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

cover
1 Oct 2020

The Good Q3

Strong quarter for Sales
We project to exceed our internal 2020 Sales OKR of
redacted
or 2x last year. As of today October 28th, 2020, we’ve clocked in over
redacted
in total revenue. With 2 months left to go in 2020, we are confident to meet our yearly
redacted
goal.
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.
Redacted
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
redacted
. It’s exciting to create new business opportunities to rev share with contributors.
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.