Launch on Show HN with a technical angle
A Show HN puts something people can try in front of Hacker News readers, who reward plain technical detail and punish marketing. Most posts get little attention: Daniel King's analysis of 188,085 Show HN posts found a median of 2 points. It fits developer and power-user tools that people can use without signing up; landing pages, waitlists and write-ups are off topic.
- Stage
- Stage 2. Users, no retention signalDo the first users get value, and do they come back?
- Category
- Launches
- Time
- 1 to 2 daysAwiser's estimate of the active work
- Cash
- No cash
- Live calls
- No live calls
- First result
- Within days
- Risk
- LowA post nobody notices costs a day; breaking the rules on votes or AI text can get it flagged.
- Needs
- Something people can try today, ideally without a signup or an emailA few hours in the thread on the day you post
When does it fit?
- People can try the product right away, without a signup wall: Hacker News asks for exactly that.[1]
- It is a developer or power-user tool: in Daniel King's dataset, AI and command-line tools converted slightly better.[5]
- You can tell a personal how and why, with technical detail, in plain words.[1][4]
- Other channels are ready to take over after the spike: Daniel King calls a Show HN a pulse, not a growth strategy.[5]
When should you skip it?
- You only have a landing page, a waitlist, a sign-up page or a write-up: Hacker News lists these as off topic.[1]
- Your buyers do not read Hacker News, as in sales to companies or governments: the visits arrive without buyers.[7]
- The project is a quick one-off: the rules ask for something non-trivial.[1]
- You cannot stay in the thread on posting day: the rules want the maker around to discuss.[1]
How do you run it?
Make it tryable without a wall
Link the product itself: a demo, a playground or a free tier that needs no signup or email. A landing page or a waitlist is not a Show HN.
Write the post yourself
Hacker News bans generated and AI-edited text, so write the title and the text by hand. Tell how you came to build it and what is different about it, with no marketing language.
Keep the title plain
Start with "Show HN:" and say what it is and who it is for. No uppercase, no exclamation points, no claim about how great it is.
Post from a personal account
Use your own username, not the company name, from an account that also takes part in other threads.
Pick the hour
Daniel King's data shows the highest mean scores between 7 and 10am US Eastern. It is a correlation, not a rule.
Stay in the thread
Answer technical questions yourself, the same day. Do not ask anyone to upvote or to post supportive comments.
Count tries first
Track visits and product tries from news.ycombinator.com, with signups as a second count, and read them after two days.
What usually happens?
- Most posts get little attention: Daniel King's analysis of 188,085 Show HN posts found a median of 2 points, and 50 points puts a post in the top 6%.[5]
- The competition is heavy: Daniel King counts about 200 other Show HN posts a day.[5]
- The effect is short: in Daniel King's data, 92% of GitHub star gains are over after 48 hours.[5]
- Posts that take off can bring real numbers: an arXiv study of 138 AI repositories posted to Hacker News found an average of 121 GitHub stars in 24 hours and 289 in a week.[6]
Who has done it, and what happened?
Each case is one team's own report: what happened to them, not a typical result.
Nick Kimel, founder of Onigiri2024, Positive result
Posted a plain, honest Show HN for a simple invoicing tool for freelancers, written in a few minutes, and replied in the thread.
Nick Kimel reports 4100 visits, 150+ new users and a 3.5% visit-to-registration rate.[8]
One self-reported launch, counting registrations, not paying users. Most Show HN posts get nowhere near this.
Jakub, founder of Aidlab2025, Mixed result
Posted a second Show HN for a research-grade wearable, with a personal story, code examples and a less product-like title. The first one, five years earlier, had been buried.
Jakub reports about 500 unique visitors from Hacker News and no direct conversions, just a lot of curiosity.[7]
Hardware sold to research teams and government programs, buyers who rarely sit on Hacker News.
Shota, a solo developer of browser extensions2026, Negative result
Posted one Show HN after another for months, one product at a time, without taking part in the comments.
Shota reports that all 21 posts scored 1 point and that the most recent was flagged.[9]
The author blames treating the account as a self-promotion channel; product quality and channel are not separated.
What does the evidence say against it?
How do you read the result?
- What to count
- Tries and signups from news.ycombinator.com
- When to read it
- Two days after posting
What goes wrong?
