If you want to launch your product in the US without a local team or an ad budget, three online communities are where your first American users are. Hacker News draws developers, Product Hunt works as your official announcement, and Reddit brings together buyers looking for a fix to a specific problem.
All three tightened their rules in 2025 and 2026. Since March 2026, Hacker News has blocked Show HN posts from new accounts and banned any text written or edited by AI. Product Hunt removed "Coming soon" pages in August 2025. On Reddit, the French founders of Gojiberry racked up 11 million impressions in a few months, at the cost of 40 bans.
This guide collects the methods that Y Combinator startups and indie hackers published in 2025 and 2026, along with their numbers. The Reddit section draws on a talk that Anthony Riera, founder of Rankhog, gave at The Nest, swanbase's program, in August 2026.
Launching your product in the US through online communities
French guides to the American market mostly cover setting up there: incorporation, taxes, visas. To find your first American users, all you need is a live product, an account on each platform and a few weeks of preparation.
On all three platforms, people come to discover or compare products. Anthony Riera describes Reddit as a forum: people show up with a problem and ask which tool to pick.
From Paris, the time difference works in your favor. The Product Hunt leaderboard resets at 9:01 a.m. Paris time, and New York starts its day around 3 p.m. Paris time. You prepare in the morning, then answer Americans in the afternoon and evening.
Hacker News, Product Hunt or Reddit: matching the platform to your product
- Hacker News suits developer tools, open source and infrastructure. Its readers want to understand how the product works and steer clear of sales talk.
- Product Hunt suits SaaS and consumer apps that already have an audience to rally on launch day.
- Reddit suits any product that solves a problem people discuss in a subreddit, from a CRM for freelancers to a bike accessory. For a startup, Reddit marketing takes the longest to prepare and pays off the longest, because Google indexes the threads.
You can combine all three. Open SaaS, Wasp's template, launched on both Product Hunt and Hacker News in spring 2025, and Hacker News sent it three times as many visitors.
Launching on Hacker News in 2026
Hacker News (HN) is Y Combinator's forum, read by American developers, founders and investors. To launch a product there, you publish a "Show HN": a post presenting a project readers can try. YC startups also get a single "Launch HN", which the site's team places on the front page.
Competition has exploded. Daniel King counted 28,302 Show HN posts in 2025 and about 200 a day in 2026, compared with around thirty a day ten years ago. According to antionmil's open dataset of 208,000 Show HN posts, the median post gets 2 points, one of them from its author. Only 4.1% of posts get past 30 points.
Hacker News rules since March 2026
Three rules changed in 2026:
- New accounts can no longer post Show HNs. A Hacker News page has said so since March 2026: "We're temporarily restricting Show HNs because of a massive influx". Dang, HN's moderator, keeps the threshold secret. In April 2026, a founder with a week-old account got the message "Sorry, your account isn't able to submit this site".
- AI-generated or AI-edited text is banned. Since March 11, 2026, the guidelines read: "Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans."
- Waitlists are excluded. Dang restated it on July 27, 2026: "Waitlists are against the Show HN rules." A signup page, a newsletter or a blog post can't be a Show HN.
The second rule affects French founders most. If you write in French and then run the text through ChatGPT, HN readers spot the polished English and your post sinks. Dang described the pattern on June 9, 2026: the author thinks they "fixed the grammar a bit", while the reader thinks an AI wrote the whole thing. HN readers would rather read your imperfect English.
Preparing the account and the product
Create your HN account several weeks before launch and comment on topics in your field. Pick a personal username: YC's Launch HN guide asks founders whose username is their company name to get it changed.
Readers must be able to try the product without creating an account. The Show HN rules spell it out: "Please make it easy for users to try your thing out, ideally without barriers such as signups or emails." A live demo, a GitHub repo or a read-only sandbox all work. If all you can offer is an email signup, you're launching too early.
Writing the post with Y Combinator's template
YC gives its startups a seven-step template that also works for a Show HN:
- Introduce yourselves ("Hey HN! Lev and Justin here").
- Say in one sentence what the product does.
- Explain the problem.
