How to launch on Hacker News: a Show HN guide built on 11,660 posts

The short answer

Hacker News works best for developer tools, open source projects and anything technical with a working demo. If your product is a waitlist, a newsletter or a sales page, it is not a Show HN yet.

What happens to most Show HN posts

Before the advice, the honest numbers. Between 3 August and 1 November 2026, 11,660 stories with “Show HN” at the start of the title were posted, about 130 a day. We pulled all of them from the public Hacker News search API and looked at where they ended up a week or more later.

Typical comments is the median. 65% of all Show HN posts got no comments at all. Points and comments counted on 8 November 2026.

The median Show HN gets 2 points. Only about one in thirteen reaches 10, and one in seventy reaches 100. So most of what follows is about getting out of that first row, and the most common reasons posts stay there are ones you control: the product cannot be tried, the title says nothing, the text reads like an ad, or nobody is around to answer.

A post with 10 or more points had a median of 12 comments. Comments are what you are really after: they are where you learn what people think of the product, in detail, from people who just tried it.

Is your product a Show HN?

The Show HN guidelines open with one sentence that decides most of it: “Show HN is for something you’ve made that other people can play with.” In practice:

Three more rules from the guidelines catch people out:

• It must be non-trivial. The guidelines now say: “Don’t post quickly-generated one-offs; anybody can do that now.” A weekend wrapper around an API is not what Show HN is for. Something you have thought hard about, with an interesting reason behind it, is.
• You must have made it, and be around. The project has to be something you worked on personally and are there to discuss. Posting a friend’s product for them does not count.
• Make it easy to try. The guidelines ask for it “ideally without barriers such as signups or emails”. A demo account, a sandbox or a no-login playground gets you far more feedback than a sign-up form.

It does not have to be polished. The guidelines say the community “is comfortable with work that’s at an early stage.” A rough product that works beats a slick one people cannot get into.

The rule most guides miss: write it yourself

The Hacker News guidelines now say “Please don’t put generated text in HN posts. Write your text yourself”, and for comments, “Don’t post generated text or AI-edited text.” They also ask you not to automate posting.

In March 2026 the moderators added the same point to their tips for Show HN posts, more bluntly: don’t use an LLM to generate any of it, “not even a tiny bit, including to edit or spruce it up.” Their reason is that readers recognise the patterns AI leaves in text and react badly to them. They also make clear they have nothing against building with AI. The rule is about the words you post.

Our numbers point the same way. 31% of Show HN titles in our sample mentioned AI, LLMs, agents or similar. Those posts reached 50 points 1.9% of the time, against 3.1% for the rest. That does not prove the word “AI” hurts a post, but there is no sign it helps.

Get ready before you post

Most of the work happens before you press submit. Give yourself a few days for this list.

1. Use a personal account. The moderators advise against a username that is your company or product name, because it looks like a brand promoting itself. Any name that shows you are a person will do.
2. Put your email in your profile. The moderators say they use it to contact posters, and sometimes to send a repost invite to a post that deserved more attention.
3. Spend some time as a reader first. If the account has never commented, read for a week or two and join a few threads you actually care about. You will learn the tone, and your launch will not be the only thing on your profile.
4. Remove the barriers. A no-login demo, a sample project already loaded, a one-line install. Whatever lets a visitor see the product working within a minute.
5. Fix your landing page’s first sentence. Hacker News readers click through and decide within seconds. The page should say plainly what the product does, with no slogan to decode. Our guide to writing a launch listing covers how to put that in one line.
6. Make sure it holds up. A post that takes off can bring a lot of visitors at once. Check that the sign-up, the demo and any free tier will survive a few thousand people in an hour.
7. Clear your calendar. Plan to be at your desk for at least the first three or four hours after posting, and to check back that evening and the next day.

Write a plain title

Your title has to start with “Show HN”. The usual shape is the product’s name and one plain line about what it does:

Show HN: [Name] – [what it does, in plain words]

The general Hacker News rules for titles apply too: no capitals or exclamation marks for emphasis, and nothing that says how great it is. In our sample, shorter titles did better. Show HN titles under 50 characters reached 10 points 9.2% of the time, against 7.4% for titles of 70 characters or more. The typical title was 67 characters long.

The products in this table are made up, to show the pattern.

Specific beats impressive. “Open source” and “self-hosted” are facts readers care about, and in our sample, Show HN titles that said so reached 10 points 10.3% of the time, against 7.6% for the rest. Say them if they are true. Do not add them if they are not.

Write the text that goes with it

Submit the link to your product in the URL field and write a few short paragraphs in the text field. According to the moderators’ tips, the text shows at the top of the thread; if it does not appear, post it as the first comment instead. Their tips ask for four things: a clear statement of what the project is, the backstory of why you built it, what is different about it, and links to any earlier Hacker News threads about it.

