How to post a Show HN on Hacker News

Your SaaS is for developers, and people keep telling you to post a Show HN on Hacker News. In 2026 most Show HNs get 2 points or fewer and no comments, and many new accounts cannot post one at all. Here is how to post a Show HN on Hacker News that people try and talk about: two weeks of taking part first, a post you write by hand, a morning of replies, and a follow-up with every person who signs up.

Do these three things

About 1.5 hours a day for 2 weeks, then 6 hours on the day. 2 in 3 Show HNs get no comments, so judge yours 2 weeks later, by the users it brought.

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1. 1Today: check a stranger can use your SaaS in under a minute with no signup, set your Hacker News username to your own name, and put your email in your profile.
2. 2Every day for at least 2 weeks before you post: write 20 useful comments in your own words across Hacker News and 4 places where developers ask for help, at least 5 of them on Hacker News, and submit 1 good article someone else wrote.
3. 3On the day you post: submit "Show HN: [name] – [what it does]" between 6 am and noon Pacific with a first comment you wrote by hand. Reply to every comment within an hour for 6 hours, never ask anyone to upvote, and email every new signup within 24 hours with a set-up offer.

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1. Check your SaaS is ready for a Show HN

Post a Show HN only when developers are among your buyers and a stranger can use the main feature of your SaaS in under a minute, with no signup and no email. Test that with 3 people before you do anything else.

Show HN is for something you made that other people can try for themselves, today. The rules are short, so read them once: news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html. Then check four things.

• Developers use it. Hacker News readers are mostly people who build software. If your buyers are not, launch on Product Hunt instead. If only some of them are developers, you can do both, on different days.
• A stranger can try it in a minute, with no account. The rules ask for this: "ideally without barriers such as signups or emails". If your main feature needs an account, build a demo page with sample data, or turn one job your product does into a free tool, as in how to market your product as a technical founder. Point your Show HN at that page.
• It works today. The rules say blog posts, signup pages, newsletters and "landing pages or fundraisers" are not Show HNs. A waitlist is not either: in July 2026 a moderator wrote, "Waitlists are against the Show HN rules." If people cannot use it yet, build your waitlist elsewhere and post when it works.
• It is more than a weekend project. The rules now say: "Don't post quickly-generated one-offs; anybody can do that now." Since about December 2025, coding agents have filled Show HN with small projects built in a day. Yours needs a real problem it solves, one you have heard about in customer interviews, and a story of how you solved it.

Also check two smaller things. Put your price on the page in plain words, because how you price your SaaS is one of the first questions people ask. And make the page fast: check your site's speed, because a slow page gets a comment instead of a try. It helps to have about 20 users first. You then know who it is for, and you can answer every question in the thread.

• Tool: your site. No paid tool needed.
• Time: 20 minutes to check. Half a day to a day to build a demo page, if you do not have one.
• You will have: one link a stranger can open and use at once.
• It worked if: you send the link to 3 developers who have never seen your product, and all 3 use the main feature within a minute without making an account.
• Common mistake: posting your homepage, where the first button is "Sign up". Most readers leave, and some flag the post as an ad. The other mistake is posting before it works. The rules say, "If your work isn't ready for users to try out, please don't do a Show HN."

2. Build your Hacker News account with 20 comments a day

Before you post, spend at least 2 weeks taking part in Hacker News. Every day, write 20 useful comments across Hacker News and 4 other places where developers talk, at least 5 of them on Hacker News, and submit 1 good article someone else wrote.

This is the step most founders skip, and in 2026 it decides whether you can post at all. In March 2026 Hacker News started restricting Show HNs from accounts without much history. If yours is one, you press submit and see: "We're temporarily restricting Show HNs because of a massive influx, mostly by users who aren't yet familiar with the site or its culture." The notice asks you to "get to know the community, become a good contributor". Hacker News does not publish how much history is enough. Founders asked in May, July and August 2026 and got no number.

It matters after you post, too. Readers flag Show HNs from accounts that have only ever posted about their own product. In September 2026 a Show HN reached 16 points in under an hour and was then flagged. The replies explained why: "a new account and your only posts and comments are about promoting your project." Hacker News's guidelines say it plainly: "Please don't use HN primarily for promotion."

Set up your profile. Make an account if you do not have one. Use a username that is a person, not your company: the moderators' own tips say a company name "creates a feeling of using HN for promotion". Put your email in your profile, so the moderators can send you an invite to post again if they like your work. Add one line in "about": who you are and what you build.

