Show HN

What Is Show HN?

Show HN is a submission type on Hacker News (news.ycombinator.com) reserved for things people have made: apps, tools, libraries, hardware projects, side projects, and the occasional oddball experiment. Instead of submitting a news article, you submit your own work with a title prefixed "Show HN:" and a link (or a text post if there's no live URL yet). It sits in its own queue and, if it gets traction, its own section on the homepage.

It's one of the few places on the internet where a solo founder can get direct, technically literate feedback from thousands of engineers, hours after shipping, for free.

Why It Matters for Founders

Hacker News has an outsized audience relative to its size: engineers, technical founders, VCs, and early adopters who are unusually willing to try new tools. A well-received Show HN post can generate:

• Thousands of visitors in a single day
• Direct, unfiltered feedback on your product, pricing, or positioning
• Backlinks and press pickup (journalists and newsletter writers monitor HN)
• Your first cohort of technical users, which matters a lot for dev tools, infra, and B2B SaaS

Unlike paid channels, Show HN costs nothing but reputation. That's also the risk: a bad reception (or, worse, silence) is public and permanent in the comments thread.

How It Works

1. Submit: Go to the Show HN submission page, title it "Show HN: [What it does]", and link to a live demo, GitHub repo, or working product. Text-only submissions are allowed but get less traction than something people can actually click and try.
2. Ranking: Show HN posts are ranked by upvotes and comment velocity, similar to regular HN stories, but they live in their own listing at news.ycombinator.com/show and can surface on the main homepage if they gain momentum.
3. The first 60 minutes matter most: HN's ranking algorithm weights early engagement heavily. If a post gets a handful of upvotes and thoughtful comments early, it's more likely to be promoted. If it sits flat, it quietly disappears.
4. You have to participate: The founder is expected to be in the comments, answering questions, defending decisions, and taking criticism (some of it blunt) without getting defensive.

What a Good Show HN Post Looks Like

Title: Specific and honest. "Show HN: I built a Postgres backup tool that runs in a single binary" beats "Show HN: Check out my startup."

Link: A live demo or working product, not a landing page with a waitlist. HN's audience is famously allergic to "coming soon."

First comment: Many successful Show HN posters immediately add a top-level comment explaining the backstory: why they built it, what stack they used, what's still rough. This does double duty: it seeds the discussion and signals the founder is present.

Example structure of that first comment:

Hey HN, I built this after getting frustrated with [specific problem]. It's a single Go binary, no dependencies, MIT licensed. Known limitations: no Windows support yet, and backups over 50GB are untested. Would love feedback on the CLI design especially.

Benchmarks: What Counts as a Win

There's no official metric, but rough reference points from the community:

• Under 5 upvotes: Normal outcome for most Show HN posts. Not a failure, just low visibility that day.
• 20 to 50 upvotes: Solid showing, usually a few hundred to low thousands of visits.
• 100+ upvotes: Front-page territory, can bring 10,000+ visitors and lasting SEO backlinks.
• 300+ upvotes: Rare, viral-for-HN territory, often picked up by tech newsletters within 24 hours.

Comment count and quality often matter more than the upvote number for actual product feedback and conversions.

Common Mistakes

• Launching a waitlist instead of a product. HN wants something they can use right now.
• Overselling in the title. Words like "revolutionary" or excessive marketing language get flagged or downvoted fast.
• Disappearing after posting. If the founder doesn't answer questions in the first hour, momentum dies.
• Posting at the wrong time. Weekday mornings in US Eastern time tend to get more traffic than weekends or late nights.
• Re-submitting too often. HN's guidelines allow reposting if a prior submission didn't get traction, but spamming the same project repeatedly annoys moderators and users alike.

Show HN vs. Product Hunt

Show HN skews technical and blunt; Product Hunt skews visual and hype-friendly. Many founders run both as part of a coordinated launch plan through tools like welaunch.sh, using Show HN to reach engineers and technical early adopters, and Product Hunt to reach a broader consumer and indie-maker audience. They rarely cannibalize each other since the audiences barely overlap.