What competitor mentions means
Watching what is said about the tools you sell against — launches, price changes, outages, and the people leaving them.
Hacker News · Competitor mentions
Monitor Hacker News for competitor mentions
Catch a competitor’s launch, outage or price change while the thread is live — and the comments where their customers explain what is wrong.
[01] THE JOB/ COMPETITOR MENTIONS
What it looks like on Hacker News
When a competitor is on Hacker News it is usually one of three things: they launched something, they broke something, or somebody wrote about leaving them. All three draw their actual customers into the comments to explain their experience in public, which is the most concentrated competitive intelligence available anywhere and it lasts about a day. A launch thread in particular is worth reading in full — the top comments are the objections your own sales team will hear next quarter.
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 competitor mentions 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
competitor names
Low volume on Hacker News, so a bare name is manageable and catches launches, outages and migration posts together.
competitor plus "moved off" or "migrating"
The write-up post, which is the highest-value competitive artefact there is — it names the failure mode and the alternatives considered.
their category positioning
The phrase they use to describe themselves. Threads discussing the category name the players, and being in that conversation matters.
Hacker News89
Show HN: we rebuilt our support stack after Notchmail’s outage last month — writeup on what broke and what we moved to
Complaint[03] HOW TO SET IT UP/ VIEWS & ROUTING
The configuration that works here
A relevance floor of 70 on a competitive channel, and treat the whole thread as the artefact rather than the individual mention. This is the one job where reading the comments manually is worth someone’s hour — the objections in a competitor’s launch thread are a roadmap.
And what to do with what arrives
The Switchers view collects it — competitor keyword, labelled Complaint or negative sentiment. An agent you write can post it to a competitive Slack channel with a draft, and into whatever your team uses to keep track of what rivals are doing.
[04] THE COMMON MISTAKE/ AVOID THIS
Filing the launch thread without reading it
A competitor's launch thread gets labelled competitive intelligence and filed away, when the top comments are the single most useful document you will get that quarter — the objections your own sales team will hear, stated by people with no reason to soften them. This is the one cell where an hour of a human reading is worth more than any automation.
Questions
Run it from your assistant: Competitor complaints summary.
Other jobs on Hacker News
Reddit
LinkedIn
YouTube24 of a possible 40. A job and a platform only make a page when the intersection has something true of it alone.