How to write a Show HN or launch post that doesn't flop (with templates)

I've watched a lot of launch posts sink without a trace, and they almost always share one trait: they read like an advert. Features listed, adjectives stacked, a confident call to action at the bottom. Nobody engages, because there's nothing to engage with. An advert asks you to act; it doesn't give you a reason to care.

The posts that land do the opposite. They tell a true, specific story, and the product shows up as the natural end of it. That's the whole technique. Let me show you the shape, then hand you templates for the three rooms you'll most likely post in.

Why "pitch" posts flop

A pitch is about the product. A story is about a problem, which means it's about the reader. When you open with "introducing X, the all-in-one platform for Y," you've given a stranger no foothold. When you open with "I kept losing my place in long PDFs and no reader let me fix it, so I built one," you've handed them a problem they might share. That recognition is what makes them keep reading.

So the rule is simple: lead with the problem, not the product. The product is the payoff, not the premise.

The universal shape

Underneath every room, the same skeleton works:

1. The problem you hit, concretely.
2. What you tried, and why it didn't fit.
3. The thing you built.
4. One plain sentence on what it does.
5. What's still rough (this builds more trust than a clean pitch ever will).
6. The link, and what feedback you want.

Notice there's no hype and no hard sell. On the rooms that matter, those actively hurt you. Now the templates.

Template: Show HN (Hacker News)

Keep the title flat and specific. No exclamation marks, no adjectives.

Show HN: A CLI that turns a folder of markdown into a searchable site

I write a lot of notes in markdown and could never search across them quickly. The existing tools wanted a database or a hosted account, which felt heavy for plain text files. So I built a small CLI that indexes a folder and serves a searchable site locally.

It's about 800 lines of Go, no dependencies, and the index rebuilds in well under a second for my ~2,000 notes. Still rough: the search is exact-match only, and Windows paths aren't tested.

Code and demo: [link]. I'd love feedback on the indexing approach, and on whether the exact-match limit is a dealbreaker for you.

HN rewards the honest, technical version of yourself. The "still rough" paragraph isn't a weakness, it's the thing that earns trust.

Template: Reddit (a niche subreddit)

Warmer, more personal, problem-first, and only after you've been a real member of the sub.

After losing my place in long PDFs one too many times, I built a reader that fixes it

I read a lot of long technical PDFs and every reader I tried lost my position, or buried the outline. It drove me up the wall, so over a few weekends I built my own.

It does one thing: remembers exactly where you were, per document, and keeps the outline one tap away. That's it. No account, works offline.

Here's the link if it's useful to you: [link]. Genuinely keen to hear what's missing, this sub knows the problem better than I do.

Template: X (build in public)

Short, one clear hook, the demo doing the work.

Spent three weekends on a small thing: a PDF reader that actually remembers where you left off, per document, offline.

Sounds trivial. It's the feature I missed in every other reader.

[15-second demo clip]

Link in the next post. What would you want it to do?

Cut anything that sounds like marketing

Once you've drafted it, do one pass with a red pen. Delete "revolutionary", "seamless", "game-changing", "powerful", and any sentence that could appear on a pricing page. Delete the call to action that tells people what to do. If a line sounds like a brand wrote it, a brand did, and it weakens the post. What's left should sound like you, talking to people who have the same problem you had.

Then post it and stay in the thread. The replies are where the value is, both the users and the feedback that makes the next version better.

If writing tailored launch copy for each room is the part you'd rather not do every time, that's one of the things Shipyard handles, distribution and honest feedback from real builders, without you rewriting the same post five ways. We're opening the first 50 founding spots now. If the launch post is where you stall, come and build with us.