How to Launch on Hacker News: A Show HN Guide for Founders

To launch on Hacker News, post a "Show HN" submission that links to something people can actually try (a live product, a demo or a repo), give it a plain descriptive title, post a short founder comment explaining what you built and why, and then spend the next six hours answering technical questions honestly. Post on a weekday morning US time, never ask anyone for upvotes, and make sure your infrastructure can survive tens of thousands of visitors in a few hours if you hit the front page.

That's the whole method. The hard part is the discipline: Hacker News punishes the instincts most marketing teams have, and rewards founders who sound like engineers talking to other engineers.

What Show HN is and what the rules say

Show HN is the section of Hacker News for sharing something you've made. The guidelines are short and worth reading in full before you post, but the core points are these:

• It must be something people can try. A live product, an open-source repo, a playable demo, a working tool.
• Landing pages, waitlists, signup walls and fundraising announcements don't qualify. If a reader can't use the thing, it isn't a Show HN.
• The title starts with "Show HN:" followed by the name and a plain description.
• Don't ask friends or colleagues to upvote or comment. Hacker News detects voting rings and will penalise or kill the post.
• Blog posts and "how we built X" write-ups are regular submissions, not Show HN.
• Be around to answer questions. The maker is expected to show up in the thread.

If your product requires a sales call to try, you aren't ready for Show HN. Ship a free tier, a sandbox or a public demo first. For a lot of AI products, a hosted playground with sensible rate limits is the fastest way to qualify.

Who should (and shouldn't) launch on Hacker News

Hacker News readers are mostly engineers, technical founders, researchers and the people who hire them. That makes it one of the best launch channels in existence for some products and close to useless for others.

If you sit in the top three rows, Show HN deserves a real slot in your launch plan. The developer tools marketing playbook covers how HN fits next to docs, GitHub and community for that audience.

How to write a Show HN title

The title does most of the work. HN readers skim a list of 30 plain-text titles, and anything that sounds like an ad gets skipped or flagged.

Formats that work:

Show HN: [Name] - [what it does in plain words]
Show HN: [Name], an open-source [category] for [specific use]
Show HN: I built [thing] because [specific frustration]
Show HN: [Name] - [what it does], written in [language]

Use a plain hyphen or comma as the separator. Three illustrations, all fictional products:

Show HN: Tracelet - open-source tracing for LLM agent tool calls
Show HN: I built a local-first transcription app that runs on a laptop GPU
Show HN: Pgvecto-bench, reproducible benchmarks for Postgres vector extensions

What flops:

• Superlatives: "the fastest," "the best," "revolutionary."
• Category jargon with no object: "AI-native agentic platform for teams."
• Emoji, exclamation marks and title case on every word.
• Anything that reads like it came from a marketing team, because it probably did.

Specific nouns beat adjectives every time. "Runs on a laptop GPU" is a claim a reader can test. "Blazing fast" is a claim a reader will mock.

The founder comment: your first post in the thread

Post a comment on your own submission within a minute or two of submitting. This is where you give context the title can't hold. Keep it short, technical and honest.

Hi HN, I'm [name]. I built [product] after [specific problem, one or two sentences].

How it works: [two to four sentences on the architecture. Name the model, the stack, the tradeoff you made.]

What's different from [obvious alternative]: [one honest sentence].

Limitations: [what it doesn't do well yet, stated plainly].

It's [free / open source under MIT / free tier with X limit]. Pricing is [visible link or one sentence].

I'd love feedback, especially on [specific area you're unsure about].

Three things make this comment land. Technical specifics (people want to know which model, which database, how you handle cost). An honest limitations line (it disarms the first critic). And a specific ask for feedback, which invites the kind of comment that keeps the thread alive.

When to post

There's no magic minute, but there are patterns. Weekday mornings US time, roughly 7am to 10am Pacific, put your post in front of the largest audience as the US wakes up. The tradeoff: more competition from other submissions. Weekend posts get fewer readers but a calmer new page, and some founders find they climb more easily there.

Practical rules I'd follow:

• Post when the founder who built it can sit in the thread for the next six hours with nothing else on the calendar.
• Avoid the day of a major industry event that's dominating the front page.
• Don't post the same day as your Product Hunt launch if you can avoid it. Split them so each gets your full attention; the Product Hunt launch checklist assumes a separate day.
• If the post sinks without traction, don't immediately resubmit. HN allows a repost after a reasonable gap if the first one got no attention, and moderators sometimes give good posts a second chance on their own.

How to answer comments

The thread is the launch. Readers often open the comments before the link.

• Reply to substantive questions fast, ideally within 15 minutes for the first few hours.
• Answer the question asked, with numbers where you have them. "p95 latency is about 400ms on a T4" beats "it's very fast."
• Agree with fair criticism out loud. "You're right, that's a gap, it's on the roadmap for next month" earns more trust than any defence.
• Never argue tone, never get sarcastic, never accuse a critic of bad faith even if you suspect it.
• Don't have teammates jump in to praise the product. Readers spot it immediately and it can sink the post.
• If someone points to a competitor, say plainly how you differ and when the competitor is the better choice.
• If someone finds a bug, thank them, fix it if you can that day, and reply when it's fixed.

The most common way a promising Show HN dies is a defensive founder. The product is fine, then the maker argues with the third commenter and the thread turns into a pile-on.

What to do if you hit the front page

The front page can send tens of thousands of visitors in a few hours, with heavy concentration in the first two or three. For AI products that means inference cost, not just page load. Prepare before you post.

• Put the landing page and docs behind a CDN and test them under load.
• Set rate limits and a queue on any free inference endpoint, with a friendly message when it's busy.
• Set a hard spending cap on your model provider account and a billing alert well below it.
• Make sure signup works without email verification delays that lose impatient visitors.
• Have a static fallback page ready if the app goes down: a demo video, the repo link and a waitlist.
• Put one person on infra watch who isn't answering comments.
• Pre-write a status comment for the thread in case things break. "We're getting hammered, here's a video while we scale up" is fine. Silence isn't.

Getting hugged to death is survivable and even a little endearing. Getting hugged to death while silent in the thread is not.

Converting Hacker News traffic

HN readers are allergic to aggressive conversion tactics. They block trackers, ignore popups and leave if they hit a signup wall before seeing value. Design for that.

Track HN separately. Tag the link you share in the comment, watch referrer data, and look at activation rather than signups. A few hundred engaged developers trying your API is a better outcome than thousands of drive-by visits.

After the spike, follow up properly. Reply to every remaining comment over the next two days. Turn the best questions into docs pages or an FAQ. If a technical discussion in the thread was particularly good, write a follow-up blog post on it; that post can become a normal HN submission weeks later.

How a Show HN fits into the rest of your launch

A successful Show HN produces something more durable than traffic: a public, archived technical discussion of your product that reporters, investors and AI assistants all read. Tech journalists do browse the front page, and a thread with substantive discussion is a better pitch asset than a press release. If you're planning press around the same launch, the PR side should reference the HN reception, not compete with it. That sequencing is part of what I help AI founders plan, and the full launch sequence is in the product launch checklist PDF.

For AI infrastructure companies in particular, HN credibility tends to compound. The AI infrastructure marketing guide covers how technical community proof feeds into enterprise sales later.

Hacker News doesn't reward the best marketing. It rewards the founder who shows up in the thread, tells the truth about their product, and lets the work speak.

Planning a technical launch and want a second opinion on the sequence? Book a 30-minute teardown.