This is a redacted version of the by CEO and COO sent to HackerNoon’s 1.3k shareholders. Picture: HackerNoon team eats ice cream at a company offsite. HackerNoon shareholders' newsletter David Smooke Linh Dao Smooke TL;DR Our team is humming along, building and integrating the HackerNoon CMS with the internet’s best publishing technologies. product development Valuation’s up: purchased $250,000 worth of HackerNoon common stock shares at . Forward Research $42.55/share, a $50M pre-money valuation ( ) has its first 200k+ votes and . Our business database now includes information on 60k+ companies. Startups of the Year video has trending startups all over the internet talking about their HackerNoon nomination Revenue’s risen 6 years in a row, but we fell short of our 2022 revenue goals, totaling , a YoY increase. redacted redacted Expenses are down YoY YtD. We cut costs at the top and the bottom, reducing management (Linh’s + David’s) compensation, reducing part-time staff, and eliminating all nonessential business costs. redacted We published 8,311 stories YTD, a 52% YoY increase. Read for editorial picks and for trending stories chosen by the people. HackerNoon Top Stories The TechBeat Product 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 ( replacing as the next big thing, , and dry startups funding notwithstanding). AI web3 tech layoffs Product themes: 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: ( ) - all published HackerNoon writers can now collect email subscribers via both profile and story page and have their new stories sent directly to subscribers’ inboxes. Subscribe for Writers video - all HackerNoon stories are now categorized into 1 of 22 niches that spin off into: 22 Parent Categories - with 250k+ subscribers and counting, these newsletters target readers interested in specific niches, rather than general top content from our daily or . 22 Category Specific Newsletters Noonification weekly company techbrief - audio content consumers can now find our top performing stories, read by AI for now, in their podcast feeds. 22 Category Specific Podcasts ( ) - our 2nd ever open source Github repo of top HackerNoon stories ranked by reading time The Learn Repo post explainer First open repo was our , which was downloaded ~2000 times on and this year. HackerNoon font Github Dafont - this feature combines historical tech events with a call back to interesting HackerNoon stories of years past, published on the same day. For example, did you know that on this day ( ), Hotmail Launched as a Free Email Service? On this Day in Tech History July 4, 1996 AI & Machine Learning Integrations Wouldn’t be a 2023 tech newsletter without mentioning once would it? 😛Jokes aside, these features are our practical across our CMS: AI use of AI - This reads the content of the story and suggests the catchiest headlines possible based off of existing content. AI Headline Generator - fully accessible to our community of 45k+ writers, the HackerNoon AI Image Generator comes with 5 different models from Stable Diffusion, MidJourney Diffusion to Kandinsky; with both a prompt and a negative prompt. AI Image Generator - To date, 4148 images have been prompted and 903 used as feature images by our writers. Community driven AI image library AI Assisting Human editors - In beta, it helps editors with 1st pass at checking for grammatical and formatting mistakes while . ChatGPT-4 is also used to rewrite highlighted text within the HackerNoon text editor. While not as astute as our editors, this tool can do basic preliminary checks on common glaring mistakes. Replacing detecting plagiarism and AI-content itself - These ensure accessibility and international accessibility for our top stories. With the community will also be able to improve these machine generated translations. Machine learning translations for all top stories annotations revamp 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. Redesign of to include better search, a more comprehensive ranking system, and 3 ways to filter. Check out Microsoft's company page . Learn more about Evergreen, our updated Tech Company Ranking System . Discover Companies page here here ( & ) - launched early May, this annual campaign features sleek new design, a more streamlined database (of this year’s 31k startups as well as winners of years past). This year’s nominees can also claim their accounts and customize their descriptions. 217k votes cast YTD, this campaign will announce the winners in January 2024. Startups of the Year 2023 announcement post SuperbCrew Interview with David Web3 Integrations Dethroned by AI though it’s been, is still one of our bets for the future, including our , and . web3 most recent round of funding our upcoming documentary - HackerNoon has published over 1 billion words, and now all those words and stories are backed up on the Arweave blockchain. Arweave Web3 Backups - Coil unfortunately decided to sunset their Web Monetization product. The business entity Coil continues as a HackerNoon shareholder. Sunset our Coil Integration - building on and writing contest payments, we’ve set up the option for a person’s visual identity to be an NFT. NFT as Profile Picture Web3 login Content Portability Writers of HackerNoon can now easily move their content in and out of the CMS with a couple simple clicks. Our Content Management System can now power contributor sites on any domain (beta). Some example sites: , , , , and . CoinWikis.com WritingContests.xyz HackerNoon.LinhDaoSmooke.com Blog.Slogging.com HackerNoon.tech Improved content Import and Export. Contributors can now export their