TL;DR In Q2 2020, Hacker Noon had its highest revenue quarter in company history ( ), we built a lot of quality software (including ), published a lot of great technology stories ( ), made it onto , 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 We’ve passed the total revenue of last year ( redacted ) within the first half of this year! redacted Noonies 2.0 some top ones Wikipedia how hackers start their afternoons. Product Development 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 , who’s a referral from our Full-Stack Developer , that we made him a full-time offer in Q3, which he accepted :-) Richard Kubina Austin Pocus In 2020 Q2, here is a list of what we released, and one sentence about each: : our custom voting product at (voting opens on August 13th). The Noonies v2 Noonies.Tech : all stories published on a date accessible by clicking any date under each story title ( ) Story Archives example : Chrome is Hacker Noon readers’ most popular browser and by installing ( ), users can get the latest stories from Hacker Noon when opening a new tab. Tech Stories Tab Chrome Extension this extension open sourced here : removing barrier to reading even further, this feature emphasizes the story title, author accreditation, and a less annoying, more reader friendly sticky ad ( , scroll down to see how design functions). Sticky Story Headline example : easily accessible under each story title for writers & editors, this new stat page also includes a pixelated graph that showcases how well the story does over time compared to average peak performance ( ). Single Story Stats Page example : It is a lot easier to move fast and break things if you can go back in time to restore how things work - now we can! Backup System : this feature emphasizes the value created by each writer via hackernoon.com (time reading, one of our 3 core metrics) front & center on their profile ( ) Time Reading Created on Profile Page example : any writer can now add meta tag to their profile to be streamed micropayments from Coil subscribers ( ) Coil Web Monetization Integration 2.6k users have done so About Page: all you need to know about Hacker Noon in one page . : Hacker Noon’s pixelated designs are now open sourced on Github ( & ). Open Sourced Emojis here here we continue to improve our , which manages hundreds of submissions per day (reject, improve, schedule or publish), on top of 22k+ , 12k+ writer profiles, sponsor payments for , and content curation & distribution. Admin/Editor Improvement: app tags BAA : ; however, as we are transitioning off Disqus commenting system, this is currently turned off. Commenting Leaderboard ranking all comments on Hacker Noon : Reliability, reliability, reliability - we’ve built more testing systems with Sentry, Hotjar, and more importantly, we’ve been writing end-to-end tests that simulate user behavior with Cypress. Increased Testing Overall, each of these product developments help move at least one of our main core metrics: time reading, words published, or money made. Profit and Loss For better or for worse, we are getting closer to profitability despite a growing pandemic. Last quarter, while the US GDP , Hacker Noon revenue grew by 121.96% QoQ. shrank by 32.9% Redacted Editorial & Traffic This quarter, we published from Hacker Noon stories; which marks a + 7.3% YoY and + 5.6% QoQ increase. We averaged published per day; representing a + 19.6 % YoY and +5.5% QoQ increase. . 3,593,068 words 30.9 stories 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 Coil Strategic Investment, & Ensuing Investor Interest Redacted Team , 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 Redacted Outlook & Q3 Sneak Peek Q3 started off with a grant from Mozilla. Our mentor for the program is Rotten Tomatoes founding CEO . 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 Fix the Internet Patrick Lee Redacted