How to Launch on Hacker News Without Getting Buried: The Show HN Checklist
This checklist turns a Hacker News launch from an intimidating gamble into an executable process. It is written for early-stage founders, indie hackers, and SaaS creators launching a product for the first time, often solo or with a small team. The goal is simple: get your Show HN post seen, discussed, and upvoted instead of buried. No front-page result is ever guaranteed, but every item here controls something you can actually do. Work through the stages in order, respect the priority labels, and check off every done criteria before you hit submit.
How to Launch on Hacker News: Why This Checklist Works (and Who It's For)
Hacker News is one of the few places where a dense, technical, and candid audience will tell you what is wrong with your product within minutes of your post going live. That feedback loop is hard to find anywhere else, which is why it deserves an early spot in any founder's launch plan. This guide gives you a step-by-step checklist that materially improves the odds of your Show HN post gaining traction, from first post to first customers. It is built for startup founders, indie hackers, SaaS product creators, product managers, and mobile app founders launching for the first time. You are technical or product-focused, short on marketing muscle, and often launching solo. This is your playbook.
One honest note before you start: HN upvotes and comments follow substance, novelty, and community behavior. Neither this checklist nor any tool can guarantee traffic or customers. What a disciplined process can do is make sure you control every factor that is in your control, which turns out to be most of them. Every checklist item carries a priority label, a why, a how, and a clear done criteria, and the stages run in execution order, so nothing in Stage 2 or 3 works if you skip Stage 1.