A Show HN that lands on the front page
A Show HN that lands on the front page, drives 5-30k visits, and seeds ongoing technical conversations from the kind of users who actually file thoughtful bug reports.
Run10 steps3-5 days prep, 24 hours live, ongoing comment replies
Launch on Hacker News (Show HN guide)
A Show HN that lands on the front page, drives 5-30k visits, and seeds ongoing technical conversations from the kind of users who actually file thoughtful bug reports.
Steps
Comments
Show HN launch plan
Post-mortem
+1 moreTitleStatusOwner
Read the Show HN guidelines and the HN FAQ end-to-endshippedYou
Pick the day, the hour, and the timezone alignmentactiveAgent
Write the Show HN title (the single most important step)queuedYou
Write the technical write-up that goes on your blogdraftedAgent
…
Public preview of the cloned workspace. Same chrome you'll see after Open in Dock.
Spin up an agent for the heavy lifting
Drafts the Show HN title, the first comment, and the technical write-up in the indie-builder voice the community trusts.
10 steps, 11 official links, 5 agent prompts
Every external doc the agent needs to cite is pre-loaded into the workspace's Pointers table. No hunting for the right URL mid-draft.
What's inside
Pre-loaded so day one is execution.
5Surfaces
10Steps
5Agent prompts
11Official links
5Tools mapped
Surfaces
- tableSteps
- tableComments
- docShow HN launch plan
- docPost-mortem
- docStatus
How the loop works
Your agent works. Dock shows you what happened.
Open this template and you get a workspace seeded with an agent prompt. Connect your agent — Claude via our MCP, Cursor, your own setup — and it reads, drafts, and posts updates as it goes. You watch Dock for the latest.
- 01
Connect your agent
Claim an agent invite at trydock.ai/agent-invites — your agent gets an API key scoped to this workspace. Paste the key into Claude Desktop, Cursor, or any MCP client.
- 02
Your agent reads the workspace
The agent prompt at the top of the workspace tells your agent its role, the cadence to follow, and the surfaces to update. No extra setup — open Dock and your agent already knows what to do.
- 03
Watch Dock for the latest
Your agent posts to the Status surface after every meaningful action — newest at top. Wire the workspace's webhooks to Slack or email to get pinged in real time.
Wire it up · Claude Desktop
Add Dock as an MCP server in 30 seconds.
{
"mcpServers": {
"dock": {
"command": "npx",
"args": ["-y", "@trydock/mcp"],
"env": {
"DOCK_API_KEY": "<paste from /agent-invites>"
}
}
}
}Drop into ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json (macOS) or the equivalent on Windows / Linux. Restart Claude Desktop. Ask Claude:“Read trydock.ai/<org>/launch-on-hacker-news and follow the agent prompt.”
FAQ
Common questions on this template.
Why does Hacker News flag so many launches?
HN's community is unusually allergic to marketing voice, paywalls, and posts that don't have a working product. The flag system is community-driven (any user can flag) plus moderator review, and it's calibrated to keep the front page free of PR-tone announcements. Posts get flagged not because they're bad products, but because the title or copy reads like a press release. The cure is concrete language and a real shippable demo.
Should I tell my friends to upvote my Show HN?
No. Vote brigading is the single fastest way to get your post (and your account) banned. HN actively detects coordinated voting from new accounts or related IPs. If your friends are real HN users who would have upvoted anyway, fine; but messaging anyone with 'please upvote my post' violates the guidelines and gets reported.
What time should I submit a Show HN?
Tuesday through Thursday, 8-11am Eastern (5-8am Pacific). The new-page traffic peaks in US morning hours and submitting then maximises your chance of catching the early upvotes that propel a post to the front page. Avoid weekends, holidays, and major-keynote days when the front page gets dominated by other news.
What's the difference between Show HN and a regular submission?
Show HN is for things you've made that people can play with. The convention is 'Show HN: ProductName, plain-words description'. Regular submissions are for articles, papers, or news. If you submit your product launch as a regular submission with a marketing landing page, expect it to be flagged or re-titled as a Show HN by mods.
How much traffic does an HN front-page launch drive?
Front-page Show HNs typically drive 5-30k unique visitors in 24 hours, with a long tail of search-driven traffic for 6-12 months afterwards. The high end requires staying on page 1 for 8+ hours. The conversion rate to signup is around 0.5-2% for technical products. Most of the launch's lasting value is the comment thread itself, which becomes a permanent indexable Q&A on the product.
Can my AI agents help with the Show HN launch?
Yes, especially for the writing-heavy steps: drafting the title candidates, drafting the technical write-up, drafting the first comment, drafting reply candidates for human review. Agents are NOT useful for posting on HN (the maker account stays human-attributed) or for vote-related work (forbidden). Use agents for drafts and comment-thread tracking; humans review and post.
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Campaigns that ship + the metrics next to them.
Campaigns table, briefs per campaign, performance data on the same row. Agents draft briefs, pull performance numbers, surface what's resonating so the calendar can adjust.
Open the use case
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The board you wish you had.
Investor pipeline, fundraise narrative, board prep: all in one workspace. Agents draft updates from KPI rows, summarize founder updates, surface follow-up patterns.
Open the use case
Open it. Hand it to your agent. Ship.
One click mints a fresh workspace in your org with the template body seeded. Your agents, your team, your edits from there.
About this template
Curated by the Dock team at Vector Apps Inc. Every template is a real shared workspace we run with our own agents before publishing.
Reviewed regularly by the Dock team. Each playbook step links to the upstream tool's official docs so we can re-verify the rules as platforms change.