Write 20 comments a day, across 5 places. Pick Hacker News and 4 other places where developers ask for help: a subreddit, a Discord or Slack group, a forum. Read each place's rules on self-promotion first. Write at least 5 of the 20 on Hacker News, on threads where you know something: your language, your stack, a problem you have fixed. Add a fact, a number from your own work, or a question. Do not mention your product. This is the same habit as building a community: you give first. Spreading the 20 over 5 places keeps you inside each place's rules.

Submit 1 article a day. On Hacker News, submit one article you found interesting, written by someone else. A moderator gave this advice in August 2026: become "a good community member who submits interesting articles from different sources about a variety of topics".

Write every word yourself. Since March 2026 the guidelines say: "Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans." Readers spot it, and a moderator said in April 2026 that a new filter kills posts that look machine-written. ChatGPT or Claude can help you find threads you know about. Type every comment yourself. Keep this up alongside your daily outreach: it is a different job, and it does not replace it.

• Tool: a free Hacker News account, and the search box on each site.
• Time: about 1.5 hours a day: 20 comments at about 4 minutes each, and 5 minutes to submit an article.
• You will have: after 2 weeks, 280 comments, at least 70 of them on Hacker News, and 14 articles submitted.
• It worked if: people reply to your comments and your karma (the points next to your name) goes up. When you submit your Show HN in step 4, you do not see the restriction notice. If you do, keep going for 2 more weeks and try again.
• Common mistake: making a new account on the day, or a second account when the first is restricted. The other mistake is a comment that ends with "I built a tool for this". Readers flag it, and your later Show HN pays for it.

3. Write your Show HN title and first comment by hand

Write a title that says what your SaaS does in plain words, under 80 characters, starting with "Show HN:". Then write 150 to 300 words on what it is, why you built it and what was hard. Write both by hand, with no AI.

The title. Use "Show HN: [name] – [what it does, in plain words]". Say what a reader gets when they click, the same way your homepage headline should. The guidelines ask you not to make titles stand out with capital letters, exclamation marks or praise, so leave out "best", "revolutionary" and "AI-powered". Keep it under 80 characters, because Hacker News cuts titles at 80. If it is open source, or has a free plan or free trial, say so: those are facts readers care about.

The link. Put the page people can try in the URL field: your demo page or free tool from step 1, not your homepage or a landing page. Tag it with UTM parameters, so you can count visits from the post.

The text. Put it in the text box when you submit. The moderators' tips say it shows at the top of a Show HN; if it does not, post it as the first comment. Cover these parts, in this order:

• What it is, in one sentence. Without it, the moderators warn, "the discussion will consist of 'I can't tell what this is'."
• Who you are, in one line.
• Why you built it: the moment the problem hurt you or your users. This is your value proposition, told as a story.
• What was hard, and how it works. Technical detail is welcome. A moderator wrote in March 2026 that code generation has "eaten everything that used to be interesting" about most Show HNs, so what you tried, what failed and what you learned now matters most.
• What is different from the tool people will name. Do a short competitor check so you know the answer.
• What is free and what it costs, in numbers.
• The feedback you want, as one question. Ask it the way you would ask your first users for feedback: about what they did, not what they think.
• Links to earlier Hacker News threads about it, if there are any.

Leave out every word that sounds like marketing. The tips say it is "an instant turnoff" there. And write it all yourself. In March 2026 the moderators added to their tips: "Don't use an LLM to generate any of it (not even a tiny bit, including to edit or spruce it up)." A slightly clumsy sentence in your own voice does better than a smooth one from an AI.

Show HN: [Name] – [what it does, in plain words]Hi HN, I'm [first name]. I build [product] with [co-founder, if any].[Product] [what it does, in one sentence].I built it because [the moment the problem hurt you or your users, in 2 or 3 sentences].The hard part was [the technical problem]. We tried [what did not work]. What worked was [what you did, with one real detail].It's different from [the tool people will name] because [the one real difference].You can try it here without signing up: [link]. [What is free.] [The price, if there is one.]I'd like to know: [one specific question, such as "what would stop you using this on a real project?"]. I'll be here all day to answer.

