Show HN Launch Preparation for Technical Founders

A Show HN needs roughly eight to fifteen upvotes in its first hour to escape /newest, and the number moves with the hour and the day. You cannot buy those, and attempting it is the worst available outcome: Hacker News detects voting rings, has done for years, and the penalty attaches to your domain rather than an account, so every future submission from your company dies silently. The work that remains is the artifact people can try, the title, and the founder being present and awake for six hours. We prepare all three and sit with you through the window. Readiness: Show HN requires something a reader can try in the next two minutes. An email wall in front of the demo roughly halves the thread and produces a specific kind of comment you do not want at the top. So the first conversation is about what can be opened: a hosted instance with no signup, a repository, a binary, a playable build. If the honest answer is that nothing can be opened yet, we say wait, and we mean wait, not launch anyway with a video. Launch HN is reserved for YC companies and we will not imply otherwise or dress a Show HN up as one. The title and the post: No exclamation mark, no company name in front, no announcement verb, no adjective. Editorialised titles get rewritten by moderators and the rewrite is usually less flattering than what you would have written yourself, so we write the plain one. The post body is short and factual: what it is, what it is built on, what it does not do, what you want feedback about. Tuesday to Thursday, between 8 and 10am Eastern, and never in the week of a large industry event that will occupy the front page. The first six hours: The founder answers every comment personally, including the dismissive ones, and especially the first hostile one, because that reply sets the tone of everything below it. We rehearse three questions before the day. For crypto: why this needs a chain at all, who holds the keys, and what happens to user assets if you shut down. For games: whether the economy is designed to extract, and whether this is an advertising surface wearing a game. Answers are prepared in your own words, and we drill them out loud, because the written version always reads better than it sounds at hour two. How we work during the window: On a call or a shared channel for the full six hours. We read every comment as it lands, flag the ones worth answering first, and draft replies you rewrite before posting. We do not post. We do not hold an account used on your behalf. The comment thread is under your name, and the value of that only exists if it is true. Hard no: Submitting on your behalf. Any coordination of votes, including asking your own team, which is the version people believe is harmless and is not. Sockpuppet comments, including friendly ones. Reposting a submission that did not take, in place of the moderator second-chance pool, which exists and which we prepare for instead. Launching a token. And launching a product whose only demonstration is a video. Not included: Writing the engineering blog post the thread will ask for, which we can quote separately. Media outreach. Press embargoes. Any promise about front page placement, which depends on what else was posted that morning and on a ranking penalty system nobody outside the moderators can see. Who this is not for: Founders who will not read the comments. Companies whose product is closed and will stay closed. And anyone who wants the thread managed on their behalf, which is a request for the thing that gets domains banned.