Hi. My startup was listed in IndieHackers, and here is my experience, which I think might explain why this thread did as well as it did. A few weeks ago, Courtland, the dev who built IndieHackers contacted my via email with a polite request for me to list my startup on his upcoming site.

He had obviously done a lot of work scouring HN and Reddit threads to pick out people who fit his criteria of starting independent apps and emailed them one by one.

I was interested, so signed up on his site and started filling in my profile. And here is the clincher - I've filled out my startup profile on LOTS of sites, but IH was the only one where the creator emailed me back and asked for more information and clarification about my story. It felt more like an interview than a straight up submission, and it also lead me to believe that someone actually cares.

Then, yesterday, I received an email from Courtland mentioning that he would be posting about his site to HN as a "Show HN" post and asked me to support it by upvoting.

By this stage, I had totally 'bought in' to the whole deal, and when I woke up this morning, eagerly sought out the thread to participate and upvote. I was actually alarmed when I couldn't find the thread. A quick email and response from Courtland indicated that the thread name had been changed from a 'Show HN' thread.

I am thinking that it was the personalised contact with the participants, then the email follow and actual request to support the thread which lead to it getting the response that it has to date.

Hi cyberferret. This is a great answer that makes a lot of sense to me. Indeed, I didn't contact most of the featured startups, mostly because I thought they won't answer me until I have some volume on the site. That's a big lesson I learned today. Many thanks for the feedback.

He/she did "things that don't scale". See: http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

True, contacting personally people and manually reviewing all the stories is not very scalable. But I believe that's probably the most "lean" way to startup a Startup or Side Project. You start doing things that don't scale then, if you have the luck of getting bigger, you should start automating as much as possible. Giving the response he received, I think this non-scalable start has been absolutely awesome.

But there are lots of ways to automate personalisation :-)

Would be great if you can elaborate more about this :)

aka vote brigading

Nothing is organically viral

Thanks for term - good to know it!

In addition to what others have said, which I agree with, I want to point out one other small difference that makes me much more interested in IH than your site...the focus on an individual developer rather than a startup.

I've been through startups and know much of the work that it entails. I know (roughly) how much of my life I'm going to have to devote to that idea and the pain of fundraising/bootstrapping. But I've never had a revenue-generating side project or lifestyle business, so it's great to see examples of that and concrete numbers on how much those types of projects can generate. I'm far less interested in this kind of information at the level of a startup than I am at an individual level since I'm far more likely to put something together over the course of a few weekends and see if it can make enough for me to quit my day job rather than to opt into the commitment needed to do a startup.

I agree. Being a developer myself and knowing how hard is to make a successful side project, it is definitely more inspiring seeing those stories from solo developers like us working hard to become profitable.

Actually I have a mixture of young bootstrapped startups that were side projects just months ago like Nomad List (by levelsio), BugMuncher, StoreMapper, ... And other more stable startups like Buffer, Baremetrics, Groove, ... that are also very inspiring in my opinion.

I should add some filters asap to be able to filter by Bootstrapped vs Founded, Work Remotely vs Colocated, etc.

Thanks a lot for your comment! Great point mentioned.

Based on quick glance (which is what most sites get from me) one key difference is that indiehackers shows the actual amounts right there on front page. This is quite small thing, but for me it tells this site might actually contain something I'm interested in.

Yes, whether I'm looking to spend money or earn money the first thing I want to see is how much money. I hate product reviews where the price is buried in the article, put it where everyone can find it quickly.

I don't think this is about earning or spending money, is it? (but I've got the point, ShowMeTheMoney!)

For me, it is absolutely about earning money.

Frankly, I'm not interested in someone who built a side business with <$1k/m in revenue. That's a single retainer for my consulting company.

Stories where the developer has been able to attract meaningful revenue are for more interesting.

That's a good point, thank you for the feedback. Yeah, I'm not focusing on "money" but in "transparency"(which is a broad term). What I show in the list however, is what is the Startup notable for (aka "champion" in), e.g. remote work or bootstrapping. Definitely something I should think about.

