100K Views, 1K GitHub Stars, and 100+ Messages Later
by Dylan Huang on December 23, 2024
Recently I shared my startup journey on LinkedIn. In particular, I shared the source code for my startup after closing it down along with the story of building and shutting down the company. Ordinarily, I got an above-average response from my personal network since it was big career news for me. But as I woke up the next day, I saw a pull request on the open source repo asking to license the code—which was weird because I didn't think anybody would actually care about a failed startup's codebase.
Similarly weird, there were ~50 stars on the repo. Curious about where this sudden attention was coming from, I checked my website analytics and noticed a surge of traffic from both Hacker News and Reddit. Someone had discovered my post and shared it on both platforms where it quickly gained traction. Over the next 6 days, my story reached over 100,000 readers, I received more than 100 recruitment messages, and the GitHub repo accumulated over 1,000 stars. What started as a simple LinkedIn post about my startup journey had organically spread to /r/programming and HackerNews, sparking discussions in both communities.
Here is a screenshot of website page views from Cloudflare.
Analytics from LinkedIn:
Stars on GitHub:
Reflection
While betting on myself didn't work out financially, the overwhelming response to sharing my journey has given me a unique sense of validation I've never felt before in my career. The way my story resonated with the tech community—from complete strangers to old colleagues—tells me that the skills and experiences I gained over these 3 years are genuinely valuable. Sure, it's just social validation, but seeing my post hit the front page of Hacker News and /r/programming suggests that my experience building and shutting down a startup resonates deeply with other engineers. When I look at my refreshed resume now, I see more than just another failed startup—I recall the experience of shipping products, pivoting through market changes, and learning hard lessons about what it takes to build something from scratch. In hindsight, what felt like an ending when we decided to shut down might just be another stepping stone in my career.