• Tool: a plain text editor. No AI for the words.
• Time: 1 to 2 hours.
• You will have: a title under 80 characters and a text of 150 to 300 words.
• It worked if: you show the title and text to 2 developers who have never seen your product, and both can say what it does and how it differs from what they use now. No sentence sounds like an ad.
• Common mistake: a title about the technology ("infrastructure", "platform", "AI-powered") instead of what the reader gets. The other mistake is asking an AI to "clean it up". Readers notice, and a post flagged for AI text rarely comes back.

4. Post your Show HN between 6 am and noon Pacific and reply to every comment

Submit your Show HN between 6 am and noon Pacific time, on a day you can stay for the next 6 hours. Reply to every comment within an hour, in your own words, and do not ask anyone to upvote or comment.

We counted every post starting "Show HN" from 31 August to 27 September 2026: 3,433 posts, about 120 a day. Half got 2 points or fewer. 2 in 3 got no comments at all. About 1 in 12 reached 10 points. The time of day mattered more than the day of the week: posts made between 6 am and 6 pm Pacific reached 10 points about twice as often as posts made at night. The day barely mattered: between about 7% and 8.5% reached 10 points on every day of the week. So pick the day you can give 6 hours in a row, and post between 6 am and noon Pacific. Check what time that is where you live.

Post it. Click "submit" at the top of Hacker News. Paste your title, your link and your text from step 3. Then log out, or open a private window, and look for your post on the "shownew" page. Every Show HN appears there first; it moves to the "show" page after "a small points threshold". If you cannot see it, turn on "showdead" in your profile: "[dead]" means software, readers or moderators have hidden it.

Tell nobody. Do not send the link to friends, users, your team or your email list on the day, and do not announce it on social media asking for support. The rules say "Please don't ask friends to upvote or comment", and the FAQ says Hacker News will "penalize or ban submissions, accounts, and sites that break this rule". Asking for comments is banned for the same reason: readers "will detect it, flag it". Keeping the link to yourself on the day is our rule, to stay well inside theirs. Your friends and users must not write "booster comments" either.

Reply to every comment within an hour, for 6 hours. Answer the question that was asked. When someone finds a bug, fix it if you can, then say so in the thread. When someone criticises it, thank them, agree with what is true, and say what you will change or why you won't. Never argue, and never paste an AI reply. The comment rules ask readers to be kind to people sharing work, and most are. The ones who are blunt often teach you the most. Each comment is feedback from a user: write every point down, because the same questions will come up in your product demos.

Then check the thread twice a day for 2 weeks. Threads close to new comments after two weeks.

• Tool: Hacker News.
• Time: 6 hours on the day, then 15 minutes twice a day for 2 weeks.
• You will have: a live Show HN with every comment answered, and a list of every bug and question.
• It worked if: your post shows on "shownew" when you are logged out, and no comment waited more than an hour for your reply.
• Common mistake: asking anyone to upvote, or posting "we're on Hacker News, please support us" in a team chat or on X. The other mistake is deleting a slow post and posting it again. The guidelines say, "Please don't delete and repost."

5. Email every new signup and count the users your Show HN brought

Within 24 hours, email every person who signed up after your Show HN, from your own address, with an offer to set it up with them. Two weeks later, count how many became users, and judge the post by that, not by its points.

A Show HN brings a burst of visits for a day or two, then it drops. In a front-page Show HN in October 2025, a company counted about 6,000 page views and 500+ unique visitors from Hacker News, 4 enquiries and no paid customers. The follow-up is what turns a visit into a user.

Email every new signup within 24 hours. One short, personal email each, with the 15-minute set-up offer: you set it up with them on a call, so they see the first result before the call ends. That is how a free trial becomes a user who does the main thing, and later a paying customer. Keep your automatic onboarding emails too; this one comes from a person.

Reply to commenters in the thread, not by email. Hacker News has no private messages. If a commenter asked for something, such as access or an invite, and their profile shows an email, write to them once. Do not email everyone whose address you can find in a profile: people who post a Show HN already complain about spam emails after posting, and yours would look the same.

Count what came from it. Check your conversion tracking records signups, then add "Hacker News" as an answer to "Where did you hear about us?" on your signup form. That is self-reported attribution, and it catches people your analytics miss. In your sheet, fill in one row for the Show HN: visits, signups, users who did the main thing, and set-up calls booked. That is how you track which channel brought each customer. Ask anyone who liked it for one sentence you can quote: your first testimonial.