content in , and , and in addition to importing by individual URL, contributors can now mass import content from other blogging platforms (beta). PDF, HTML, audio file access it on Arweave Managed Accounts - for our customers, we are building features and processes to manage larger volumes of content. Some of our best MA accounts include , , , , , & . Crypto Hayes BugSnag AmazonIVS Protocol Labs Courier Indrive For the most updated and frequent product updates, visit . We publish there every few weeks. Notably, check out , , and . HackerNoon.Tech this this this Valuation . This is great news for shareholders, who’ve previously purchased shares at StartEngine price of $8.20 and strategic investment price of $11.35/share . Forward Research purchased $250,000 worth of HackerNoon common stock shares at $42.55/ share, a $50M pre-money valuation in 2019 in 2020 As part of this strategic partnership, . Some news coverage links for reference: , , , , , , and . HackerNoon now backs up its entire text library on the Arweave blockchain TechStartups MarketWired Invezz Newswire PermaNews Arweave CEO Sam Williams 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. Revenue Our 2022 revenue plateaued, totaling just above our 2021 revenue ( 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 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. redacted redacted redacted Some notable business realignments we did this year to combat macroeconomic challenges: ( ) and added 31k+ startups to the top of the HackerNoon business account freemium funnel. This campaign has its first 217k+ votes and . Startups of the Year launched video has trending startups all over the internet talking about their HackerNoon nomination Niche targeting simplification from to . This better aligned our ad inventory to our content relevancy ad placement philosophy into sellable units. All 100,000+ stories are now categorized into 22 buckets that pertain to distinct advertisement requirements, enabling advertisers to buy only those impressions and clicks that are relevant to their line of business. As a result, targeted ads turned out to be the biggest rising star of ad inventory, overtaking even writing contests. 30k+ tags 22 niche technology categories ( ): Given the diverse needs and expectations of advertisers with this inventory item, we divided it up into 3 different categories that attract customers from different price points. Writing Contests 2.0 what winners say /contest that runs for 1 month, no premium tags allowed. Mini-Contests: redacted minimum /contest that runs for 3 months, top 50 highest traffic tags are purchasable. Standard Writing Contests: redacted min /contest for customers who want to ‘throw in the kitchen sink,’ aggressively marketing it on HackerNoon and around the web. Mega-Contests: redacted Editorial 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. Ahrefs YTD, we’ve published 8,311 stories, generating years of reading time. Our stories come with , , , , , and more. . With a leaner editorial staff, our focus has been on building stronger and longer-lasting relationships with our top users. See writers' testimonials , 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 for editorial picks, or for trending stories chosen by the people. translations in 7 languages emoji credibility indicators a lite version quotable images commenting All published writers now can also gain newsletters subscribers a-la substack directly on HackerNoon here HackerNoon top stories the TechBeat The entire Internet (if not the entire world) is talking about, and for good reason, and more broadly how we write, how we edit, and how we code. We’ve known this was coming, we’ve been before it was cool. We have integrated AI tools to , , , and even improve grammar, punctuation, and wording. For a deeper dive on our AI publishing strategy and progress, . ChatGPT LLMs changing publishing about GPT generate images suggest better headlines translate stories into 7 languages 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 Here are some of the highlights so far this year: We published compared to just 2,822 stories in Q1 of 2022. We published 8,311 stories YTD, a 52% YoY increase. 4,196 stories in Q1 received and is close to cracking 1 Million total reads. This story 68,868 reads this year in Spanish alone This and cracked 100,000 reads. brand story went viral AI and ChatGPT have been the subject of many viral headlines this year: AI Sex Is Almost Here - And the World Isn't Ready for It Top 10 AI Tools to Check Out If You're Bored With ChatGPT How to Talk to ChatGPT: An Intro to Prompt Engineering The Best ChatGPT Prompts For Content Strategy and Creation Take ChatGPT With You: Introducing Ariana, the ChatGPT Assistant That Lives in WhatsApp Our alone have accumulated over 650,000 reads so far this year, and in April we just welcomed our biggest cohort yet of 13 new fellows. blogging fellowship stories Operations 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. How to Support HackerNoon: We are launching a HackerNoon documentary called with screenings at tech events, a couple small movie theaters, and on Amazon Prime. Pls support by and let us know if you want to host a watch party once the film is released. Web 2.5 watching the trailer here , it’s the best physical product we’ve ever sold. Buy a HackerNoon hat Kind Regards, & COO Linh Dao Smooke CEO David Smooke If seeking more regular updates from HackerNoon, I recommend , , and/or . P.S. subscribing to the #hackernoon-product tag hackernoon.tech the #hackernoon tag

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