Launch on Hacker News (Show HN guide)

Most Show HN failures aren't bad products: they're titles or copy that violate the unwritten community norms. Reading the official guidelines + the FAQ is the highest-ROI hour you'll spend. The community here is unusually willing to flag aggressively if it smells marketing voice or a Show HN that isn't actually shippable.

HN's audience is global, with a strong skew to US morning hours. Tuesday through Thursday, 8am to 11am Eastern is the highest-engagement window. The submission needs to gather 5-10 upvotes in the first 30 minutes to enter the new-page ranking model and have a shot at the front page. Submitting at 3am Pacific into a sparse new-page is how good products get buried.

The convention is 'Show HN: ProductName, what it does in plain words.' Keep it under 80 characters. No marketing voice, no 'AI-powered', no 'world's first'. The HN audience reflexively flags titles that read like a press release. The verbs they reward are 'I built', 'I made', 'I wrote', 'we built'.

Draft 10 Show HN title candidates for our launch.

Read the Brief surface for what the product is. Constraints:

1. Format: 'Show HN: ProductName, [plain-words description]'
2. 80 chars max
3. No "launch", "announcing", "introducing", "world's first", "AI-powered" (unless AI is genuinely the point)
4. No marketing adjectives ("powerful", "revolutionary", "next-gen")
5. Lead with what it concretely does, not what category it's in

Output as a 10-row table with columns: title, why-this-one, char-count. Then recommend the top 3.

Many of the best Show HN posts link to a blog post that explains the genuinely interesting engineering decision behind the product. This isn't required, but it dramatically improves comment quality: technical readers come for the post, then click through to try the product. Skip the marketing landing page; write the engineering post the audience wants to read.

Draft a 1500-2500 word technical write-up for our Show HN launch.

Read the codebase via the Brief and pick the ONE most interesting technical decision worth a post. Constraints:

1. Lead with the problem we hit, not the product
2. Include 'prior art': what's already out there and why it didn't fit
3. Include code samples (real, not pseudocode) for the hard parts
4. Include real measurements (benchmarks, perf, cost)
5. Close with what we'd do differently next time

No marketing voice. Sound like an engineer typing in their lunch break, not a content marketer. HN readers smell PR voice from a mile away.

Output as a markdown blog post draft with title + headers + body.

Show HN posts get reviewed in real time by 50-200 hackers who will actually try the product. If signup is broken, if the demo crashes, if the docs are missing, the comment thread will say so within an hour. Shipping the playbook means doing the boring pre-flight: a stranger can land on the URL, click through to value in under 60 seconds, and not hit a wall.

Submit, then immediately post a top-level comment with: the why-now, the technical link, what's not yet built, and what feedback you specifically want. This first comment goes a long way to setting the tone of the whole thread. The community responds well to founders who name what's incomplete and ask for specific feedback, badly to founders who lead with 'we're excited to share'.

Draft the first comment for our Show HN submission.

Structure:
1. Opening: 'Hi HN, [your name] here.' Single sentence on who you are and what you built.
2. Why-now: a paragraph on what made you build this — a real frustration, a hard problem, an experiment.
3. Stack note: the technical decisions worth surfacing (language, hosting, scaling, why-X-not-Y)
4. What's not built yet: 1-3 things you know are missing or rough
5. Closing: the specific feedback you want — code review, naming, missing feature, target audience fit

Constraints: 800-1500 chars. No "excited to share". No "we are launching today". No emoji. Sound like you're typing into a mailing list, not a press release.

Output the draft + 2 alternative openings.

The HN comment thread is the actual launch surface. People judge the product by how the founder shows up in the comments. Honest engineering humility wins; defensive corporate-tone replies kill the thread. Engage substantively even with the harshest critic; the audience reads the entire thread and rewards graceful responses.

HN traffic is shaped like a half-day spike: it climbs fast in the first 4 hours, peaks around hour 6-10, and tails off after 24. Track rank, traffic, and conversion in real time so you know what to optimise: more comments? Better signup? Faster fix? The data tells you whether the post is succeeding on its own merits or needs an intervention.

HN visits compound when the founder shows back up the day after with a 'thanks, here's what I shipped from your feedback' comment. Pick the single most-cited issue from the comment thread, fix it, and post the update. Then write the post-mortem: what worked, what surprised you, what you'd repeat.

Draft the post-mortem for our Show HN launch.

Read the Comments surface for the full top-level thread + the Steps surface for what we shipped.

Output a markdown doc with sections:
1. By the numbers: rank achieved, total points, total comments, total visits, signups, paid (if applicable)
2. What worked: 3-5 bullets on what made the launch land
3. What surprised us: 3-5 bullets on what we didn't expect (good + bad)
4. Top 5 most-cited issues from the comment thread + how we addressed each
5. What we'd repeat for the next Show HN
6. What we'd drop for the next Show HN

No marketing voice. This is a journal entry for your future self, not a press release.

Posts get flagged by users and demoted by mods for: marketing voice, paywall walls, broken demos, suspected vote brigading, or 'not actually a Show HN'. If your post gets flagged, do not panic, do not resubmit. The recovery is: read the flag reason, fix what's flag-worthy, and learn for next time. Most flagged founders make the same post worse by re-submitting.