- Tell how you got here.
- Describe the solution with technical details.
- Explain what sets it apart, again with technical details.
- Ask for feedback.
The same guide rules out feature lists, one-sentence paragraphs ("They read like sales letters") and superlatives like fastest or best. It also asks you to be upfront about your business model and pricing. PgDog followed this template in February 2026 and collected 326 points.
The title starts with "Show HN:", followed by the name and a plain description, with no decorative capitals or exclamation points. Avoid the word "AI". In antionmil's data, titles containing AI, LLM, GPT or agent get past 30 points 2.9% of the time, versus 4.6% for all other titles. Aidlab's first Show HN "sounded too much like a product pitch," according to its founder. The second, titled "Aidlab - Health Data for Devs", reached the front page in October 2025.
Launch day on Hacker News
Post on a weekday between 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Paris time, while the East Coast is at work. Antionmil puts the best slot at 17:00 UTC, which is 7 p.m. in Paris during summer time. Daniel King finds better odds on weekends, peaking overnight from Sunday to Monday, Paris time. Timing matters little: according to antionmil, the gap is about 3.6 posts out of 100.
Then stay in the thread. YC's guide warns: "The hivemind gets cranky without attention, and your post will fall down the page faster." When you reply to criticism, open with what you agree with. That's how you win over the silent majority reading the exchange.
Never ask for votes, even from friends. HN moderators penalize or ban the posts, accounts and domains involved. YC's guide calls it "the worst mistake you can make on HN".
Rescuing a Show HN that went unnoticed
You have two options after a flop.
The first is the "second-chance pool", where moderators give overlooked posts another shot. Shashank Tomar posted "Strange Attractors" on September 10, 2025 and got 7 points. The moderators invited him to repost, and he reached 804 points on October 31, 2025. You can also email [email protected], though dang advises waiting two to three months.
The second is to change the format. Abdellatif Abdelfattah, founder of Agentset, got 4 and then 6 points with two Show HNs of his repo in 2025. He then published a technical write-up, "Production RAG: what I learned from processing 5M+ documents". The post collected 551 points on October 20, 2025 and stayed on the front page for 26 hours. His published results: 838 GitHub stars, 187 new self-serve customers and 8 demo requests.
Only repost when you have something new to show. PgDog scored 307 points in May 2025, then 326 in February 2026 when it announced it was production-ready.
Results from three Hacker News launches
Reaching HN's front page gets you in front of developers, but it doesn't guarantee sales.
DDL to Data posted its Show HN on January 6, 2026: 55 points, 8th place, about 1,000 visitors, 425 demos started, 3 signups and zero sales. Its founder, Travis Brannan, concluded: "High demo completion + low signup = conversion problem, not product problem." Aidlab, which sells hardware, got about 6,000 page views and no direct sales, but 4 requests from research teams.
For an open source project, Daniel King measures about 1.4 GitHub stars per point within 48 hours.
Launching on Product Hunt in 2026
Product Hunt is the daily leaderboard of new tech products. It resets at 12:01 a.m. California time, which is 9:01 a.m. in Paris. In May 2025, Wasp CEO Matija called it "a unique opportunity to declare an 'official' launch of your product". You'll find the hour-by-hour playbook in our Product Hunt launch guide. This section covers recent changes and results from 2025-2026.
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\n\nFour changes make playbooks written before 2025 obsolete:
- Points instead of votes (December 2024). Product Hunt calculates points mostly from votes and weighs in comments as an extra factor. It doesn't publish the formula. Makers have seen 800 votes turn into 193 points.
- The end of "Coming soon" pages (August 28, 2025). Each new product now gets a forum thread instead, where you announce your launch date.
- Public featuring criteria. Product Hunt's featuring guidelines, updated March 10, 2026, look for four qualities: useful, novel, polished and creative. The team rules out waitlists without immediate access, directories, templates, courses and services. A launch that isn't featured stays in the "All" feed, which few people browse.
- Automatic scheduling. You pick a date up to a month ahead, and Product Hunt publishes the launch at midnight Pacific time.
