Gaining that trust takes time, and, in many cases, admission of biases inherent to built-in perspectives. We’ve learned that early on with our clear distinction between an individual story and a brand-as-author story. The following features are meant to provide more context to the stories and writers’ perspectives:

We learned a long time ago that a typical HackerNoon reader is more educated and wealthier than industry’s average, and we know they would appreciate more data-driven insights, such as with the following features:

HackerNoon built its own content management system, meaning we have near absolute flexibility when it comes to choosing which technologies to maximize readership. We are making a dedicated push for Web3 technologies in HackerNoon, and are in talks with more Web3 staples to work with HackerNoon. Here is our YTD progress:

We’ve continued to enhance user experience across all three groups with these following platform-exclusive features:

Protip: Subscribe to #HackerNoon-Product for more regular HackerNoon publishing platform updates :-)

2022 YTD Revenue is at $redacted. That’s a 34.5% growth rate YoY and 97% of total 2021’s revenue, with ≈3 months left in the year. While we remain profitable YTD and optimistic for our diversified revenue growth, we did lose some customers to market conditions. Revenue over the last 365 days is $redacted with the Writing Contests making $redacted YTD.

Billboard ADs, Newsletters, and Niche ADs constitute our core limited inventory items and continue to be our top revenue sources.

Writing Contests for 3 quarters in a row now surpassed Billboard Top Nav as the largest HackerNoon inventory. Writing Contests accumulated 2K+ stories participated and 5M+ reads across all stories. Linode even sponsored a #Linux writing competition while being acquired by Akama. Since its launch late last year, writing contests sponsors, such as SandBox, Sentry, and Twingate, have committed to a total of ~$200k in payout money to winners.

Writing Contests create the right flywheel incentives (pictured below): more new quality content on the internet creates a win for readers, a win for sponsors, and a win for contributing writers!

Looking at performance across the sponsors, we can see that the contest landing pages created bring thousands of new visitors to HackerNoon and to the sponsors (some with millions of impressions) while enabling great content creators to earn from their pen and encouraging content creation on niche technical topics. Sponsors and writers are pumped about these contests (see more).

Publishing as a brand by consuming our free credit is most brands' first contact with the HackerNoon ecosystem. Over 3000 brands have leveraged this offer to broaden their content marketing efforts.

HackerNoon's managed account services help build upon those efforts. For example, Arthur Hayes, BNBchain, and Amazon IVS, to name a few, increased the reach of their existing corporate blogs by simply choosing to republish on HackerNoon. We’ve also seen increased demand from stalwarts in the Blockchain space like Coinbase, Avalanche and Lisk to buy from HackerNoon in order to target Web3 developers.

This quarter, buoyed by strong sales to Brands and the demand for more exposure, we increased prices per article from $redacted to $redacted. This price increase enabled us to bring over to Brands the biggest differentiator from our Managed Accounts Program - a guaranteed $100 per story ad spend on social media. Our team accumulated enough social media ad insights to have these niche ads perform well. Basically, we are paid to drive more relevant traffic to our own site while helping drive traffic to our paying customers.

With literally thousands of brands now publishing with us, we've streamlined mandatory disclosures, editorial transparency, and communicated content guidelines to Brands which helped speed up the time to publish.

This quarter, we also launched the Brand Dashboard Storefront to enable customers and clients to self-checkout This new experience has generated a little over $redacted in revenue YTD (mostly on Brand-as-author credits). On top of the ability for brands to preview each and every ad, the storefront also offers massive discounts across all packages:

For V2 of the Brand Dashboard, we will include a “wins” tab, where staff members upload campaign wins such as trending mentions/milestones/data from their stories and ad placements, and in-app direct messaging, where staff can help clients answer any questions or report on campaigns’ progress.

It is undeniable that our target customers - companies in the emerging tech space - have been feeling the brunt of the recession. We did have a number of large and well-funded technology customers renege or drastically alter agreements and upcoming plans, citing layoffs and budget cuts.

BUT, we remain profitable and have more time on hand to clean house, tightening our process to be the go-to publishing platform for every single tech company out there. Revenue-wise, we are profitable YTD and still project to sizably increase our 2022 total revenue for the 7th year in a row.

Our editorial team is hard at work improving our output and juggling multiple initiatives to recruit new writers and stories into the HackerNoon community. HackerNoon is ramping up our human editorial team of subject matter experts, building automation and productivity tools into our editorial process and workflow..

We’ve reached historical milestones of serving 1k+ customers, publishing 30k+ contributing writers and welcoming 200M+ visitors to date. 2022 YTD Revenue is up 77% YoY. For the first time in 3 years, a “new” inventory, Writing Contests, surpassed “traditional” inventories (Top Nav Billboard, Ad-by-tag, Brand Publishing) as our #1 revenue source! Since Writing Contests launched in 2021, they have generated over $XXXk in revenue and resulted in publishing 2k+ stories. It’s a win for readers, a win for sponsors, and a win for contributing writers! We’ve also shipped a ton of software: notably, web3 login, NFTs for Noonies winners, a new store for brands, a native commenting system, a notification center for readers and writers alike, and lots of market-insight pages like the Trending Tech Company Brief. Our next big pushes are: Slogging in the Slack App, Coin Price Pages, a lot more traffic via emails (automated emails, editor-written emails, and newsletter distribution for the verified contributing writers), and even more web3 integrations.

