Every quarter, our CEO David and COO Linh sent a shareholder newsletter to Hacker Noon’s 1.3k shareholders. You can read all redacted versions . here 💰First thing first, how we've made money this year We're very excited that , and emerged as new and competitive offerings beside the usual revenue leader, . HackerNoon 2021 Year to Date Revenue is over $1M !!!! This is more than we expect total expenses for all of 2021 to be, as well as, a 168% increase over 2020 revenue, a 343% increase over 2019 revenue, and we still have three and half months left in 2021. Ad by Tag Writing Contest Startups of the Year Top Nav Billboard So far this year, we've published 6,844 stories in addition to 1,213 tech company news pages and 4,553 startups city award pages. These business pages are showing great early signs for their value to reflect the technology industry and have startups initiative dialogue with us, but it required increased editorial work to publish more startup voting, tech news pages, and HackerNoon newsletters. We'll be ramping up part-time editorial staff through the next 6 months to focus on increasing our rate of publishing quality tech stories. We launched with our custom voting software that ran the Noonies, featuring 40k+ startups, redacted in sponsorship revenue, and $100k+ rewards for startups. You can check out and , as well as, the initial . The headline sponsors are Brex, Blockster, and ByBit. It launched on July 26, and already has more site visitors than our first instance. Voting runs through January 2022, prolonging the duration for startups nominees and winners to market their own success. This is the 3rd profitable instance of our voting software, paving the way for more software expansion down the road. Startup of the Year Vote Discussions on LinkedIn Twitter 100+ Interviews with Startup Founders Noonies 🔥 Notable Progress Since May 15 2021 ● New Text Editor with . Built with Outline's open source text editor, this new editor supports Markdown and rich Notion-like block embeds. We'll be supporting both text editors for the foreseeable future, and possibly adding more. Markdown support ● . This program brought in 325k+ readers in 6 months from pilot program of 8 fellows. In the vein of a free BeOnDeck, we've expanded this program to 20 fellows for the second batch. Blogging Fellowship Expansion ● . We have our first purchases of $1k without first talking to a human! While creating a lot of value for customers, this package also requires no limited inventory and very little labor to serve. It's really a great way for technical companies to distribute their post posts and validate that they are a company worth covering. Startup Special Packages ● . Feature launched in January, updated in June, and has first dozen customers committed. Premium Tech Company News Pages ● has from the HackerNoon community, and has been installed in its first communities: Product School (100k+ members), Greater Colorado Venture Fund (yay our shareholders!), The State of Digital Publishing, and Civic Hackers. Slogging published 150+ posts ● Email Centralization. We're scaling up , and Transactional Emails with SendGrid. New with much better control of which types of emails they'd like to receive, and even what time zone certain emails will be delivered. Noonification Tech Brief user email settings ● . Now, users can be directed to an existing structured draft. The first 100+ interviews published via this format are live . If you are a startup founder, signup to get interviewed by HackerNoon. Text Interview Signup Flow here here ● - in addition to the existing Google and email. Smoother signup experience. Signup with Facebook, GitHub, Twitter ● :-) Top Stories (so far) in 2021 ● Page performance projects (have you noticed the speed at which things load has much improved? 😉). ● Account Management for Premium Brand Publishing Customers, such as , , and . Lisk Bybit Checkpoint ● . Personalized homepage for recommended stories, subscription management, bookmarks, and other useful resources. The framework also toggles to the writer dashboard, and upcoming brand dashboard. Reader Dashboard ● . This Podpage is a repo of all our existing podcast. By the way, the Hacker Noon podcast passed last quarter! New Podcast Microsite 200k downloads ● . Sandbox, the sponsor, pays out $5,800 to writers per month, and totals redacted revenue to HackerNoon. This model follows the success of the and writing contests. #Gaming-Metaverse Writing contest #Decentralized-Internet #Velo ● 10 Default rejection emails so editors communicate precisely to writers why their story got rejected, from grammar, bad formatting, plagiarism, length, audience fit, to general low quality. ● More original default thumbnails (12 new original robots designs!) to liven up the profiles that don't want to upload or