Keep the daily work going. The comments from step 2 and the 100 personal messages a day keep bringing people after the post has gone quiet. Two weeks after you post, compare the cost of each user: the users the Show HN brought per hour of work with the users your messages brought per hour. Give next month's hours to whichever brought more, in your monthly review, and use the numbers when you choose your next channel. If Hacker News sent visits but few signed up, fix the page they landed on.

Subject: your [product] signupHi [first name],Thanks for trying [product] after the Show HN yesterday.If you'd like, I'll set it up with you on a 15-minute call, so you have [the result] working today: [booking link]Or just reply with what you were hoping it would do. I read every reply.[Your name]

• Tool: your email, your analytics, and a Google Sheet.
• Time: about 2 hours the day after you post, then 20 minutes every Sunday.
• You will have: a personal email sent to every new signup, and one Show HN row with users counted.
• It worked if: every new signup got an email within 24 hours, at least 3 set-up calls are booked that week, and you can say how many users came from the post.
• Common mistake: judging the Show HN by its points or its rank. The other mistake is stopping the daily comments and messages once the post is up, so the one-day burst is all you get.

6. Repost once, or wait for a big change, if your Show HN got no attention

Look at your post 24 hours after you submit it. If it got under 10 points and under 3 comments, you may post it once more, at least a week later, with a clearer title and text. If it got real attention, do not repost: wait until you have a big change to show.

The FAQ says: "If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok." It also says: "Please don't delete and repost the same story." Our rule turns that into numbers:

• Under 10 points and under 3 comments after 24 hours: post it once more, at least a week later. First fix what held it back: a title that did not say what it does, a text that sounded like an ad, or a page that needed an account. If you want people to test the change before you post again, find a few beta users. About 120 Show HNs are posted a day, so a good one can sink because few people saw it in its first hours. A second try is fair. If you are not sure the change is enough, work out why the launch got no signups first.
• 10 points or more, or a real discussion: do not repost. Turn what you learned into posts you can reuse instead. Your next Show HN comes when you have a big change. The moderators' tips say a new version counts only if it is "significantly different", and that reposting "should probably only happen once or twice a year". Link the old thread in your new text.
• Flagged or [dead]: read every comment on it, and fix the cause, which is usually a new account, text that reads like an ad or like AI, or a page people cannot try without signing up. Then email hn@ycombinator.com once, politely, and ask what to change. Do not make a new account.

Leave your email in your profile. The moderators run a "second-chance pool": they look through posts that got little attention and put good ones back on the front page, or email the poster an invite to post again. They were still doing it in August 2026.

A Show HN is one day. Do not count directory listings as a second launch either; they mostly bring links, not users. What brings users every week is the daily work in how to market a SaaS product.

• Tool: Hacker News and your email.
• Time: 30 minutes to decide and write down the date.
• You will have: a date and a change for one repost, or the date and change for your next Show HN.
• It worked if: no Show HN of yours has been posted more than twice, and your repost (if any) has a new title or text that says what it does in the first line.
• Common mistake: posting the same thing three times. In September 2026 a Show HN was flagged, and the replies said why: "it was the third time you submitted the same thing". The other mistake is posting every small update as a new Show HN. The rules say upgrades like "Foo 1.3.1 is out" generally are not enough.

Your Show HN checklist

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Step 1 · Check your SaaS is ready for a Show HN

• Check developers are among your buyers, and that a stranger can use the main feature in under a minute with no signup.

Step 2 · Build your Hacker News account

• Set your Hacker News username to your own name, and add your email and one line about you to your profile.
• Every dayWrite 20 useful comments across Hacker News and 4 places where developers ask for help.
• Every daySubmit 1 good article someone else wrote to Hacker News.

Step 3 · Write your title and first comment by hand

• Write your Show HN title and text by hand, using the template.
• Show the title and text to 2 developers and fix anything they could not follow.

Step 4 · Post your Show HN and reply to every comment

• Submit your Show HN between 6 am and noon Pacific and check it shows on shownew while logged out.
• Reply to every comment within an hour for 6 hours, in your own words, and ask nobody to upvote.

Step 5 · Email every new signup and count users

• Email every new signup within 24 hours with your set-up offer.
• Every SundayFill in the Show HN row, and 2 weeks after posting, move your hours to what brought the most users.

Step 6 · Repost once or wait for a big change

• 24 hours after posting, decide by the rule: repost once a week later, or wait for a big change.

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