HackerNoon’s YTD revenue stands at redacted. It marks a 77% growth YoY. Revenue over the last 12 months is redacted. As we were in 2021, HackerNoon remains profitable in 2022.

The average deal size (excluding BAA) was redacteddepicting the trust HackerNoon developed with the companies. This year, with our great push towards Web3 adoption, writing competitions have overtaken billboard revenue and signaled the decreasing reliance on search engines and the increasing resilience of HackerNoon revenue to AD Blockers.

With the May launch of our Brand Dashboard, we’ll be enabling companies to self-check out nearly any brand offering. While we’ve worked with over 1,000 brands, previously only brand-as-author publishing credits were available for self-purchase. Now brands can purchase billboard slots, newsletters, specialty packages, and even writing contests without the explicit need of speaking to a human. A milestone for the sales team 🎉

Going beyond simply selling inventory, the brand dashboard is a ‘true’ dashboard where sponsors can track the performance of their campaigns (clicks, impressions, and geo-targeting) for granular oversight. This will save our team many hours spent each week generating and sending reports, so we can use that time to land even more clients.

Future iterations also include messaging functionalities that allow the sales team to communicate quick “wins” or causes for concern with sponsors during the course of the campaign.

We’re now sending monthly newsletters to sponsors and leads to educate them on inventory and offer discounted packages. We’re calling these ‘Love Letter to Brands’. These newsletters are averaging 25+ meetings booked with every send.

This exercise keeps the sponsors updated and engaged. Future iterations: we can segment our lists to send more niche-relevant newsletters!

HackerNoon’s Writing Competitions have been a smashing success. This June, we’ll have onboarded 9 sponsors in 2022 and successfully concluded 3 in 2021. Compared to banner ads (that can be blocked by AD blockers), writing competitions get native placements, a ton of social marketing activities, and an incentivized model to crowdsource high-quality content. We’re now committed to rewarding $174k to contest winners.

With these simultaneous writing contests__, we’re practically rewarding more money to more winners that simply beat the subscription model pursued by generic publications.

A couple more notable things about HackerNoon business development in 2022 YTD:

Words of the year (thus far): web3 and iteration. Our talented dev team has been hard at work making the experience of writers, readers, editors, and sponsors better(in some cases, radically improved).

This year to date, we really doubled down on making it easier and more useful than ever to own a reader account on HackerNoon.

This quarter, we’ve spent a lot of time iterating on the writers’ experience on HackerNoon. These are the features that have been launched in the past, made better 💪

These are the features deployed to make the life of our 1000+ sponsors (that make HackerNoon possible for users) easier.

More writers = more stories = the need for a bigger editorial team

Great stories are the lifeblood of HackerNoon, and thus the writers on our platform are our heroes. Historically, we have published over 30k+ writers. In addition to our core offering of timely professional editing and story distribution, we run a number of initiatives to attract talented writers and the best stories, which include Writing Contests, The HackerNoon Blogging Fellowship, story/interview templates, HackerNoon Books, and more!

This year, we already have 5 active writing contests running, and 4 more in the pipeline. Writing contests encourage organic, user-generated stories about what’s happening in the tech world today, be it the Future of Gaming, Cybersecurity, or what’s happening in Web3. At the same time, these contests reward our writers with $174k cash prizes for their valuable content. In total, our contests have created 2k+ stories and over 2M+ reads to date!

HackerNoon ranks for hundreds of thousands of important tech keywords on Google, Bing, and other search engines. Some of the popular top three wins for tech terms with thousands of monthly searches are: proxy servers, what is a full-stack engineer, one hot encoding, manacher’s algorithm, and curl request.

To help our community choose the best-trending topics to write about and format their story structure in an engaging way, we’ve published a couple dozen story templates/writing prompts. Stories published via these templates have gone on to garner tens of thousands of reads. We’ll be expanding our default template library, and adding incentives to create more templates and answer more templates to make original stories.

We’ve created an online blogging fellowship program to teach the basics of writing for an online audience, SEO, keyword research, and modern internet writing. The blogging fellows have contributed over 600 stories to the platform which has garnered over 2.2 million readers in the first year of this program. Most of our graduates have gone on to get part-time or even full-time writing jobs during or directly after the fellowship. A few have even joined the HackerNoon staff.

More writers equals more story submissions and in order to keep publishing times at a minimum, we’ve had to grow our tools and our team. We’ve hired 3 more editors with expertise in business/finance, software development, and the video game industry to help bolster our editorial team. We will continue to expand the part-time HackerNoon editorial staff to cover more technological expertise.

For the 5th year in a row, we doubled HackerNoon Revenue of the previous year with 2021 revenue clocking in at redacted USD! And, for the first time since we started sending these shareholders newsletters, HackerNoon is profitable again, byredacted! Our primary ad inventories, Top Navigation, Ad By Tag, Brand as Author, and Email Newsletters, all improved in YoY revenue, and new ad inventory from Startups of the Year and Writing Contests also drove revenue up. With regards to traffic, we saw a 11% increase in readers QoQ, a 2% decrease YoY to readers on hackernoon.com, and as of today rank as the #3,990 site on the worldwide internet by Alexa. In-app traffic (app.hackernoon.com) saw a significant bump, with users increasing 62% YoY, and 7.9% QoQ. Software-wise, we strengthened the product team, and in the last 4 months we’ve shipped AI-powered Audio Stories (≈3x avg time on site), About Pages (here are some examples), Terminal Reader, Writing Prompts, Noonies 3.0, Choose Your Color, (revamped) Noonification, Emails, Internal KPI Dashboard Improvements, Open Sourced Font, Internal Changelog History for Every Story Draft, Editorial Notes, (improved) Core Web Vitals, among many other features/fixes/improvements/iterations.

