I have flagged this as ridiculous clickbait. "I added a notification email to people who didn't finish signing up and made some extra money" is the gist of the article, and much more mundane.

"You won't believe this SIMPLE trick that can INCREASE your MONEY by HOW MUCH?! Percent!"

Ah ok so you made a feature for an already existing business model. Expanding and improving your product is surely important :)

Is any computer program a bot now?

If it's not an app, yup.

I'd have actually read the article if had been titled: You won't believe how I increased sales by 10% with this one simple trick.

"There is no program" --- it's an app, a bot, a micro-service, a nano-service, a REST Hook, a CLI, a Job, a miner --- "programs" are what gramps wrote!

Gramps was a programmer too, not a developer.

I think a bot implies some level of automated communication with a human (in this case, an email reminder).

If it's just about an email reminder (cron job), "bot" is even more of a buzz-word!

But whatever, good on OP

If I recall correctly every computer program was a bot when I started coding in 2005. YMMV.

I was just thinking that...

IPFS mirror: https://www.eternum.io/ipfs/QmeKB8MLrwudksQRUTnADmD3JEwjJqdt...

Website slow to load/HN hug of traffic.

cached version: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:eP3WTm...

"I made a script to email people, but if I call it a "bot" I will make it to the top of HN in no time. "

Worked.

"How I made 10% of my side project's incomes with a bot written in 4 hours"... "then decreased my products lifetime earning by 15% permanently".

Now that it's publicly known, why would anyone sign-up immediately? Surely this addition has now done more harm?

It could also be that some or all of these 10% knew or expected that they would get a discount if they did this, in which case it would be a loss of (max) 1.5%.

All I see is - if I'm interested in his service, create an account and wait a few days for the promo code...

How do niche projects like this gain traction? Is it just about SEO?

A lot of people made a lot of money just researching key words, and building a product around that. I'm sure it's a quick flame, but cash can be made for sure.

SEO, cold email, etc. I'm sure even linkedin would be a good target for something like this since it's a pool of recruiters.