Finding Customers on Hacker News: The Underrated Channel

Most founders overlook Hacker News as a lead generation channel. That's a mistake. HN is where technical co-founders, CTOs, and engineering leads — people with real budgets and real problems — ask questions in public.

The most valuable HN thread types

Ask HN: Direct questions from the community. "Ask HN: What are you using for X?" threads are pure gold — people list their current solutions and frustrations in one place.

Show HN: Founders launch products here. Comments often reveal what alternatives people considered and why they might switch.

Regular threads: Pain points, competitor complaints, and tool comparisons show up in comment threads on otherwise unrelated posts.

What makes HN different from Reddit

The HN audience skews technical and senior. If your product has a developer angle, a DevOps use case, or a "we replaced legacy enterprise X with Y" story, HN will convert better than almost any other organic channel.

The culture is similar to Reddit — no spam, no fluff. But direct, technical responses are respected.

The volume problem

HN moves fast. New posts and comment threads appear constantly, and the valuable signals are scattered across hundreds of threads per day. Finding them manually is a full-time job.

Brew Me A Coffee monitors HN alongside Reddit and GitHub Discussions, scores each signal with AI, and surfaces only the ones worth your time.