connect a profile photo. ● Niche Marketing Ad Art Creator. Admins can now create original ad imagery within the HackerNoon content management system. Soon brands will be able to too. ● New reading discovery experiences, such as , a word cloud design of overlapping tags, and , a real-time feed of readers giving emoji reactions to writers. SuperTag Live 😻 More Upcoming ● Around the Web on the Story Page and Writer Stats pages. Using the AHrefs API, we will automatically cite where every story is mentioned, discussed, and/or linked around the internet. ● Brand Dashboard. We're in the prototype phase for customers to manage their ad spend and pay for compartmentalized offerings. This will also re-use our Bing News API work to track company mentions around the web to grease the flywheel signup flow. ● Writer Dashboard 3.0. Now that we have writing contests, web monetization, multiple text editors, story templates, around the web analytics, and more ways to work with writers, it's time to update how we organize the writer dashboard. ● Publishing and distributing audio files for all text stories in our library ;-) ● The Noonies! Our annual tech awards will be back in the summer. So far, sponsorship commitment is redacted. ● Verified writers program ✅ Working to up our rate of publishing by empowering the top contributors to earn and leverage the publish button. ● Individual User About Pages The about page is the second most visited page on the average site (after the homepage). With this user about page, we are validating writers’ expertise and perspective, and giving readers a page they can be proud of on HackerNoon. ● More Slack communities to install Slogging, and entry into the Slack App Directory to follow. ● Emoji Credibility Indicators for every story. These indicators provide important context for readers, such as clarifying where things like original reporting, referral links, and vested interests. ● Mobile Reading App. Currently this is in internal beta testing, our first mobile app is focused on the growing aggregate mobile time reading. ● A revamped Editor Dashboard and in-app workflow to match our evolving and expanding editorial team. ● Expansion into product reviews as technology stories via partnership with Advon Commerce and listing physical tech goods via ecommerce content partnership with StackCommerce. ● More Writing Contests. These drive words published, time reading, and money made - more to come! ● Noonies Voting Software backend improvements. To better leverage existing functions we built for our content management system (like social signup/in, ad by content relevancy placements, and database curation capabilities), we'll be moving our voting software's backend into Firebase. ● More default profile call to actions. Building on the most popular use cases for user generated call to actions, we'll be baking more default call to actions into the HackerNoon profile. 🥺 How you can help ● Purchase or refer the (free, growing $1k, and scaling $10k). After publishing thousands of brands, we think this package may be a sweet spot to scaling our customers' internet stories with inventory that is inexpensive for us to serve. Startup Specials publishing packages ● : , , , , and . Now (still) Hiring Slogging Engineer Fullstack Engineer Editors Junior Editors Sales Development ● Use ! It’s a simple ask - but will help you test the core competencies of the platform, aka, to read, write, learn and publish. Hacker Noon said Contrapoint (2021). We've come a long way, and yet, we still work to publish better stories, build better software and just be a better company. Right now, HackerNoon has record-breaking revenue, ships more software than ever, but what keeps us up at night is still that one customer who didn't renew, or the ways Google algo affects our traffic, or that person on Twitter who didn't appreciate our jokes... 🙂 C'est la vie? Onwards, we ship! Onwards, we publish! Onwards, we learn! "The human mind is not built for contentment," Thank you for your support. Until next time, stay safe, healthy, and take care. 🤞 COO & CEO HackerNoon Linh Dao Smooke David Smooke P.S. Some notable recent press citations of HackerNoon stories: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , and . Los Angeles Times Business Insider Wired Benzinga AOL Yahoo CleverProgrammer Product School Mozilla Boulder Startup Week MIT Sloan Review Facebook Engineering Nasdaq Vercel Tribune Dice Colorado Startups Google Developers StackOverflow Investor Place Apache Square TechTimes Intel RBC Asana Crypto.com Entrepreneur.com Twilio CIO P.P.S. For previous shareholder newsletters, visit . State of the Noonion

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State of The Noonion Q2 2021: We Made over $1M in Revenue!

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