How to Find Customers on Hacker News
Hacker News is one of the highest-signal places on the internet to find early SaaS customers — the audience skews technical, high-income, and quick to try new tools. But it's also unforgiving: overt self-promotion gets flagged fast. This guide covers how to find real buying-intent conversations and join them the right way.
Where the buying intent actually is
Most founders watch the front page. That's the wrong place — front-page stories are already saturated. The buying-intent conversations happen in three quieter spots:
- "Ask HN" threads — "Ask HN: what do you use for X?" is a direct request for a recommendation.
- The monthly "Who is hiring / Who wants to be hired / Freelancer" threads — dense with people describing exactly what they need.
- Comment sections of tool-adjacent stories — someone complaining about a competitor in a comment is a warm lead most people scroll past.
Search HN like a buyer, not a marketer
Use HN Search (Algolia) and query the problem, not your product name. If you sell an invoice-chasing tool, search "chasing late payments", "clients not paying", "invoice reminder". Sort by date, not popularity — a three-day-old comment with two upvotes and a real question converts better than a viral thread everyone has already answered.
How to reply without getting flagged
HN's community norms are strict but simple. Follow these and you'll be fine:
- Lead with a genuinely useful answer that stands on its own even if you never mention your product.
- Disclose your affiliation plainly: "I'm building X, so I'm biased, but…". HN respects honesty and punishes stealth marketing.
- Mention your product once, as one option among others — including competitors. Recommending only yourself reads as spam.
- Never copy-paste. Each reply should reference the specific detail the person mentioned.
The hard part: doing this every day
The tactic works, but it depends on catching threads within hours and reading dozens of posts to find the two worth answering. That's a daily grind most founders abandon after a week. This is exactly the busywork LurkScout automates.
A realistic expectation
Finding customers on Hacker News is a compounding, low-volume channel — a handful of genuinely helpful comments a week, not a firehose. Done consistently for a couple of months, it builds both customers and a reputation. Done as a spam blast, it gets your account shadow-killed. Patience wins.