In 2021, VP of BD Utsav Jaiswal continued to chuck the Sponsors team along with steady growth on proven offerings, such as Top Navigation, Ad By Tag, Brand as Author,  Email Newsletters, and Noonies, while also opening up new revenue generating streams including Writing Contests, Startups of the Year, Startup Specials, and Managed Account Services! Startups of the Year nominated 44k startups and generated unique social data on trending startups via 190k votes. We’ll also be opening up new ad inventory via the upcoming coin price pages and audio story ad placements. With the growth of these inventories, we see a path to double again in 2022.

The MVP of all ad inventories this year goes to Writing Contests (details). Writing contests are awesome for flywheeling our business because they generate revenue, they generate quality stories, and they reward contributing writers. Our early group of customers, including Sandbox, Wix, and Everscale (formerly Freeton), accounted for redacted in revenue, and thousands of new quality stories around trending tech movements like #gaming-metaverse and #decentralized-internet.

In 2021, we published 10,355 stories and 13,637,478 words. That’s a 4% increase in stories published and a 5% increase in total words published YoY. While the rate of publishing seems to have stabilized instead of increasing significantly, there’s a lot of behind-the-scenes work done programmatically and with our human editors to improve the overall quality of all of our stories. To improve the average story quality in 2021, we brushed up the editorial experience in our Content Management System by shipping a Markdown text editor, AI-powered TL;DR generator, Writer/Editor messaging notes, an internal measuring system for story submission quality, and a built-in plagiarism detection tool. By growing the roles of part-time Junior Editors to our editorial team, we also ensure that every article submitted is checked for formatting, plagiarism, grammar, writing quality, before being reviewed by a second Senior Editor for a final quality control check, internet distribution optimization, and headline rewrite options. Our writers seem to really appreciate the overall bump in editorial quality.

Notably, this year Limarc Ambalina rose up as the VP of Editorial and played a critical role in various initiatives such as the Blogging Fellowship, Slogging, Writing Contests, Writing Prompts, and the expansion of the editorial team. In company history, we are now past 25k writers published. We have also fostered numerous partnerships to both help with content distribution, and to attract new writers and better stories. Some of these recent partnerships include Digg, Den, Flipboard, Headtopics, Tealfeed, Blockster, Blockchain Game Alliance, Data Driven Investor, Microverse, Daily.dev, Quora, and NewsBreak.

Here’s a (non-exhaustive list) of Notable Product Progress since our previous shareholders letter sent on August 19, 2021:

WIP building, i.e. what’s next: Commenting System, Coin Price Pages, Coin Price Page Ad Placements, Dynamic Sitemap, Notification System, Reader Mobile App, Audio Story Distribution, Audio Story Ad Placements, Web 3.0 Signup/Login, In-app Writing Contest Payments, Slogging Wordpress Plugin, Slogging Slack App Directory Listing, Writer Dashboard Revamp, Search Discovery Experience Revamp, and more :-)

Internet voting momentum, the HackerShip takes off, and a few more miscellaneous milestones:

Until next time Slogging along,

HackerNoon COO Linh Dao Smooke & CEO David Smooke

P.S. Some notable recent press citations of HackerNoon stories: Forbes, Fast Company, Google Cloud Official Blog, Google Books, Amazon AWS Official Blog, Cloudflare Official Blog, The Oxford Journal of International Economic Law, Coindesk, Tech Times, The Llama Sanctuary, NippleVerse, Postman, PacktPub, SkillShare, TechCrunch, Glints, The Hack Posts, Figma, Public.uk, Gamezebo, Lippincott, Peninsula Daily, FreeCodeCamp, Springer Link, ACM Digital Library, MarketSquare, BusinessInsider, StarterStory, The Art Law Review, VentureBeat, and Berkeley Alumni.

P.P.S. We are moving the cadence for these State of the Noonion Addresses from every 3 months to every 4 months. This works better for us as a business so we can really focus on the actual work, but also ensures these newsletters remain robust and detailed reports. For all previous State of the Noonion newsletters simply visit Noonion for shortened/redacted/public versions.

We’ve passed total revenue of last year (redacted) within the first half of this year! In Q2 2020, Hacker Noon had it’s highest revenue quarter in company history (redacted), we built a lot of quality software (including Noonies 2.0), published a lot of great technology stories (some top ones), made it onto Wikipedia, increased the share price by 38% in our second round of financing (2020 Strategic Coil investment vs. 2019 StartEngine Equity crowdfunding round); but have seen a decline in Google traffic, and are actively working with Google and experts to rectify. We’ll dig into how our business is making adaptations for internet reading trends, but our overall strategy remains unchanged. Hacker Noon publishes insightful tech stories, makes useful software, and just is how hackers start their afternoons.

The Hacker Noon product team had a strong quarter. With our cleaner infrastructure detailed in our previous shareholder letter,  we were able to accelerate our rate of deployment significantly, largely via automatically (as opposed to manually) deploying features, as well as adding one more part-time back-end developer to the team. We are so happy with the work of Richard Kubina, who’s a referral from our Full-Stack Developer Austin Pocus, that we made him a full time offer in Q3, which he accepted :-)

In 2020 Q2, here is list of what we released, and one sentence about each:

Overall, each of these product developments help move at least one of our main core metrics: time reading, words published, or money made.