Hunter or self-hunt
Product Hunt says an outside hunter brings "no discernible advantage". According to the platform, makers launched 79% of featured products themselves in 2023. Even so, Mastra (YC W25) brought in Flo Merian as its hunter and finished 3rd of the day on January 21, 2026. If you don't have an American network, a well-known hunter brings their followers and experience. Self-hunting is still the default.
The launch page
In March 2025, Product Hunt CEO Rajiv Ayyangar named the top priority: a clear one-sentence tagline that you've tested on friends. Kilo Code, #1 of the day and of the week in May 2026, showed three real screenshots of its product and skipped stock images and marketing filler.
Keep the maker's first comment short and ask for feedback. The official guide insists: "Ask for feedback (NOT upvotes)". Kilo Code sums it up: "No looooooong background stories, the objective is to start the conversation."
Launch day on Product Hunt
For the first few hours, Product Hunt hides vote counts and shows products in random order. That's when launches build their lead: Open SaaS got 100 votes in 4 hours and finished 7th with about 400 votes.
Flexprice rallied its supporters in three waves:
- its inner circle between midnight and 2 a.m. Pacific time, or 9 to 11 a.m. in Paris;
- its wider network between 7 and 9 a.m., or 4 to 6 p.m. in Paris;
- other communities between noon and 3 p.m., or 9 p.m. to midnight in Paris.
Product Hunt spells out exactly one rule: ask for a visit and a comment, never for a vote. The team strips out votes from bots, fake profiles and vote swaps, and removes the product entirely if votes were bought. That means your points can drop during the day.
A small team can aim for the weekend. Product Hunt reports 15% more clicks on the "Visit" button on weekends. Flexprice launched on a Sunday, April 6, 2025, and finished #1 of the day with 488 votes and more than 50 signups.
Product Hunt launch results 2025-2026
Results range from 112 to 17,300 visitors, depending on the audience the founders built before launch. Elitza Vasileva, solo founder of own.page, put it this way in July 2026: "Product Hunt is not magic. It amplifies existing momentum. It does not create that momentum for you." She had been sharing her progress on X for eight months.
- own.page, May 25, 2026: 2nd of the day with 517 votes, followed by 17,300 visits and 2,021 signups over 22 days.
- Shipper, December 3, 2025: 10th of the day and 1,568 visitors. According to its founder, monthly revenue went from $3,600 to $4,080 overnight.
- Postraid, September 22, 2026: 29th place, 28 votes and 112 visitors from Product Hunt. The founder's posts on X brought in more than 1,000 visitors and 2 customers.
Consumer products can also try Uneed. Habit Pixel launched there on January 1, 2026, finished 2nd of the day and reported more than 200 sales in two days.
Launching on Reddit: Anthony Riera's method
Reddit is made up of thousands of forums called subreddits, each with its own rules and volunteer moderators. Anthony Riera, founder of Rankhog, walked the founders of The Nest through his method in August 2026. The full talk is on video. This section covers the key points, along with case studies published in 2025 and 2026.
Why Reddit matters for Google and AI
A Reddit thread keeps sending you visitors long after you post it, because Google indexes it and AI companies use it. According to Reuters, Google pays Reddit about $60 million a year to train its models on Reddit content. \1\n
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The Gojiberry and Starter Story cases
Gojiberry automates LinkedIn prospecting. Its three French founders, Pierre-Eliott Lallemant, Romàn Czerny and Dylan Teixeira, are in Y Combinator's Spring 2026 batch.
In his January 2026 interview with Starter Story, Romàn Czerny put numbers on what Reddit did for them: 11 million impressions, more than 40,000 visitors and their first 100 customers. Gojiberry went from zero to $30,000 in monthly revenue in four months. Anthony Riera adds a less flattering number: 40 bans along the way.
Their rule was to never promote the product directly. Each post tells a story that's useful to other founders ("We got into Y Combinator, here's what happened"), backs it up with proof and mentions the product in one line. The team also published playbooks on public Notion pages labeled "sponsored by Gojiberry AI". The Reddit post links to the Notion page, which moderators see as more neutral than a link to the website.
