How do you monitor Hacker News around a launch?

What should you do before posting a Show HN?

Search past Hacker News threads about your category and your competitors, list the objections that keep coming up, and write a plain answer to each one.

HN commenters have usually discussed your category many times before you arrive. Those old threads show you the questions you will get, often word for word. An hour of reading saves you from improvising answers on the day.

• Step 1: search hn.algolia.com for your category terms and each competitor's name, set to all time and sorted by popularity.
• Step 2: open the five to ten biggest threads and read the top comments, where the strongest objections usually sit.
• Step 3: list what repeats. Common ones are pricing, licensing, self-hosting, data privacy, and 'why not just use X?'.
• Step 4: write a two or three sentence answer to each, with facts you can stand behind, and keep it open on launch day.
• Step 5: make sure people can try the product. Show HN is meant for things people can use, ideally without a signup in the way.

What should you watch on launch day?

Watch new comments on your own thread, mentions of your product in other threads, and any competitor who comes up in your comments.

Hacker News does not notify you when someone replies, so one person on the team needs to keep the thread open and refresh it. Split the day so it is always clear who is on duty. A second person can search hn.algolia.com by date for your product name every hour or two, since people sometimes mention a launch in other threads.

If a competitor's name shows up in your comments, note what the commenter compared. That comparison is what your buyers will ask about next.

How should you reply to comments on your launch?

Reply as the maker, in plain words, with specifics, and answer criticism head on.

HN readers respond well to a maker who explains how something works and admits what it does not do yet. Marketing phrasing in a reply tends to get called out in the next comment.

• Answer the question that was asked, with numbers or details where you have them.
• When someone says a competitor already does this, say plainly what is different, or agree when it is the same.
• When someone reports a bug, thank them, say whether you can reproduce it, and reply again when it is fixed.
• Do not ask friends, colleagues or customers to upvote or comment. HN's guidelines discourage solicited votes.
• Skip arguments about tone. Answer the substance once and move on.

What should you do in the week after a launch?

Collect every objection and question into one list, fix or answer the most common ones, and post again only when you have something new to show.

Copy each substantive comment into a sheet with a tag such as pricing, missing feature, trust or comparison. Count the tags. The top two or three are what your homepage, docs or comparison pages need to answer, because the next visitor will have the same doubt.

Keep replying to late comments for a few days. For a follow-up post, a technical write-up of a problem you solved while building the product often suits HN better than a second announcement.

How does MarketHQ help around a Hacker News launch?

MarketHQ checks Hacker News stories and comments for your brand and competitor names on every plan, so mentions outside your launch thread do not slip past.

Every MarketHQ plan, from Lite at $29 a month, checks Hacker News four times a day, alongside GitHub, Stack Overflow, Dev.to, Lobsters, blogs and RSS feeds you add, and keeps the last 30 days in one feed. That is the right speed for the week after a launch. On launch day itself, keep your own thread open and refresh it by hand; no checker replaces that.

A daily Slack digest of top reply opportunities is available on any plan. Every plan also adds Reddit, X, LinkedIn, YouTube and Bluesky, labels each mention positive, negative or neutral, and drafts replies for you to review and post yourself. MarketHQ never posts for you.

What does a Show HN launch look like hour by hour?

Illustrative example: prepared answers cover most early questions, one bug report gets fixed the same day, and the objection list shapes the pricing page.

Illustrative example: a two-person team launches an open source backup tool. Before posting, they read eight old threads about backup tools and prepare answers on encryption, restore speed and why not just use rsync. In the first three hours the founder replies to every comment; four of the first ten questions match a prepared answer. A commenter reports a failed restore on one file system, and the team posts a fix that afternoon and says so in the thread. Two days later MarketHQ picks up a comment in an unrelated thread recommending the tool. That week's objection sheet shows pricing for teams as the top question, so they add a short FAQ to the pricing page.

What can launch monitoring not do for you?

It cannot get your post onto the front page, and checks a few times a day are too slow to run a live thread.

Whether a Show HN gets traction depends on the product, the title, the timing and luck. Monitoring makes sure you answer the people who do show up. For your own thread on the day, refreshing it yourself is the only reliable method, and MarketHQ's role is catching what happens elsewhere on HN before and after.