How to launch a dev tool on Hacker News

If you are marketing a dev tool, especially an open-source infra dev tool, then sharing your product on Hacker News is a must.

Now the question is how to do that exactly, as marketing to the HN audience is just really hard.

Obviously, the best thing you can do for your marketing is to actually have a good product to market. But assuming you do, how do you pitch it on HN so that people see it too?

In this post, I am going deep into that:

I am looking at the HN Launch guidelines from HN admins,
I am going over the best HN launch post ever
I share a few more tips coming from dev marketing community
I share top/bottom HN launch and HN show posts that you can compare against those guidelines.

And through all that research there seems to be a clear pattern that is pretty much explained openly by Hacker News admins.

Rules for launching your product on HN directly from Hacker News admins

So HN Admins actually share the guidelines for Launching on HN directly in this doc:

and

They explain exactly how to write it in there so make sure to read it.

But here is a TLDR.

Style:

“Write in your own voice, not a corporate one.“
“Talk to HN as fellow builders and engineers. Imagine you're having a drink with a friend you used to work with.”
“Don't use superlatives (fastest, biggest, first, best). Modest language is stronger.”
“Don't sell to this audience. If you try, they will close the tab. Instead, interest them, then let them sell themselves.”

Product/Offer:

Give people an easy way to try it out. For free. Remove all barriers possible. The second best thing is a demo or video.
“Make your pricing transparent.” and “Say how you make money or plan to.”
Your CTA should invite people to share their suggestions/experiences/feedback.

Format of the announcement:

introduce yourselves
say in one clear sentence what your company does
explain the problem: how is it hard? why does it matter?
tell your backstory of how you came to work on this
explain your solution, giving technical details
explain what's different about your solution, giving technical details
invite the community to share feedback

How to comment/answer:

When you launch be ready to answer comments. And quickly.
Make sure your friends/employees/cofounders DON’T post booster comments.
Go deep into details. Remember HN community is genuinely curious.
“Answer objections by first finding something to agree with, even if it's just the positive intention behind the comment.”
“When criticized, act like the critics are doing you a favor. Who knows, maybe they are, and it will win you favor either way.” You won’t convince the critic but you can convince the audience reading it.

Let’s look at the highest-upvoted devtool announcement ever through this lens.

The best dev tool HN launch ever

I want to go over these guidelines looking at the most upvoted dev tool HN launch of all time: Fly.io.

Launch HN: Fly.io (YC W20) – Deploy app servers close to your users

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22616857

I will go over all the points from Style, Product/Offer, Format, and Comments subpoints and see how they approached it. Spoiler alert. They did tick all the boxes.

Style:

“Write in your own voice, not a corporate one.“

“Talk to HN as fellow builders and engineers. Imagine you're having a drink with a friend you used to work with.”

“Don't use superlatives (fastest, biggest, first, best). Modest language is stronger.”

Instead of saying “fastest deployment” they just said “deploy servers close to your users” or

“Don't sell to this audience. If you try, they will close the tab. Instead, interest them, then let them sell themselves.”

Product/offer:

Give people an easy way to try it out. For free. Remove all barriers possible. The second best thing is a demo or video.

“Make your pricing transparent.” and “Say how you make money or plan to.”

Your CTA should invite people to share their suggestions/experiences/feedback.

Format of the announcement:

introduce yourselves

say in one clear sentence what your company does

explain the problem: how is it hard? why does it matter?

tell your backstory of how you came to work on this

explain your solution, giving technical details

explain what's different about your solution, giving technical details

invite the community to share feedback

How to comment/answer:

When you launch be ready to answer comments. And quickly.

I saw “mrkurt” answer 53 comments in this thread. Not sure how quickly that was but I presume pretty quickly.

Make sure your friends/employees/cofounders DON’T post booster comments.

No way to check it but I didn’t see anything fishy.

Go deep into details. Remember HN community is genuinely curious.

“Answer objections by first finding something to agree with, even if it's just the positive intention behind the comment.”

“When criticized, act like the critics are doing you a favor. Who knows, maybe they are, and it will win you favor either way.” You won’t convince the critic but you can convince the audience reading it.

So fly.io HN Launch pretty much ticks all of the boxes. And it didn’t feel unnatural or weird to tick them either. That launch is just descriptive, interesting, and engaging.

More tips for Launching dev tools on HN

In addition to all that there are a few more things you can do to increase your chances of success. Maybe they are not directly coming from the HN Admin guidelines but seen myself and heard them from people in the community.

HN crowd really likes and overindexes on open-source, privacy-first products. So if you actually are an "open-source alternative to X", say it right in the title.

Make the title crystal clear and explicit. It should be obvious right away what you've built. And if there is something that pretty much all successful HN posts have in common, is that it is obvious where you'll go when you click on the link. Make it obvious.

Link out to the GitHub repo. This makes your "offer" more HN dev audience-centric by design. The repo hints at it being easy to run yourself, at it being an actual working product/library/framework, and at it being a dev tool. No other website domain brings those expectations.

Conclusions

Ok, so summing up. If you are preparing for the HN Launch or HN Show just make sure to:

follow the HN Admin guidelines
look over some more examples (and anti examples) of implementing this below
if you can positioning your tool as an open-source or privacy-first
and get your servers ready for more traffic/signups than you hoped for ;)

If you need help with this, reach out, I can help you craft this.

APPENDIX top/bottom HN launch and HN show posts

Now, to get a better feel I looked at the last 4 years of HN dev tool Launch HN and Show HN posts and copy-pasted top/bottom Launch HN and top/bottom Show HN in here.

You can compare them against the guidelines I mentioned but generally, they seem to hold water. I am planning on actually scoring all of them against these guidelines and looking into this data but this is a TODO.