For better or for worse, we are getting closer to profitability despite a growing pandemic. Last quarter, while the US GDP shrank by 32.9%, Hacker Noon revenue grew by 121.96% QoQ. Redacted

This quarter, we published 3,593,068 words from Hacker Noon stories; which marks a + 7.3% YoY and + 5.6% QoQ increase. We averaged 30.9 stories published per day; representing a + 19.6 % YoY and +5.5% QoQ increase. Redacted.

Our long term strategy, however, is to diversify our traffic to come from different sources other than search, such as emails and social media, and overall, to significantly strengthen our relationship with our readers (think subscription emails, bookmarks, emoji reactions, smoother login, etc.). Redacted

Redacted

Redacted, we offered Richard a full time position which he accepted. He’s the best developer Austin had worked with besides Dane, and has proven to be extremely agile, adaptable and thoughtful. His skillset compliments our current dev team perfectly.

Redacted

Q3 started off with a redacted grant from Mozilla. Our mentor for the Fix the Internet program is Rotten Tomatoes founding CEO Patrick Lee. For the 8 week sprint we are working on inline emoji reactions. The data schema is set up to be able to iterate at the character level, word level and paragraph level.  We will be working hard to facilitate the exchange of value between reader and writer.

Redacted

With millions of Covid19 cases worldwide, stock market volatility, and billions of people under stay at home orders, this pandemic creates threats and opportunities for humanity. With great gratitude, Hacker Noon keeps humming along. We’ve always been an entirely remote team, and we like our position as a digital source of knowledge in time when people are spending as much time as ever reading online. This quarter was strong and steady at 3.4M+ words published (+5% 2019 average), 4.5M+ monthly readers (+12% 2019 average) and redacted in revenue (+42% above 2019 quarterly average). We’ll dig into how our business is making adaptations for the pandemic, but our overall strategy remains unchanged. Hacker Noon publishes insightful stories, makes useful software, and just is how hackers start their afternoons.

We’re focused on making a better place for technologists to read, write and publish.

Our big release of the quarter was dubbed NextGreen: a redesign and re-architecture built with the NextJS framework on the story page, homepage, search page and tagged page. The story page is where the vast majority of our traffic lives, and while we’ve been testing the new design work live for the last three weeks on production, average time on page is up 14% on the story page. Almost as importantly, this new architecture streamlines deployment across our CDN, cloud functions and application, so future iterations can deploy significantly faster.

Redacted

We did run a beta experiment hosting annotations and inline comments on a blockchain, partnering with GUN decentralized peer to peer database. It is not ready to deploy to all users, so we are exploring multiple approaches to micro-content hosting and curation within our user facing experience. GUN is still providing page load performance insights. Curious about how text hosting evolves over time.

We also did experience some spammy visitors - so that was a fun cat and mouse game that resulted in more spam prevention implementations. Lots of free roblox codes. New users now earn writer functionality, like profile advertisements, after they spend time reading and writing. Spam management never ends, it’s part of running a large community, and now our system now has a bit more protection baked in.

In the long term, we have a lot of options to be a better place for technologists to read, write, and publish. Once Hacker Noon the site is a profitable growth machine, we could explore questions like, how is it possible to use our software to serve more of the internet? Additionally, we remain excited about the creation of token generated by time reading created.  But we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves. In the short term, our product team is iterating on how curation works (collections and reactions), improving the writer experience (text editor interactions and human editor interactions), and building out the reader account experience (subscriptions and recommendations).  As our site is historically about 75% desktop and 25% mobile readership - and other many text content destinations (especially in tech)  are closer to 50% desktop and 50% mobile - we are likely to move our attention to a mobile application later in the year.  But we do operate with the product funnel approach.

Redacted

We published 2,200 stories for the quarter. You can view the list of our best stories (3.37% of all stories) curated by editors here. We also have put gasoline on stories of the time, publishing 175 Coronavirus /Covid-19 stories (and rejecting about 350 more), besides our regular powerful topics, namely programming, python, and cryptocurrency stories.

Google News started picking up Hacker Noon stories in late February, mostly our cryptocurrency news. We’ll be monitoring this source, but it is a solid win for amplifying the publish button, as Google News has ≈630M+ users. Some of top recent mentions around the web are Mercedes Benz commercial, Wired, Forbes, book citations, Investor Place, Media Post, Cornell, Yale, International Business Times, Yahoo Finance, Bitcoin Exchange Guide,  ZDNet, BizCommunity, NewsMax, Crypto Slate, Crypto Daily, Security Boulevard, Hacker Earth, Decrypt, UPenn Law School, Seeking Alpha, Value Walk, Dice, IFL Science, ProductHunt, Cointelegraph, Coindesk,  Bitcoinist, Thrive Global, Bitcoin.com, GeekWire, and other places around the web.

Redacted

We have further steered into the “ugly-highlighter-pixelated-terminal green” for our pixelated presence on incumbent social media platforms. We are creating and distributing more micro-content. In Q1 2020, not only did we continue to expand on current strong platforms such as on Facebook (where we gained a “verified” checkmark),  Twitter (where we have not gained a verified checkmark), Youtube (where we post podcast episodes and software updates) or LinkedIn (where they say we have 200+ ‘employees’), Pinterest (with almost 400k monthly views exclusively from RSS repost), or Instagram (it’s very green); but also on younger platforms, such as Giphy (with 5.3M views across 80 GIFs), Minds (42k subscribers), and Unsplash (817k views and 2k downloads).