Be selective about what you borrow from them. Romàn Czerny also describes an internal group of 15 marketers who upvote each other's posts to get 10 votes in the first 10 minutes. Reddit's rules treat this kind of arrangement as content manipulation. Gojiberry has also pulled back, because subreddit members get tired of a brand that shows up too often.
Pat Walls followed the same logic with Starter Story, which has since grown into a YouTube channel with a million subscribers. He summarized each founder interview on Reddit with a story, a number and a link to the blog. His constant presence annoyed regulars, but moderators never banned him, since every post gave readers something of value.
Warming up your Reddit account
Reddit bans fast, and appeals rarely succeed. With a shadowban, you can keep posting, but nobody sees your contributions. Prepare your account before you need it:
- Create the account with an old email address. According to Anthony Riera, an account opened with a brand-new address gets banned on its first comment.
- Add a profile picture, even an anonymous one.
- Join the subreddits in your market. Upvote, then comment two or three times a day. Romàn Czerny recommends 7 to 14 days of commenting before your first post.
- Earn your first karma on r/AskReddit by being one of the first to comment on a post that's just taking off. Many subreddits require 5 karma to comment, and you should wait until you have about 50 before posting.
- Never link to your product in a comment. A single link can cost you the account.
- Hide your post history in your profile settings. Moderators use it to spot accounts that always talk about the same product.
If you have a Reddit account that's more than three years old, protect it and keep it out of your startup promotion.
Choosing your subreddits
Search Google for site:reddit.com followed by keywords describing your problem, and you'll find the subreddits where your future customers talk about it. The free tool Similar Subreddits, built by developer Andrei Kashcha (anvaka), then shows you related communities.
Start with small niche communities. Their members match your target, and they often engage more than people on r/SaaS. Save the big subreddits for when you have a strong story and proof to back it up.
Reddit post structure: story, value, proof
A good Reddit post follows the same structure as a good LinkedIn post:
- The hook, in the title, with no link.
- The context: who you are ("developer for ten years").
- The value: what you learned, tested or got wrong, for example "what I did wrong for six months".
- The proof: a screenshot, a video or a number. Almost every Reddit account is anonymous, so readers only believe what they can see.
Revenue proof draws the most readers. A Stripe screenshot or your first $9 payment is enough to build a post around. Vanity metrics like "6,000 signups" also grab attention, as long as they're accurate. Mention the product in a single sentence. r/SaaS readers are founders themselves and will go check out what works.
Stick to the 90/10 ratio: 90% of your contributions help other members, and at most 10% are about your product.
Reddit changes in 2025 and 2026
- Reddit filters new accounts. Steve Huffman, Reddit's CEO, acknowledged it in July 2026: "new users are likely to have their posts removed because their account isn't old enough".
- Reddit labels automated accounts. Since March 31, 2026, an [App] label flags them, and Reddit can ask a suspicious account to prove it's human. Each subreddit sets its own rules on AI-written text.
- Member counts are gone. Since September 2025, subreddits show their weekly visitors and contributions instead, so use those two numbers to judge activity.
- r/all disappeared from the app and the website on April 2, 2026.
- Reddit closed its API to new tools in November 2025. GummySearch, the monitoring tool founders relied on, shuts down on December 1, 2026 because it couldn't get a license. F5Bot, which is free, still sends an email alert whenever a keyword appears on Reddit or Hacker News.
- Reddit's share of AI answers keeps shifting. According to Semrush, ChatGPT cited Reddit in nearly 60% of its answers in early August 2025, then in about 10% by mid-September. Tinuiti later measured an increase of at least 73% in Reddit's share of AI engine citations between October 2025 and January 2026.
Anthony Riera's reading is straightforward. Reddit is fighting bots, so ChatGPT may cite it less often. But AI companies still need human-written text, and Google still surfaces Reddit threads.
Set up F5Bot to track your problem and your competitors' names. Anthony Riera's advice: when someone complains about a competitor, be the first to reply, and say who you are.