I built [name] because [the problem you had, in one or two sentences, with a real detail].

It [what it does, plainly]. Unlike [what people use today], it [the one real difference], because [how it works underneath].

You can try it here without signing up: [link to the demo]. [If open source:] The code is at [repo link].

It's early. [What doesn't work yet or what you're unsure about.] I'd love to hear [the specific feedback you want].

A few things make this text work on Hacker News:

• Technical detail is welcome. How it works, what you tried first, the stack, the hard part. Readers ask about this anyway, so get ahead of it.
• Drop every marketing word. The moderators call marketing language “an instant turnoff” there. No “seamless”, “powerful” or “game-changing”.
• Say what is not finished. Admitting the rough edges up front takes the sting out of the comments that would have pointed them out.
• Mention the price if there is one. If it is paid, say so and say what is free. Readers find out anyway, and feel misled if you hid it.

When to post

Every guide has a favorite hour. Our sample says timing matters less than people think, and the day of the week hardly at all. The share of Show HN posts reaching 10 points ranged only from 7.2% (Wednesday) to 8.9% (Monday), and weekends did as well as weekdays. The hour did make a difference:

Show HN posts from 3 August to 1 November 2026, by the hour they were posted in US Pacific daylight time (UTC−7).

The clearest result is what to avoid: posts made late at night in the US did about half as well as posts made in the morning. Between 6 a.m. and noon Pacific (9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Eastern, afternoon and evening in Europe) is the busiest time, and it still did well. The late afternoon did best, but on far fewer posts, so treat it as a good second choice rather than a secret.

In practice: post when you can be there for the next four hours, inside that window. A post you can babysit at 9 a.m. is worth more than a perfectly timed one you leave alone.

The first hours in the thread

Once it is up, your job is the comments. The thread is the launch. A reply from the maker under every comment shows readers that a person is there and listening, and it is where you learn the most.

• Answer every question, plainly. Short, factual, specific. If you do not know, say so.
• Thank criticism and engage with it. Hacker News feedback is blunt. “Good point, here is why I made that trade-off” or “You’re right, fixing it today” wins people over. Arguing does not.
• Fix things live, and say so. If someone finds a bug and you ship a fix within the hour, reply to tell them. Few things read better in a thread.
• Don’t ask for upvotes, anywhere. The FAQ says Hacker News penalizes or bans “submissions, accounts, and sites” that do this. That includes a tweet, a newsletter, a Slack group or a launch-day chat asking people to go and vote.
• Keep friends out of the comments. The moderators warn that readers spot booster comments and treat them as spam. You can share the link with people who would find it interesting; just don’t tell them what to do with it.

Replies you can adapt

Use these as a shape, then write your own words. Copying a template word for word is exactly what readers notice.

[To a feature request] That's a good idea. I hadn't thought about [their use case]. Right now you can [workaround], but I've added it to the list.

[To criticism] Fair point. I went with [choice] because [reason], but I can see why it gets in the way for [their case]. What would you expect instead?

[To a bug report] Thanks for catching that. Fixed now: [what you changed]. Does it work for you?

If the post sinks

Most do, as the numbers above show, often for reasons that have nothing to do with the product: a busy hour, a crowded page, nobody who cared happening to look. Here is what the rules allow.

• Don’t delete it and post it again. Both the guidelines and the FAQ say so. Deleting is for things that should never have been submitted.
• A small number of reposts is fine. The FAQ says that if a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is OK. Wait a while, improve the title and text, and try again.
• Bigger changes can be a new Show HN. A new version counts only if it is significantly different. The moderators suggest this should happen once or twice a year at most, with a comment linking to the previous Show HN and saying what changed.
• Keep your email in your profile. That is how the moderators reach you if they decide to invite a repost.

Meanwhile, Hacker News is only one place to launch. Our guide to Product Hunt alternatives covers the others, and planning a launch week shows how to spread several of them over one week, so no single post has to carry the launch.

Turn the thread into users

Whether you got 8 points or 800, the thread is now a list of real reactions from technical people. Use it in the week after:

1. Copy every request and complaint into one list. One line each, with a link to the comment. It is better research than most surveys.
2. Reply when you ship something people asked for. Comment in the thread while it is still open (threads close to new comments after two weeks) to say it is live.
3. Write to the people who signed up. Most visitors from a launch never come back on their own. A short personal note from the founder often changes that.
4. Check where they came from. In your analytics, look at visitors with news.ycombinator.com as the referrer, and at what they did after landing.

Our 30-day plan for after launch day goes through this month step by step, with messages you can copy.

The checklist

Questions founders ask