State of the Noonion 2020 Q3: The Good, the Bad, and the Opportunities Ahead

The Good Q3

Strong quarter for Sales

We project to exceed our internal 2020 Sales OKR of

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High-Quality New Product

We’ve built a lot of quality software designed to move our three main metrics, aka Time Reading, Words Published, and Money Made.

Growth via Strategic Investment

We concluded our financing round led by Coil (at $1M), followed by Greater Colorado Venture Fund (at $350k) and Genesis Investments (at $150k), totalling $1.5M while increasing the share price by 38% since the crowdfunding round. The company remains entirely common stock.

Noonies

Noonies 2020 10x-ed the traffic of Noonies 2019. Tons of social traffic.

Editorial

30.3 stories published per day.

Marketing growth

We’ve also recently built and increased traffic to publish, sponsor, support, leaders, and many other pages to drive business activity.

The Bad Q3

Spam attack, and the ensuing effect on Google Rankings

An individual or entity conducted a spam attack that stress-tested our onboarding flow, and forced the creation of spam prevention new functionality. There are now more steps in terms of new users earning functionality, and bad actors are much easier to catch now.

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A company that shall remain nameless

We had a large customer renege on a deal (3rd largest in company history), and compromised on a smaller total amount.

Mental Health.

2020 is a year like no other. Turnover has been very low, but there certainly have been external factors facing the team, and we’ve made efforts for Hacker Noon to be a good company to work for - even during a global pandemic.

The Opportunities Ahead Q4 and Beyond

Slogging

The Slack blogging app. One command to curate your most marketable Slack discussions into Hacker Noon story drafts. Have been using it internally. Can read a couple of posts here, and see a preview of Slogging.com in our slide deck.

Tech Company News Pages (beta)

Public facing pages for top 1000 tech companies. We are using the Bing News API to pull in stories around the web to put next to business information and mentions in Hacker Noon stories.

Tech Brief, subscription + improved reader onboarding

Readers can sign up/in and subscribe to tag-specific newsletters, amongst other reader-friendly functions.

Paid Video Calls with Tech Experts

This in partnership with Superpeer. A preview of this marketplace is Experts.Hackernoon.com with the password

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Improved performance and speed

In talks with a number of experts and technology solutions to improve the performance of our site.

Internal Stats Level Up

We have an admin internal stats system, in addition to data being stored in Firebase, Vercel, Algolia and Google Analytics. Going into 2021, we are prioritizing some robust improvements to better understand our data.