Platforms
Hacker News
Blunt technical discourse, launches, and founder peer feedback.
Visit Hacker News- Monthly uniques (est.)
- 5–12M
- HN moderator comment (~5M) vs Similarweb (~12M/mo visits, 2025)
- Daily stories
- ~1,300
- Stable since ~2011 per HN team
- Daily comments
- ~13K
- HN moderator comment (2022 baseline)
Who uses Hacker News?
Startup founders, engineers, investors, and early adopters - heavily US-skewed, substance-over-hype culture run by Y Combinator.
Why it matters for customer discovery
- Show HN and Ask HN threads surface blunt positioning feedback you will not get on polished landing pages.
- Technical buyers discuss stacks, tradeoffs, and “what are you using for X” in public - useful for devtools and B2B SaaS.
- A single high-signal HN thread can shape category narrative for weeks; monitoring beats catching it days late.
Best for
- Launch and Show HN feedback
- Ask HN workflow and tooling questions
- Industry trend discussions
- Hiring and team-process threads
Weak for
- Deep library-specific debugging (often on Stack Overflow instead)
- Non-technical consumer personas
- Polished brand storytelling without substance
Example Needle searches
Plain-language queries you can run in Manual Search - Needle ranks results by sentiment and buying intent.
Show HN open source CRMLaunch threads with technical questions about architecture, pricing model, and differentiation from incumbents.
Ask HN alternatives to SegmentFounders listing analytics stacks and pain with cost or complexity - strong devtools signal.
frustrated with Heroku pricingMigration threads where teams describe what they moved to and why.
Etiquette & gotchas
- Substance beats hype; answer technical questions in Show HN comments for hours.
- Do not re-post the same launch weekly.
- Read the official HN guidelines before posting.
Go deeper: Hacker News playbook for founders