Our redacted in revenue was 42% higher than the average quarter in 2019, but a 6% decline from 2019 Q4, which was the highest in company history. Advertising is highly seasonal and even in growing businesses, Q1 is often less than Q4 of prior year. Top navigation continued to lead the way, brand as author overperformed, and we made a big move into ad placement by content relevancy with the beta launch of our ad by tag program.

Redacted

At Hacker Noon, we’ve also been building better tech for the sponsorship experience.  For the prospective & current customer, we’ve automated our internal brand as author publishing flow. For any lead that visits our sponsor page, we also introduced our own sales chatbot.

We have also started to open our Ad by Tag beta program, with Sentry & NORDVPN as beta customers.  As mentioned above, it’s our first ad placement by content relevancy (example of Sentry on the Javascript page).

Redacted

While the entire economy is subject to this global downturn, the effect of the bottom-line was not massive to ours: there was one delayed customer payment and a dozen or so leads dropping, citing budget constraints. However, we continue to benefit from increased marketing budgets from online education and knowledge based companies, such as our new customers Udacity and Udemy.  Also, a lot of event marketing budgets have opened up, and how tech companies driving tech people to online events could grow.  I think tech companies marketing budgets will not shrink like other industries’ budgets, but who knows? What we control is how we make a better sales machine.

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In growing our team, we plan to continue what has worked, hire for part time project/s, with the plan to consider each person for full-time. Our next three roles this year are Head of Story Recruitment, Sales Representative, and T-shaped Backend Developer.  Email us if you have a candidate in mind.

Don’t forget to wash your hands :-)

We ended the year with our highest quarterly revenue in company history while building some important product integrations (with Google Analytics, Algolia, Unsplash & GUN), and dark mode. Our Alexa ranking is at 3.5k worldwide, up from a 5.2k ranking before removing Medium, proving the overall success of the move into our own infrastructure. We also had a company wide year end review where 100% of the team answered “yes” to the question “are you happy?”

In 2019, Hacker Noon had 38M total site visitors, an increase of 35% from 2018 year over year. From Nov 2016 through early Dec 2019, Hacker Noon totaled ≈77M visitors.

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We closed the year as a top 3.5k site in the world, which is up from worldwide Alexa ranking of 5.2k at the time of removing the Medium infrastructure from our site. From mid July (launch of our software) through December 2019, we published 4,523 stories, which is an average of 27 stories per day, and our library created 48+ years of time reading.

Internally, we have promoted Natasha Nel from Technology Editor to Managing Editor, and expanded the editorial team with the part-time hiring of top community commenter Arthur Tkachenko as Software Editor. Natasha’s voice and data driven approach will be important to scaling our brand voice and rate of publishing.

Over the course of the year, Hacker Noon stories have been featured in Forbes, ReadWrite, VICE, Cointelegraph, Coindesk, The Next Web, CSO, Tech Startups, MarTechSeries, TheNews.Asia, Real Vail, Decrypt, Entrepreneur.com, Code Opinion, NewsBTC, Tokenist, Network World, Robotics Online, Silicon Republic, Salon, ProductHunt Stories, GiveBat, Reddit, Crypto Daily The Block, Seeking Alpha, JJ’s Javascript Blog, Connecticut Post, Inverse, Sociable, Metafilter, Inside Blogging, JB Supra, Crypto Briefing, Business.com, PR Daily, Daily Hodl, Yahoo, Yahoo Finance, Value Walk, Security Boulevard, Merca 2.0, Tech Republic, CNN, CCN, Newsmax, Windows Club, Aithority, Packt, Wright State University, KingsCrowd, Wikipedia, Everipedia, Dice, CBS, University World News, IAB Tech Lab, News Click, Common Dreams, Detailed, CryptoNewsZ, Tech Story, Bitcoinist, Interesting Engineering, Study International, Tech Advocate, Blockonomi, Hackaday, Singapore Fintech News, Torrent Freak, SiteJabber, Business2Community, TechDirt, KeenGamer, Popular Mechanics, GitHub, G2, Jaxenter, MarTech Today, Irish Times, Digital Journal, StackOverflow Blog, Thrive Global, Thomas, ZDnet, @Jack, @Naval, Tech Domains, a number of Books, and elsewhere around the internet.

Our 2019 revenue (over redacted) increased by 73% year from 2018 year over year. The Top Navigation Billboard sponsorship accounted for the majority of our revenue at 55%, even though we could only start serving sponsors mid July after Hacker Noon 2.0 launched. The rest of our yearly revenue was made up of podcast sponsorships at 14% (which ends up breaking-even after expenses), brand as author program at 12%, newsletter sponsorships at 6%, The Noonies at 5%, and events/shirts/interest/other accounting for 8%.

In the less than five months of running the brand as author program and newsletter sponsorships, we totaled over 100 paying customers. For 2019 Q4 (pictured below), the ordered revenue by program breakdown was top navigation (64%), brand as author (18%), newsletters (14%), followed by interest and schwag sales for the rest (4%).

