🔍LeadSleuth Try free

How to find customers on Hacker News (without getting flagged)

Hacker News readers are engineers, CTOs, and founders — people who choose and buy tools. But HN is also one of the most self-policing communities on the internet: obvious marketing gets flagged, downvoted, and remembered. Here's how to find real customers there while staying within community norms.

Where the buying signals live

1. Ask HN threads. "Ask HN: What do you use for error tracking?" is a purchase committee meeting happening in public. Search Ask HN [your category] on hn.algolia.com and sort by date.

2. Comment threads under competitor launches. When a competitor posts Show HN or gets covered, the comments fill with people describing what they actually need — including gaps the competitor doesn't cover.

3. Complaint threads. Pricing-change and acquisition announcements generate "time to migrate" comments. These are the warmest switching signals you'll find anywhere.

4. "Who is hiring" / "Freelancer" threads. A company hiring for a role your product replaces or augments is a signal.

5. Show HN posts from your ICP. A founder launching in your target segment just became a prospect for every tool a new company needs.

The HN Algolia search cheat sheet

  • https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22alternative+to+X%22&dateRange=pastMonth — recent alternative-seekers
  • Search comments (not just stories) — most intent lives in comments
  • Sort by date, not popularity; a 3-day-old comment with 2 points beats a famous thread from 2019

Outreach rules that keep you welcome

  1. Reply in-thread while the thread is alive (first 48h). A helpful, specific answer with disclosed affiliation ("I work on X, so biased, but...") is accepted and often upvoted.
  2. Never mass-reply. One thoughtful reply per relevant thread.
  3. If the thread is dead, go off-platform. Many HN users list emails or personal sites in their profile. Reference the exact comment: "Saw your comment on the Datadog pricing thread..."
  4. Don't fake grassroots. Voting rings and sockpuppet recommendations are detected and ban-worthy.
  5. Give more than you take. Answer questions where you have no product to sell; your comment history is your reputation.

Doing this at scale

Manually checking Algolia searches daily works but decays fast. LeadSleuth monitors Hacker News continuously against your ICP: it catches recommendation asks, competitor complaints, and problem descriptions, then builds a cited dossier on each poster (who they are, why the post signals intent, ICP fit) with a draft reply quoting their own words. You review and send; nothing is auto-posted.

Try LeadSleuth free. Describe your product and ICP once — get daily, sourced dossiers on people publicly asking for what you sell. Free while in beta, no credit card (see pricing). Start now →

More resources

Guides

Comparisons

Also see pricing, the help center, or sign up free.