What product feedback means
Finding what people wish your product did — feature requests, comparisons that name a missing capability, and the workarounds people build because something is absent.
Hacker News · Product feedback
Monitor Hacker News for product feedback
The comment thread under a launch — yours or a competitor’s — where the objections your sales team will hear next quarter get stated plainly.
[01] THE JOB/ PRODUCT FEEDBACK
What it looks like on Hacker News
Hacker News feedback is unusually blunt and unusually well-argued, which makes it the most useful and the least comfortable of these cells. The two shapes worth watching are the comment thread under your own launch, where the top objections are effectively a prioritised list of what people do not believe, and the thread under a competitor’s launch, where the same objections get made about them and tell you what the category is worried about. The tone is harsh and the content is usually right, which is a combination worth building a tolerance for.
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 product feedback 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
your product name
Volume is low enough that a bare name catches everything, and on this platform you want everything.
your category positioning
The phrase you use to describe yourself. Threads discussing the category surface the objections to the whole idea rather than to your execution.
competitor names
Objections raised about a rival are usually objections to the category, which means they will be raised about you next.
Hacker News84
The auto-routing is the interesting part but I would want to see why a thread went where it did. A rule I cannot interrogate is a rule I will stop trusting by week three.
Feature request · your label[03] HOW TO SET IT UP/ VIEWS & ROUTING
The configuration that works here
A relevance floor of 55 on a product channel, labelled rather than answered — except during your own launch, when someone senior should be in the thread answering directly and quickly. This is the cell where the aggregate and the individual both matter: a launch thread is a one-off event worth full attention, and the rest of the year is a slow trickle worth collecting.
And what to do with what arrives
Labelled and collected rather than answered immediately — describe a label such as "Feature request" and the AI applies it, then save the view. This is the one job where the value is in the aggregate rather than the individual mention.
[04] THE COMMON MISTAKE/ AVOID THIS
Reading it defensively
The tone on Hacker News is blunt and the content is usually right, which is an uncomfortable combination and a common reason teams dismiss the thread as hostile. The top comments under a launch are a prioritised list of what people do not believe about your product. Discounting them for tone is how the same objection arrives from a prospect six months later.
Questions
Run it from your assistant: Hacker News launch watch.
Other jobs on Hacker News
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TikTok24 of a possible 40. A job and a platform only make a page when the intersection has something true of it alone.