What buyer intent means
Finding people who are describing the problem you solve, asking for a recommendation, or comparing named products — usually without mentioning your brand at all.
Hacker News · Buyer intent
Monitor Hacker News for buyer intent
Catch Ask HN threads and comment recommendations while they are still live. Low volume, short half-life, and disproportionate consequence.
[01] THE JOB/ BUYER INTENT
What it looks like on Hacker News
Hacker News produces few buyer-intent mentions and each is worth a great deal more than a Reddit one, because the audience is technical, the readership is large relative to the thread count, and a good answer is archived and searched for years. The shapes are narrow: an Ask HN asking for recommendations, a comment thread under a Show HN where someone names what they use instead, and the "we moved off X" post that draws every competitor into the comments. The constraint is time — a thread is effectively over in a day, and a comment posted after it has fallen off the front page reaches nobody.
What Hacker News will not give you
HN moves fast and is hostile to marketing. A thread is effectively closed within hours, and a promotional reply does more damage than silence. This is the platform where the speed of the alert and the tone of the draft both matter most.
What FishOut collects from Hacker News
Stories and comments, including Ask HN and Show HN.
[02] WHAT TO TRACK/ KEYWORDS
Keyword shapes for buyer intent on Hacker News
A keyword tuned for this job on another platform is usually silent here, because the same person writes differently in each place. The example beneath is read the way FishOut reads one: a relevance bar and the label it would carry.
keywords · hacker-news
Ask HN phrasings
"Ask HN: what do you use for", "Ask HN: alternatives to". Low volume, near-perfect precision, and worth an immediate alert on your phone rather than a queue.
your category, spelled the way engineers spell it
Not the marketing term. "shared inbox" rather than "customer communication platform", "feature flags" rather than "release management".
competitor names
A comparison thread between two other tools is a thread where a third option is genuinely useful, provided you are early, honest and disclose who you are.
Hacker News94
Ask HN: we outgrew our shared inbox at about 300 emails a day. What are people using that is not a full helpdesk?
Asking for recommendations[03] HOW TO SET IT UP/ VIEWS & ROUTING
The configuration that works here
A relevance floor of 80 on a phone channel rather than a queue — Telegram, ntfy or a dedicated Slack channel someone actually has notifications on. The whole value here is latency, and Hacker News is the one platform where an hour matters. FishOut checks keywords you mark Fast every 15 minutes (50 on Pro, 150 on Business) and the rest hourly, which for this specific job is sometimes too slow.
And what to do with what arrives
A reply, from a human, in the thread, while it is still live. Work it from the Leads and Reply now views, draft in your Voice, assign to a person — FishOut never posts.
[04] THE COMMON MISTAKE/ AVOID THIS
Treating it like a queue
Hacker News mentions arrive in a queue and die on a clock. Teams route them to the same inbox as everything else, get to them on Thursday, and find a thread that closed on Tuesday. The fix is structural rather than diligent: this platform needs its own channel with notifications on, and a relevance floor high enough that being interrupted by it is justified.
Questions
Run it from your assistant: Daily buyer-intent digest, Top 5 posts to reply to today, Hacker News launch watch.
Other jobs on Hacker News
Reddit
LinkedIn
YouTube
Bluesky24 of a possible 40. A job and a platform only make a page when the intersection has something true of it alone.