Redacted

Our largest two customers for the year are Seen by Indeed and Heroku by Salesforce. We have a number of six digit sponsorship deals in our pipeline, and will be investing in scaling our sales programs in 2020. In 2019, some of our more notable customers also include Google Cloud, Codacy, Passbase, Stream, Kloudless, Nodle, Polyient Labs, Vettery, PubNub, Mabl, Radix, LogDNA, ByBit, SurrveySparrow, Snyk, Digital Ocean, and Kin.

We’ve done a lot of optimization work with our top navigation ad and expect to increase the revenue per day from this. Additionally, we plan to explore sponsorship packages by tags (i.e. placement by content relevancy) in 2020.

Q4 2019, we integrated with Unsplash, Algolia, Google Analytics, and the GUN blockchain. We also launched dark mode. The GUN integration is our first use of blockchain technology in the Hacker Noon publishing platform. Starting in Q1 2020, this open source decentralized database will power our annotations and inline commenting. For the first time, we will be putting some content on the blockchain. With this integration, users browsers can contribute storage and anyone can also run their own “miner” on their computer or a cloud, distributing some of our hosting costs to our readership.

For the full view of your year in product development, please read our CPO Dane Lyons’ Product Update 2019-2020. In summary, we now have the initial experience live for our core users: writers, readers, editors, sponsors and admins; and integrated with many great technologies like: Google Cloud, SlateJS, Algolia, Filestack, Unsplash, Google Analytics, Discourse, GUN, Twitter, and more.

Building a digital product is always a trade-off between inventing the wheel, re-inventing the wheel and figuring out a way to plug in an existing solution — all while making the thing feel like just one quality thing. We're getting there. Very excited to build more this year.

We will continue investing heavily in improving and iterating on the core product experience, reading and writing, while also launching more curation tools, such as annotations and collections, to drive account creation and micro contributions.

Redacted

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Our software and new infrastructure is live at HackerNoon.com :-) In the first month in our own system, we published 1.33M words, served 8.167M pageviews and honestly it feels awesome to control how the software actually works. Migrations are tough, don’t get me wrong, we took some bruises in the move. 2019 Q2 will most likely be our worst financial quarter of the year, but it’s a great milestone for putting our future in our own hands. As of July 15th, we are making sponsorship money every moment the site is live. Previously, we were building on our own land but using someone else's infrastructure. Now we have our own infrastructure on our own land. So much more to build. So much more work to be done. But the early returns show a strong foundation.

This move consumed our resources, so in this Hacker Noon quarterly shareholder letter,we wanted to provide more detail than a typical quarterly update, as well as take a longer term year to date view on the important company issues.

The move was more challenging than anticipated, but most importantly we retained our site authority and SEO traffic in the move... and didn’t kill the company :-) For us, it had high stakes.

The team worked overtime (specifically Linh, Dane and Austin), lots of things broke, lots of things were fixed - it was an exciting sprint! It’s good to feel pressure, makes the work fun. We don’t have all the bells and whistles of our old content management, but it’s built from the feet up, it’s functioning, and it’s already served over 2M+ site visitors over the last month. Here’s our traffic 3 weeks before launch and 3 weeks after launch:

Redacted

Also, check out this writeup in ReadWrite about the move: Hacker Noon Rips Out Medium’s Software, Replaces it With Their Own:

“In the world of tech blogging, there’s always a balance between distribution and control. If you publish on someone else’s platform, they can always change how the platform works. If you build your own site, it’s a lot of upfront work and the distribution starts at zero. Hacker Noon may be approaching a sweet spot, where contributing writers can gain more control of what their stories promote; while supplying editorial support and better distribution for every story. We’ll see.”

From July 15 - Aug 15 (first month in our own environment), we published 1,330,083 new words. In Q1 2019, we averaged 1,116,312 words published per month.  Post launch, contributors are submitting more content to Hacker Noon editors than they were prelaunch.

Additionally we achieved 8,167,077 pageviews through the period on HackerNoon.com. So we successfully have people submitting more content to our new environment and traffic remains stable.

More encouraging are the early returns on why traffic is up. Page load times have been cut in half and page views per session have increased by 24%. We’re headed in the right direction, but there are gaps in our software we have to keep improving on. SEO traffic, referral traffic and social traffic are continuing to flow onto past stories previously published on HackerNoon.com.

Overall the site has been hovering between 4.7-5.4k Alexa range through Q2. We have lost a lot of links from Medium.com, which is a top 175 site in the world; we lived to tell the tale and make more money :-)  We can now focus more on how to better our own distribution systems.

The story uploading, writing and editing process is now happening in our own software. Story submission volume has successfully moved over to the new story submission workflow, which starts and ends at hackernoon.com. In the first month in our own content management system, we’ve published 985 stories totalling 1,330,083 words.

In 2019 Q2, we moved two of our best performing part-time employees to full-time roles. Utsav Jaiswal, based in India, was promoted to Business Development Executive in addition to his role as Blockchain editor. Natasha Nel, based in Amsterdam, was also promoted to full-time Technology Staff Editor & Social Media Manager. I enjoy working with these talented people, and it’s an important step forward for increasing our rate of publishing. We are hiring more part-time editors.

We expanded our newsletter from just the Hacker Noon newsletter to the Blockchain Newsletter, the Software Development Newsletter, the Technology Startup Newsletter, and the Hacker Noon Newsletter. So far, the early returns have been encouraging with engagement (open & click through rates) up 50%+ when compared to the averages of our newsletter sent via Medium. We will still continue to republish these newsletters via the Medium newsletter functionality to inform and extract more of our subscribers.

