How to launch on Hacker News: the Show HN guide
A Show HN that lands sends more qualified traffic than any other launch venue, and most of them get four points and vanish. The difference is mostly decided before you press submit.
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Hacker News is the strangest launch venue on the list: no followers, no streak, no launch page, no embeds. You submit a link with a title, and a few hundred thousand of the most skeptical readers on the internet decide what happens next.
That skepticism is the value. When a Show HN works, the traffic it sends actually signs up, actually files bugs, and actually pays, because every visitor chose to click a plain title with no picture attached. This guide is the mechanics: what qualifies, the title, the timing, the first hour, and what to do when it goes nowhere, which most of the time it will.
What actually qualifies as a Show HN
Show HN has written rules, and threads die for breaking them before any voting happens.
It has to be something people can try. A working product, a demo, an open source repo. A landing page with an email box is not a Show HN, and neither is a waitlist, a "coming soon", or a video about the thing. If a visitor cannot touch it in the first minute, post it later, when they can.
You have to have made it. Show HN is for showing your own work. Your involvement is the point; a thread where the submitter cannot answer "why did you build it this way" is just a link.
Lower the walls for one day. HN readers bounce off signup forms on principle. A demo mode, a sandbox account, or a generous free tier for launch day converts far better than a wall, and the comments will say so either way.
The title decides more than the product
The format is fixed by convention: "Show HN: Name – what it does", in plain words.
"Show HN: Nearer – find people building near you" reads right. "Show HN: Nearer – the future of local networking 🚀" reads like marketing, and HN treats marketing voice the way other sites treat spam. No superlatives, no "revolutionary", no emoji, no exclamation mark. If the plain description of what it does is not interesting, the fix is the product, not the adjectives.
Two details people get wrong. Do not put a question in the title, and do not put your metrics in it ("$4k MRR in 3 weeks" belongs in a comment, if anywhere). The moderators routinely rewrite titles that oversell, and a rewritten title is a signal to the room that you overplayed it.
Write the first comment before you submit
Engineers open the comments before the link. The first comment is yours to write, and it is the best real estate on the page: what it is, why you built it, what was hard, what you chose and what you traded away. Two or three short paragraphs, written like you talk.
The stack belongs here, because "how is this built" is half of HN's interest in anything. So do the embarrassing parts. "Self-hosted sync was a nightmare so v1 is cloud-only" earns more goodwill than a feature list, and it seeds the exact conversation you want: people telling you how they would have built it, which is HN's love language.
When to post
Weekday mornings, US Eastern, roughly 8 to 11am. That is when the most readers are looking at the new page, and the new page is the only audience you start with. Avoid days with obvious giant news in your space; you cannot outrank a model release with a side project.
One more mechanic worth knowing: HN explicitly allows reposting if a story got no traction. A Show HN that sank at four points on a bad Tuesday can be resubmitted after some days have passed. Do not machine-gun it, but do not treat one quiet morning as the verdict either.
The first hour is a support shift
If it starts moving, clear your morning. Answer every substantive comment, fastest first, and take criticism completely straight. "You're right, that's broken, fixing it now" is the single highest-converting sentence on Hacker News. Defensiveness reliably turns a mixed thread negative, and threads are read top to bottom by everyone who arrives later.
Never ask anyone to upvote, not privately, not in your team chat with a link. HN's voting-ring detection is old and good, and a flagged launch is worse than a failed one. Share the thread after it is on the front page, not to get it there.
What a good Show HN is worth
A front-page Show HN is typically tens of thousands of visits in a day, and they are the right visits: technical people who read the discussion before clicking. Expect real bug reports within the hour and real signups by lunch. The traffic spike itself fades in two days, which is why the durable half of a launch matters: the thread keeps ranking for your name, and the discussion gets cited for years.
And if it goes nowhere, which is the median outcome, you have lost a morning. Most Show HN posts get a handful of points. The product is not worse at noon than it was at breakfast; the new page is just a lottery with a good prize, so take the free ticket every time you have something new to show.
Where it fits in the rest of the launch
Hacker News is one morning. The rest of the plan is covered by where to launch your app and the venues in Product Hunt alternatives, and the description you sharpened for HN's plain-title test is the same one every directory asks for; that craft is its own guide. The listings you file that week keep sending people long after the thread scrolls away, which is the whole argument of do directory submissions still work. And if the goal behind all of it is your first real cohort of users, start with how to get your first 100 users.