How Mark Turned One Hacker News Post Into Free Fuel for a Product Hunt Launch

Meet Mark Jivko.

Mark is a Tenerife-based engineer. 17+ years in software, ex-CTO for over a decade, 30k+ hours of side-project sweat.

Mark just shipped something new: Socket2, a dead-simple way to share entire folders straight from your browser. He launched it on Hacker News and Product Hunt on the same day. Instead of waiting around for a tidy, retrospective success story, he's handing the Fake Mayo readers the raw, still-in-progress numbers.

Btw, Mark shared other startup stories previously. You might remember him from his Draw on Screen story, or his earlier project, GoIndex.

A quick word from my sponsor before Mark shares his story below

Startupik
Where Founders Actually Learn How to Make Money

Most startup content sounds smart but doesn’t help you move forward. Startupik is different. It breaks down exactly how startups get users, grow fast, and make real money - using simple, clear examples from AI tools, SaaS products, and real founders. No confusing terms, no empty talk - just practical ideas you can use right away to build and grow your own startup.

Visit to startupik.com

Socket2 lets you share a folder - not just a single file - with anyone, in one click, from any modern browser. No install. No download. You pick a folder on your device, you get a link, and whoever you send it to can browse the contents like it's a normal website.

Here's the part I find fun. Your files never leave your device. When someone visits your public link, the GET request gets chopped into frames and travels down an open WebSocket straight to your browser tab. Your tab reads the requested file fragment and pipes it back through the same connection. SSL the whole way, the connection authenticated with a token.

Close the tab and the server simply dies. There's nothing left sitting on a hosting box somewhere for some giant corporation to forget to delete.

And yes - that means you can host a static website off your laptop. At a café. At McDonald's. You drop a folder, you get a link, and suddenly you're a web server. Nobody's really doing private static-site sharing like this, and honestly that's the part I'm most excited about.

It's perfect for designers and devs who want to send a client an update without parking NDA-protected files on a third-party host. It's good for anyone sharing files on the go. And there's no subscription - you just buy bandwidth, use it when you need it, and it never expires. Use it once a year, or once an hour. Your call.

I wrote about it on Hacker News - a plain old "Show HN:" post. No fanfare, no hype thread, no begging. It picked up around 14 upvotes. Modest, I know. But Hacker News traffic is real traffic - engineers who actually click, read, and try the thing instead of just scrolling past.

Now, completely by coincidence, I'd also lined up a Product Hunt launch for the very same day. So I did the only sensible thing: I added a small Product Hunt banner to the Socket2 front page, so the folks arriving from Hacker News could be gently nudged toward the PH campaign to leave an upvote. No pop-ups. No guilt-trips. Just a quiet door, held open, for anyone who felt like walking through it.

Will it work out? I genuinely don't know. I'm writing this while it's all still happening. But here's exactly where things stand.

In about 14 hours, the "Show HN:" post brought in 218 real visitors. Not bot impressions, not inflated reach - actual humans. Of those, 10 signed up.

All of it free. Not a cent on ads.

I'm not going to dress that up as a viral moment, because it wasn't one. But for a single post, written once, on a tool I built to scratch my own itch? I'll take 218 qualified visitors and 10 signups in an afternoon, every single time.

Two takeaways I'm fairly confident about, even this early.

First: Hacker News is a legitimate, zero-cost way to put your product in front of people who matter. You don't need to top the front page. You don't need to go viral. A clear "Show HN:" and 14 upvotes was enough to pull a couple hundred genuinely interested visitors and ten signups - and those people are builders, the exact crowd a tool like Socket2 is for.

Second: launches don't have to live in separate boxes. When you've already got attention flowing in from one channel, you can let a little of it splash over onto another. My Hacker News post wasn't "about" Product Hunt at all - but a slice of that free traffic became a bit of extra momentum for the PH campaign, just by holding a door open on the front page. Call it splash damage. The good kind.

That's the whole hack, really. Ship a thing people in one corner of the internet actually want, tell them about it honestly, and then point your launches at each other instead of running them in isolation. The traffic you earned in one place can quietly do double duty.

If you want to see Socket2 for yourself, it's at socket2.me. Open a tab, share a folder, close the tab. That's genuinely the entire experience.

If you're wondering what's eating most of my hours these days, it's Uindow - my next product. It's web automation that websites can't tell apart from a human: real, OS-level mouse movement, real keystrokes, running on your own machine and your own IP, so there's no datacenter fingerprint to flag. Record a workflow by just doing it, hand it to an AI agent over MCP, or run it on a schedule while you sleep.

I'm building it because I'm tired of automation that gets blocked the second it loads a page - and because, frankly, Selenium feels like it's been running on fumes for years. And QA tools like Puppeteer are just not built for this. But that's a story for another issue.

Keep shipping!

You’ll find Mark on these platforms:

See you next time.

Thanks,
Jakob Jelling

I’m on X. Come out and play.