This is a redactedversion of the HackerNoon shareholders' newsletter by CEO David Smooke and COO Linh Smooke sent to 1.3k shareholders.

TL;DR

We’ve reached historical milestones of serving 1k+ customers, publishing 30k+ contributing writers and welcoming 200M+ visitors to date. 2022 YTD Revenue is up 77% YoY. For the first time in 3 years, a “new” inventory, Writing Contests, surpassed “traditional” inventories (Top Nav Billboard, Ad-by-tag, Brand Publishing) as our #1 revenue source! Since Writing Contests launched in 2021, they have generated over $XXXk in revenue and resulted in publishing 2k+ stories. It’s a win for readers, a win for sponsors, and a win for contributing writers! We’ve also shipped a ton of software: notably, web3 login, NFTs for Noonies winners, a new store for brands, a native commenting system, a notification center for readers and writers alike, and lots of market-insight pages like the Trending Tech Company Brief. Our next big pushes are: Slogging in the Slack App, Coin Price Pages, a lot more traffic via emails (automated emails, editor-written emails, and newsletter distribution for the verified contributing writers), and even more web3 integrations.

Read the full Blog Post below for full context.


💰 Revenue & Business Development: Reporting, Forecasting, and Ruminating

Roles and Revenue

HackerNoon’s YTD revenue stands at redacted. It marks a 77% growth YoY. Revenue over the last 12 months is redacted. As we were in 2021, HackerNoon remains profitable in 2022.


The average deal size (excluding BAA) was redacteddepicting the trust HackerNoon developed with the companies. This year, with our great push towards Web3 adoption, writing competitions have overtaken billboard revenue and signal the decreasing reliance on search engines and the increasing resilience of HackerNoon revenue to AD Blockers.

Accountability and Automation

With the May launch of our Brand Dashboard, we’ll be enabling companies to self-checkout nearly any brand offering. While we’ve worked with over 1,000 brands, previously only brand-as-author publishing credits were available for self-purchase. Now brands can purchase billboard slots, newsletters, speciality packages and even writing contests without the explicit need of speaking to a human. A milestone for the sales team 🎉


Going beyond simply selling inventory, the brand dashboard is a ‘true’ dashboard where sponsors can track the performance of their campaigns (clicks, impressions, and geo-targeting) for granular oversight. This will save our team many hours spent each week generating and sending reports, so we can use that time to land even more clients.

Future iterations also include messaging functionalities that allow the sales team to communicate quick “wins” or causes for concern with sponsors during the course of the campaign.


Closing the Loop and Constant Communications

We’re now sending monthly newsletters to sponsors and leads to educate them on inventory and offer discounted packages. We’re calling these ‘Love Letter to Brands’. These newsletters are averaging 25+ meetings booked with every send.


This exercise keeps the sponsors updated and engaged. Future iterations: we can segment our lists to send more niche-relevant newsletters!

Advertising 2.0: Native, Contextual, and Crowd-Sourced

HackerNoon’s Writing Competitions have been a smashing success. This June, we’ll have onboarded 9 sponsors in 2022 and successfully concluded 3 in 2021. Compared to banner ads (that can be blocked by AD blockers), writing competitions get native placements, a ton of social marketing activities, and an incentivized model to crowdsource high-quality content. We’re now committed to rewarding $174k to contest winners.


With these__simultaneous writing contests__, we’re practically rewarding more money to more winners that simply beats the subscription model pursued by generic publications.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Growing Company Revenue

A couple more notable things about HackerNoon business development in 2022 YTD:


🚀 Software Development: The Top Features shipped YTD

Words of the year (thus far): web3 and iteration. Our talented dev team has been hard at work making the experience of writers, readers, editors and sponsors better(in some cases, radically improved).

For Our Beloved Readers

This year to date, we really doubled down on making it easier and more useful than ever to own a reader account on HackerNoon.

For Our Brainy Writers

This quarter, we’ve spent a lot of time iterating on the writers’ experience on HackerNoon. These are the features that have been launched in the past, made better 💪

For Our Iconic Brands

These are the features deployed to make the life of our 1000+ sponsors (that make HackerNoon possible for users) easier.

Upcoming Features we’re excited about:

📈 On Readership and Editorial Growth

More writers = more stories = the need for a bigger editorial team

Great stories are the lifeblood of HackerNoon, and thus the writers on our platform are our heroes. Historically, we have published over 30k+ writers. In addition to our core offering of timely professional editing and story distribution, we run a number of initiatives to attract talented writers and the best stories, which include Writing Contests, The HackerNoon Blogging Fellowship, story/interview templates, HackerNoon Books, and more!

Writing Contests

This year, we already have 5 active writing contests running, and 4 more in the pipeline. Writing contests encourage organic, user-generated stories about what’s happening in the tech world today, be it the Future of Gaming, Cybersecurity, or what’s happening in Web3. At the same time, these contests reward our writers with $174k cash prizes for their valuable content. In total, our contests have created 2k+ stories and over 2M+ reads to date!

New Keywords Won

HackerNoon ranks for hundreds of thousands of important tech keywords on Google, Bing, and other search engines. Some of the popular top three wins for tech terms with thousands of monthly searches are: proxy servers, what is a full-stack engineer, one hot encoding, manacher’s algorithm and curl request.

Story Templates

To help our community choose the best trending topics to write about and format their stories structure in an engaging way, we’ve published a couple dozen story templates/writing prompts. Stories published via these templates have gone on to garner tens of thousands of reads. We’ll be expanding our default template library, and adding incentives to create more templates, and answer more templates to make original stories.

Blogging Fellowships

We’ve created an online blogging fellowship program to teach the basics of writing for an online audience, SEO, keyword research, and modern internet writing. The blogging fellows have contributed over 600 stories to the platform which has garnered over 2.2 million readers in the first year of this program. Most of our graduates have gone on to get part-time or even full-time writing jobs during or directly after the fellowship. A few have even joined the HackerNoon staff.

Growing the Team

More writers equals more story submissions and in order to keep publishing times at a minimum, we’ve had to grow our tools and our team. We’ve hired 3 more editors with expertise in business/finance, software development, and the video game industry to help bolster our editorial team. We will continue to expand the part-time HackerNoon editorial staff to cover more technological expertises.

How can you help

Until next time Slogging along, and treat your internet friends with respect.

HackerNoon COO Linh Dao Smooke & CEO David Smooke

P.S. On a personal note, our son (our second child) was born early! Healthy baby, healthy mama, happy people here. Take care of your loved ones.