Four Reddit launches from 2026
- Small subreddits vs. r/SaaS. In September 2026, Koustubh Lapate counted his paying customers by the subreddit they came from: 16 from r/saasbuild, 11 from r/micro_saas, 9 from r/founder and 3 from r/SaaS.
- A product born from a Reddit thread. Jakub Mužík got the idea for Leadverse from a thread where hundreds of people were asking for help finding leads. As of August 2026, Leadverse has more than 130 paying customers and $3,300 in monthly revenue.
- A revenue post on r/SaaS. In May 2026, Adel Dodas got more than 120,000 views in 48 hours with a post showing Sigentra's $4,000 in monthly revenue.
- Testing Reddit ads. Penni's founder spent $155 on ads in March 2026, at $0.90 per click, with zero conversions. An organic demo video did better.
A six-week timeline for your US launch
Hacker News and Reddit require aged accounts, and Product Hunt requires an audience you've built in advance. Start six weeks before your launch date, and launch on each platform on a different day so you can stay active in every thread. The decision tree below helps you pick your main platform.
- Six weeks before. Create your Hacker News and Reddit accounts, comment every day, list your target subreddits and set up F5Bot.
- Four weeks before. Make the product testable without a signup and open its forum thread on Product Hunt. Share your progress on X or LinkedIn.
- Two weeks before. Publish your first helpful Reddit posts, without mentioning the product. Write your Show HN yourself, in English.
- One week before. Schedule your Product Hunt launch and prepare three screenshots, the tagline and the maker comment. Ask your supporters for a visit and a comment.
- Launch day. Product Hunt publishes your launch at 9:01 a.m. Paris time. Reply to every comment until evening.
- Two to seven days after. Post your Show HN in mid-afternoon, Paris time. Share on Reddit what the launch taught you, with numbers to back it up.
- Two to three months after. Ask Hacker News for a second chance if you need one. Only relaunch on Product Hunt with a major new version, which it requires for any relaunch within six months.
Eight ways to get banned
A banned account costs you weeks of preparation. The rules of all three platforms, along with the cases above, point to eight mistakes:
- Asking for votes, even from friends.
- Organizing a vote-swapping group.
- Posting AI-generated or AI-edited text on Hacker News.
- Launching a waitlist as a Show HN or on Product Hunt.
- Posting a Show HN from an account created the week of the launch.
- Linking to your product in a Reddit comment.
- Opening a Reddit account with a brand-new email address.
- Deleting and reposting the same post on Hacker News.
To turn your first visitors into customers, read our article on a startup's first customers and the swanbase guide chapter on landing your first 10 paying customers. Our guide to launching your product for free covers other free channels.
FAQ
Do you need a US company to launch your product on these platforms?
No. Hacker News, Product Hunt and Reddit accept any product that's available online, whatever country your company is based in. To launch your startup in the US on these platforms, you need a product people can try, an English-language page and accounts you've prepared in advance.
Is Product Hunt still worth it in 2026?
Yes, if you already have an audience to rally on launch day. In 2026, own.page got 17,300 visits after finishing 2nd, while Postraid, in 29th place, got 112 visitors. Product Hunt amplifies the momentum you've built beforehand on X, LinkedIn or your newsletter.
What's the best day to launch on Product Hunt?
No public data points to a single best day. Product Hunt reports 15% more clicks on the "Visit" button on weekends, and Flexprice finished #1 on a Sunday in April 2025. own.page picked a Monday to avoid the big announcements that land late in the week.
How do you post a Show HN with a new account?
Since March 2026, Hacker News has restricted Show HNs from new accounts, without publishing the threshold. Create your account several weeks before launch and comment on topics in your field.
How do you promote your startup on Reddit without getting banned?
Warm up the account for one to two weeks with helpful comments and no links at all. Then publish posts that tell a story backed by real numbers, and mention your product in a single line. Stick to the 90/10 ratio.
Can you translate your post with ChatGPT?
On Hacker News, no. Since March 11, 2026, the guidelines have banned any AI-generated or AI-edited text. On Reddit, each subreddit sets its own rule. Write in English yourself, even if a few mistakes slip through.