I viewed the site because it displayed revenue. That was the interesting thing to me.

Good to know that. I guess the revenue thing is very attractive. Not sure if maybe others may be interested in Remote Work or in Open Source? I don't know.

The problem I'm realising now is that my site is maybe too generic and that makes not clear enough its purpose. I didn't want to saturate the list items with lots of info so I tried to summarised it with the "Champion" icon, but I agree it seems not 100% clear. I will work on that.

FINAL UPDATE: Before this thread is buried, I'd like to say a BIG THANK YOU to ALL of you that gave me Honest and Transparent Feedback.

Despite my previous submissions didn't succeeded (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12127979, only 3 votes), I feel very lucky to have raised this question in this thread and then received the great amount of comments that opened my eyes about why Transparent Startups is not engaging as I expected. Now with all this feedback I can work on these issues to try to make something better and useful that provides value.

You are awesome. Thanks again, Rafa

I went to your page. After 8 or 9 seconds, I thought "What is a transparent startup? This is just some random list of companies" and left. I have no idea what the content on your landing page means, at least within ten seconds.

Good insight. I need to work more on the "transparent" meaning for startups. Thank you.

Same thoughts here.

Thank you too!

A couple of points:

First and probably most important:

* IH - Big empty block at the top that states in clear, large letters what's going on. The text pops out and draws the reader to it. * TS - First thing my eye's go to is the first startup in the list. I have no idea why it's there or what I'm looking at.

Second: * IH - I see companies, names and logos and a revenue number that ties in directly with the stated purpose. * TS - I see logos, and a name but again don't know why they are there. It looks like a generic feed of some kind.

Basically, I'd say IH needs a site redesign. The current one doesn't tell me, as a reader, much about what's going on or what an item being on the list is about. IH doesn't look bad, it's just not as immediately obvious what the purpose is.

(missed a t)

Hi emeralds. Thank you so much for the feedback. I see your point. I need to work on removing ambiguity, making the front page very clear about what is Transparent Startups.

Instead of "embracing transparency" it should say something like "embracing transparent business practices". Someone landing on your site for the first time won't know what you mean by "transparency" especially when the first company listed on the page is named "Ghost".

I see, that's a minor but critical detail. I will reword the motto to make it clear. The challenge is to explain what "Transparency" means in this context with just a few words.

"Ghost" is actually very transparent :). Today there is a new one. I'm featuring one Startup every day at the moment.

Great thanks for the feedback!

I want to see how much money different sites are making roughly, and your site doesn't seem to do that. It isn't really pushing the same buttons for me as Indie Hackers.

Well, actually in their profile, the startup not only shows the revenues (money) but also many other things like: if they work remotely, how is their culture, their open source projects, their growth journey, if they have open salaries, etc... I believe is quite complete, not just money.

What about listing something like annual or monthly revenue and profit on the home page for each company?

That could help, but not all the startups are featured because of the revenue. For example, some have total Transparent Pricing but they don't disclose their total company profit.

For me is more inspiring and interesting the Story behind the startup rather than how much is the startup making at the moment... but yeah, that's me.

UPDATE 2: Most of you agreed about the key point of showing clearly the money or revenue.

I've been thinking about it. I agree revenue it is a very interesting data to show but I see a potential big problem: keeping this money amount up-to-date.

So personally I'd try to avoid displaying volatile data (like revenue) unless I have a mechanisms in place to update it regularly. Otherwise the info could not be accurate after some weeks of the publication.

That's why I prefer linking to their revenue boards, so it's up to the startup/founder to keep them updated. What do you think?

Hi Rafa! Nice to meet you. I didn't notice your submission. What are your goals with TransparentStartups.com? Let's talk over email if you'd like, maybe we can work together. (courtland@indiehackers.com)

Hey Cortland. Nice to meet you too! Congratulations for the site and this great thread that raised. There are a few of bootstrappers on my site I'm pretty sure they will love to appear in yours as well. Cool, let's talk.