We’ll be investing in the writer/editor experiences and interactions. Transparency in the editorial flow is a point of emphasis. Storm Farrell, who has served as the Software Development Editor for the last 4 months (while being the main engineer behind the Noonies), will be shifting his focus from editorial to software development work to improve the insights, communication and dashboard for all editors. We’ll continue to get smarter about prioritizing the relevant story to the right editor, and measuring what editorial work better yields story traction results. This will improve our content quality and keep more doors open for the future of our software (such as software licensing and/or expanding from Staff Editors to Community Editors).

In July, we launched The Noonies: the tech’s greenest awards, built to recognize the best and worst people and products of the internet. With an exclusive redacted sponsorship from Stream, there were over 55k votes cast for 457 nominees across 50 award categories. The campaign was a resounding success. See 2019’s Noonies winners. It was fun. Great to see the community make their cases for their favorite Noonie nominees. Overall, we're also excited that we got our feet wet in custom voting technology. We look forward to contributing more to how the internet curates, ranks and distributes content. Next year will be an even bigger and better Noonies next year.

The site has started making money again through sitewide billboard sponsorships and brand as author posts with Indeed being our largest customer to date (redacted contract).

About half of our sales so far came from Sitewide Top Nav Billboard (ad atop every single page of site). We presold redacted clicks at redacted CPC prior to launch. This low price was a sign of trust in our future with early pre-paid customers. Starting July 13, we started bringing back our bidding system, which works well for 1.0; as well as charging a premium for time-sensitive sponsorship campaigns. Our goal is to average redacted monthly revenue for Billboard Top Nav by January 2020.

Podcast Sponsorship: redacted

Brand-as-author comes in third so far this year but it’s only been live for a month. There are 30+ paying customers in the new environment, and that’s all from inbound leads. Brand as author is a very low entry point at $99 - $199 per post, depending on volume purchased (we now offer monthly and weekly subscription plans). However, the brands do the labor of producing the content and we have quality automated distribution systemsThe marginal cost to the company is only 10-30 minutes of editor time per post. This is strong unit economics. We’re learn how it scales - I’m bullish on it. Additional, unlike sponsorships on microsites, podcasts, events and even via sitewide billboard, brand as author is not limited or exclusive supply. Our ambitious goal is getting to 300+ brands publishing with credits on Hacker Noon, averaging redacted monthly revenue by March 2020. To achieve this, we will establish and accelerate our outbound sales campaigns to top corporate blogs, and better integrate the brand-as-author flow within our app, so brands can pay, track their stories, and consider other sponsorship options directly on our site. All brand as author customers are logged into our app to publish content and track content performance; all brand as author customers have land and expand potential for additional sponsorships down the line.

Other revenue channels include the Noonies Sponsorship (more below), event sponsorships, job ads, and newsletter sponsorships. All of these channels could grow. We haven’t even started down the potential roads of referral sales and on site merchase. From the success of the Noonies sponsorship, we can start thinking more about digital campaigns around the Hacker Noon brand, and even licensing the microsite’s software. Events could happen more often. Our one event in Q2 was in London and generated redacted. And, newsletter sponsorship should start growing weekly now we’ve moved from 1 weekly newsletter to 4 weekly newsletters. Overall we need to drive, systemize and grow (1) Billboard Top Nav sponsorships and (2) Brand-as-author revenue streams, and then if we want, (3) there’s the freedom to experiment resources on additional revenue streams.

Change is never easy, and we’ve spent the time and learned better processes to help our community through change. This quarter, we’ve built a help section and a [email protected] line. 97% of the library is in our new publishing system, we’ve worked with hundreds of contributing writers 1:1 to improve migration errors, and we’ve worked with a few dozen to redirect their story elsewhere. We only want to publish anyone who wants to be here. There are many aspects that we can improve when serving our community, but the team has quickly iterated on tech solutions (like the ability to edit 1.0 stories) and education materials through the transition. Support tickets have declined every week since the move. We are investing in on site solutions for contributing writers to control their content (such as changing handle & merging accounts), so that less customer support on the margin is needed.

Mistakes, learnings:

… and Wins:

Our goal is to be profitable (monthly) by Jan 2020. We think the path to redacted / month can be achieved primarily through sitewide bill boards and brand as author posts. Profitability gives optionality on how and when the company can scale what’s working, take on risk and invest resources.

The path to raising our floor as a company is clear, but how high can the ceiling be? I strongly think and believe we can become a profitable and sustainable company without a bold expansion to an uncharted territory. As our sponsorships are better integrated into the app and optimized, our revenue will rise. But if we’re talking moonshot directions measured in years and decades, my outlook is still (1) very bullish on an underlying cryptocurrency tied to contributor site value created, and (2) the licensing or in house usage of our new software to build more sites.

Thanks for thinking of us. Here are some ways you can help:

Hacker Noon built a great team, successfully completed its crowdfunding, made a lot of software, launched a community forum which will also serve as the commenting system for 2.0, tightened its relationship with contributing writers, started its events series, sold over $100k in sponsorships, and we are very optimistic about our future.

The best way to help Hacker Noon grow, is to recommend that your network:

A startup’s success or failure is a function of its team. We have built a great remote team. Win, lose or draw, we're thrilled to spend my time with this talented and hard working group. We are up to 4 full-time and 10 part-time people. Full-time people are ourselves, CPO Dane Lyons and Fullstack Developer Austin Pocus.

