Show HN: How to Write a Post That Gets Traction on Hacker News

What Hacker News Is Not

HN is not a marketing channel. It's a community of builders, engineers, and technically sophisticated readers who share a deep skepticism of anything that looks like marketing.

This means: the more promotional your Show HN post sounds, the worse it performs. A post that reads like a press release will be downvoted. A post that reads like a founder honestly explaining what they built and why will get upvotes. The community rewards intellectual honesty and punishes self-promotion.

The Show HN Title

Your title must start with "Show HN:" followed by the most specific, honest description of your product you can write. No adjectives. No superlatives. No benefits.

The HN title is a description of the artifact, not a pitch for it.

Titles that work:

• "Show HN: StartKitz — generate app marketing copy from a URL"
• "Show HN: I built a tool that analyzes your app URL and writes your Product Hunt copy, ads, and Reddit drafts"

Titles that don't work:

• "Show HN: StartKitz — the best AI marketing tool for app founders"
• "Show HN: I finally solved the app marketing problem with AI"
• "Show HN: StartKitz — launch your app 10× faster"

The working titles describe what the tool does. The non-working titles make claims about how good it is. HN readers evaluate claims by using the product — they don't respond to being told how good it is in a title.

The Post Body

The HN comment box allows you to add a text description when you post. Most founders either leave it blank or write a marketing paragraph. Both are wrong.

Write for the HN audience specifically: technical, skeptical, interested in how things are built, interested in the problem more than the solution.

Structure:

1. One sentence on the specific problem you experienced personally
2. Two sentences on what you built and how it works technically (briefly)
3. One honest sentence on what doesn't work yet or what you're uncertain about
4. A question that invites genuine feedback

Example:

"I kept delaying app launches because writing landing page copy, ads, and Reddit posts from scratch took days I didn't have. StartKitz reads your app URL, analyzes the product and positioning, and generates a full marketing kit — copy, ads, social posts, video scripts — in about a minute.

The URL analysis is imperfect when apps are behind auth or have sparse public content. I'm currently working on a manual input fallback for those cases.

Would love to hear from anyone who's launched an app recently — does the generated copy actually match your product well, or does it feel generic?"

That post works because: it's honest (admits a limitation), it's specific (one minute, specific outputs), and it ends with a genuine question rather than a CTA.

The Launch Timing

HN's traffic is highest Monday–Thursday 9am–11am US Eastern. Posts submitted in this window have the best chance of accumulating early upvotes before the front page rolls over.

Avoid Fridays, weekends, and holidays — lower traffic means fewer upvotes, and HN's algorithm is sensitive to early velocity. A post that gets 10 upvotes in the first hour gets exponentially more distribution than one that gets 3. Get the timing right first, then optimize the content.

Responding to Comments

This is where most founders fail. HN comments range from genuinely helpful feedback to technical challenges to borderline hostile skepticism.

The rule: respond to every comment within the first 2 hours. Short, direct, honest replies. Don't be defensive. Don't be promotional. Treat critical comments as design feedback, not attacks.

A founder who responds thoughtfully to 20 comments earns more credibility than one who posts a polished product and disappears. The community respects founders who engage — especially with criticism — and punishes those who don't.

What to Do After Your Show HN Post (The 48 Hours That Matter)

Most founders treat their Show HN post as a one-time event. The founders who extract the most value from it treat it as the beginning of a 48-hour sprint.

Hours 0–2: Full engagement mode
This is the most critical window. HN's algorithm gives early upvote velocity disproportionate weight in surface ranking. Every comment you respond to in this window has two effects: it generates notification activity for the commenter (which brings them back to upvote or continue the thread), and it signals to other readers that this is an active, engaged founder worth engaging with. Don't leave to do anything else during these two hours. Reply to every comment, even critical ones. Keep replies short — 2–4 sentences. The goal is dialogue, not debate.

Hours 2–12: Monitor and respond to late arrivals
HN threads stay active for 12–24 hours for front-page posts. Check every 2 hours and respond to any new comments. The thread can resurface in "new" and "ask" feeds throughout this period.

Hours 12–48: Capture leads from profile visitors
Founders whose posts get traction will see a spike in GitHub follows, Twitter/X profile visits, and direct DMs during this window. Make sure your profiles have a clear link to your product and a bio that converts the curious visitor. This is traffic you've earned — don't let it leak.

The HN Title Formula: More Examples

The title is where most Show HN posts succeed or fail. Here are real-style title structures across different product categories — all following the "describe, don't pitch" rule:

AI / developer tools:

• "Show HN: I built a tool that reads your app URL and writes your launch copy"
• "Show HN: Copilot for marketing — paste your URL, get ads, emails, and social posts"
• "Show HN: CLI tool for generating landing page copy from a package.json"

Productivity / B2B:

• "Show HN: Notion-like editor with auto-summarization of your notes"
• "Show HN: Slack bot that turns meeting transcripts into tracked action items"

What these all have in common: they start with a verb or describe an artifact; they say what the tool does in plain language; they avoid "best," "amazing," or any benefit claim; they're specific enough that a reader can immediately tell if it's relevant to them.

One more rule: Never put your startup name in the title alone. "Show HN: StartKitz" tells nobody anything. "Show HN: StartKitz — generate your app's full marketing kit from a URL" works because the description does the job.

HN Karma and Account Age: The Practical Requirements

Before you can post a Show HN, there are minimum account requirements that HN enforces but doesn't document clearly. Based on community observation:

• Account age: Your account should be at least 2–3 weeks old before attempting to post. Very new accounts with no comment history are shadow-banned or downranked automatically.
• Karma threshold: You need some existing karma to post links without being flagged. Accounts with fewer than 10–15 karma points are more likely to be filtered.

What this means practically: if you're planning a Show HN, create your account 3–4 weeks in advance. Spend that time leaving genuinely useful, specific comments on others' posts. This builds karma and establishes you as a real community member — not a founder who created an account to post their product. An account that's been commenting for a month with 50 karma before posting will almost always outperform one created 48 hours before the post.

When Your Show HN Doesn't Land: What to Do

Not every Show HN reaches the front page. Many good products get 5 upvotes and disappear into the "new" page. Here's how to handle that outcome productively:

Don't repost. HN explicitly forbids reposting the same URL multiple times. If your post didn't land, the answer is not to post it again — it's to understand why and use that insight to improve the product or launch strategy.

Read the comments you did get. Even a Show HN with 10 upvotes often has 3–5 comments that contain genuine product feedback from technically sophisticated readers. This feedback is disproportionately valuable compared to what you'd get from a typical user survey.

Wait at least 6 months before reposting. HN community norms allow reposting a significant product update, but only after enough time has passed that the product is substantively different. "Show HN: StartKitz v2 — rewrote the URL analyzer and added 8 output formats" is a legitimate repost if 6+ months have passed and the product has genuinely changed.

Use the traffic you did get. Even a small Show HN generates some traffic. Check your analytics during the 48 hours after posting. Where did visitors go? What did they click? How long did they stay? This behavioral data tells you what's working on your product and landing page even when the upvote count doesn't.