- Asking friends to upvote or comment breaks the rules, and readers flag it.[1][3]
- Text written or polished by an AI is banned on Hacker News, small edits included.[2][4]
- A title that sounds like a product pitch tends to sink: Aidlab's founder says their first Show HN was buried for that reason.[7]
- An account used mostly to post your own products reads as promotion.[2]
How was it graded?
- Evidence
- B. Moderate evidenceTwo datasets with stated methods set the base rate for attention, but they measure points and GitHub stars, not signups. Signup results rest on a few self-reported cases that point both ways.
- Verdict
- Strong when it fitsWorth a day for a developer or power-user tool people can try without signing up. Not a plan for a waitlist, a landing page or a product sold to buyers who do not read Hacker News.
Sources
- 1Show HN Guidelines (opens in a new tab)Hacker News. Undated. Platform rules.
Please make it easy for users to try your thing out, ideally without barriers such as signups or emails. You'll get more feedback that way.
Share something that is deeply personal and interesting to you. Explain how and why.
Off topic: blog posts, sign-up pages, newsletters, lists, and other reading material. Those can't be tried out, so can't be Show HNs.
Don't post landing pages or fundraisers.
The project should be non-trivial. Don't post quickly-generated one-offs; anybody can do that now.
The project must be something you've worked on personally and which you're around to discuss.
Please don't ask friends to upvote or comment. That's not ok on HN.
Read on October 20, 2026. - 2Hacker News Guidelines (opens in a new tab)Hacker News. Undated. Platform rules.
Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans.
Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.
Read on October 20, 2026. - 3Hacker News FAQ (opens in a new tab)Hacker News. Undated. Platform rules.
If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok.
It's also not in your interest: HN readers are sensitive to this and will detect it, flag it, and use unkind words like 'spam'.
Read on October 20, 2026. - 4Tips for presenting your work on HN (moderator comment, edited 2026-03-28) (opens in a new tab)Hacker News, dang. February 15, 2020. Platform rules.
Personal stories and technical details are great.
Write your text by hand. Don't use an LLM to generate any of it (not even a tiny bit, including to edit or spruce it up).
Read on October 20, 2026. - 5Show HN by the Numbers: 188,000 Posts, 14 Years of Data, and What Actually Predicts GitHub Stars (opens in a new tab)Daniel King's blog, Daniel King. April 23, 2026. Study.
AI/ML projects and CLI tools convert slightly better, perhaps because HN's audience skews toward power users who star tools they might actually use.
A Show HN launch is not a growth strategy. It's a pulse.
I scraped 188,085 Show HN posts and cross-referenced the top 500 with their GitHub star histories to find out.
The median Show HN scores 2 points. If you hit 50, you're in the top 6%.
Your post now competes with ~200 others per day.
After 48 hours, 92% of the star-getting is over.
Comments are an even weaker predictor (r = 0.10). A lively comment section on HN doesn't mean people are heading to your repo to star it.
Read on October 20, 2026. - 6Launch-Day Diffusion: Tracking Hacker News Impact on GitHub Stars for AI Tools (opens in a new tab)arXiv, Obada Kraishan. November 6, 2025. Study.
Built entirely on public APIs, our pipeline analyzes 138 repository launches from 2024-2025 and reveals substantial launch effects: repositories gain an average of 121 stars within 24 hours, 189 stars within 48 hours, and 289 stars within a week of HN exposure.
The Show HN tag provides no advantage after accounting for project maturity.
Read on October 20, 2026. - 7Front page of HN: the full postmortem (traffic, lessons, surprises) (opens in a new tab)Indie Hackers, Jakub. October 25, 2025. Founder report.
We're mostly B2B / B2G selling to research team, and government health programs.
our first Show HN failed because it sounded too "producty."
~500+ unique visitors directly from HN ... Sadly, no direct conversions, though, just a lot of curiosity.
Read on October 20, 2026. - 83 min post got me 4100 visits & 150 users (opens in a new tab)Indie Hackers, Nick Kimel. May 6, 2024. Founder report.
4100 visits ... 150+ new users ... 3.5% avg conversion rate to registration
Read on October 20, 2026. - 9$19.30 MRR after 16 extensions: what I learned from pausing HN (opens in a new tab)Indie Hackers, Shota. May 22, 2026. Founder report.
21 Show HN posts in. All 1 point. Most recent flagged.
Read on October 20, 2026.
Sources last checked on October 20, 2026. First published on October 20, 2026.
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