On Jan 1, Dane Lyons joined fulltime as our Chief Product Officer. Previously he was part-time, and once upon a time, I (David) worked for his startup (Knowtify, which sold to Kissmetrics). He’s one of the best product minds we know, and is great at walking the line between the ideal solution and the solution that just gets the job done. Austin Pocus also joined as a fullstack developer after a part-time trial. Read more about his focus (or ask you own question) in his Hacker Noon AMA.

After 2 months, we did part ways with our first front end developer in January. He’s very talented and has a great work ethic, but he wasn’t the right fit for this role. On the part-time side of things, we have worked with people based in Cape Town, Kyiv, San Francisco, Durnham, New York City, Nottingham, Washington D.C., Gurgaon, Hangzhou City and Belgrade. Their skill sets are divided amongst Editorial, Frontend, Design, Admin, Social Media and Podcasting.

In our all hands on meeting in San Francisco, we determined our core metrics will be:

We will discuss these numbers in Q1 in more detail below.

We have sold over $100k+ in sponsorships this quarter, despite still operating primarily on Medium’s infrastructure. This is primarily a mix of

pre-selling top navigation

for Hacker Noon 2.0,

podcast sponsorships

, as well as some social media promotion & event sponsorships. We are open to selling top navigation sponsorships by CPC or timeframe reserved ([email protected], [email protected]). We firmly believe it will get a lot easier to sell sponsorships when it’s not preselling. As you can see from the graph below, we are still burning more money than we are making, but our goal is for sponsorships to account for enough revenue to make us profitable by late 2019.

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Our approach is to serve the top of the market with our site wide top navigation billboard sponsorships and serve the lower end of the market with a small subscription brand as author fees. We have 200+ companies that have expressed interest in paying for brand as author posts. Linh built a micro-site to learn more about sponsoring Hacker Noon, available at https://sponsor.hackernoon.com/. You can get involved by referring your company or a company you think is making products worth using and employing people worth publishing. While we don’t have a formal referral program (yet), happy to offer some referral benefits! More details here.

We did not hit our goal to launch 2.0 in its entirety in March, but we did launch a very important component of it (see below). Our timeline was a little ambitious, and we decided to build additional infrastructure to better mobilize the community and protect us against uncertain market conditions.

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We did launch the Hacker Noon Community in March. We made this strategic choice because:

On the product front, we’ve made great progress on our core infrastructure and design. Here are some pieces of our upcoming publishing platform built in Q1:

In Q1 2019, Hacker Noon published 2,327 stories totaling 3,348,937 words published. This quarter, we revamped our submit a story workflow (January) and expanded our part-time editorial staff (February). The editors have raised the quality of our story submissions and tightened the relationships with our contributors. The learning from how the editors improve stories will be applied to our community editors later in the year. In Q1 2019, our time reading created was 40,174,853 minutes, aka 76 years, 5 months, 7 days, 32 minutes and 33 seconds.  Worldwide, the average human lives 71.5 years, so we created more than a lifetime worth of reading this quarter.

In Q2, we will be opening up voting for the inaugural Hacker Noon awards, and through the rest of the year, we will be accelerating our content republishing partnerships and story recruitment marketing campaigns.

We formally completed our crowdfunding campaign on 3/4/2019. We are still in the process of disbursing funds from the campaign (89% of goal disbursed to date), and we were oversubscribed by $100k+. If you made an investment after we became fully subscribed, now is the time to check your email for that confirmation email as Start Engine has started to tap into the oversubscription pool of funds. We are not interested in more investment at this time, but may be in the future.

We are yet another publisher that Medium has not treated well. Here’s the long version of our relationship developments this quarter. Oh, internet drama. The short of it is: our transition proposal was to move the old environment to a subdomain on HackerNoon.com, and open up HackerNoon.com for the new environment. This is a compromise for both parties that would, IMHO, serve the writers best. Medium tentatively agreed on this, then went radio silence on us.

Luckily, we have operated under the assumption that Medium’s words are not to be trusted. The team put significant work into gathering the rights of the stories that we already have the rights to. 15,000+ stories previously published on HackerNoon.com have opted into this Medium free agreement, and only 52 contributors total have explicitly opted out of this agreement.

While we will lose a lot of links from Medium.com in the transition, I think we are capable of taking the hit on the chin and weathering the storm. Also, the broken deal with Medium may be a blessing in disguise because under that subdomain agreement past stories would earn $0 per million+ pageview (no sponsors on those stories) and now with the majority of our library moving over to our new environment with sponsors on every page, our past library will generate significant revenue.

We had one event this quarter, #DevStories @ GitHub’s SF HQ, sponsored by PubNub. 120+ SF tech professionals attended to hear Hacker Noon contributing writers tell 5 minute dev stories. As part of our presentations, our team also demo-ed our software in production. Our short term goal is one very high quality event per quarter, but events could be a much larger marketing and revenue channel for the company in the more distant future. Our next event will be this May in London. We’ve already secured a venue sponsor, speakers, and a headline sponsor. We will be announcing this event in the upcoming weeks.

These next 6 months will be the true testament to Hacker Noon as a company: we will launch & operate in our own environment, serve our users without any middleman changing terms, and get back to selling sponsorships while they’re live. And while it is true that there’s a tremendous amount of work in front of us, we're optimistic about what we can and will do as a company. We ask you to be patient alongside us, and look forward to talking to you soon in our Q2 quarterly report.