Market Intelligence
Hacker News Signals
Show HN launches, product announcements, funding news, and company mentions from Hacker News, matched to company profiles. About 2,000 signals a month with points, comments, and extracted product details.
Posts tracked daily
Company match rate
Update frequency
Signal subtypes
What Are Hacker News Signals?
Hacker News signals fire when a company launches, announces news, or gets discussed on Hacker News. Autobound classifies each post into subtypes: Show HN launches (the large majority), company mentions, product launches, funding news, and hiring posts. Every signal captures the post title, points, comment count, and author, plus extracted details like product description, key features, founder names, and target market.
The value is timing. A Show HN post is often a founding team's first public launch; the team watches the thread for days and responds fast to relevant, technically literate outreach. Autobound generates about 2,000 company-matched HN signals a month, with 5,700+ companies matched to date, refreshed daily.
Example Signal Subtypes
Data Schema
Hacker News Signal Schema
Each HN signal includes post metadata, engagement metrics, and company resolution.
{
"signal_id": "hn-47580350",
"batch_id": "2026-03-30-00-00-00",
"signal_type": "hackernews",
"signal_subtype": "showHnLaunch",
"association": "company",
"detected_at": "2026-03-30T22: 10: 22Z",
"company": {
"name": "Acme AI",
"domain": "acme.ai", // match on domain
"linkedin_url": "linkedin.com/company/acme-ai", // or match on LinkedIn URL
"industries": ["Artificial Intelligence", "SaaS"],
"employee_count_low": 11,
"employee_count_high": 50,
"description": "AI-powered GTM workflow automation platform..."
},
"contact": [],
"data": {
"hn_id": "47580350",
"hn_title": "Show HN: Acme AI – Automate your GTM workflows with AI agents",
"hn_url": "https://acme.ai",
"hn_author": "acmefounder",
"hn_points": 232,
"hn_comments": 98,
"hn_link": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47580350",
"story_type": "show_hn",
"company_name": "Acme AI",
"product_name": "Acme AI",
"product_description": "Automate prospecting, research, and outreach with AI agents.",
"founder_names": ["Jane Smith"],
"key_features": ["AI agents", "GTM automation", "CRM integration"],
"target_market": "B2B sales and marketing teams",
"relevance": 0.9,
"is_b2b": true,
"outreach_hooks": [
"Congrats on the Show HN launch - 232 points is impressive traction.",
"Saw the HN discussion around your AI agents - would love to connect."
],
"tags": ["ai-product", "b2b", "gtm-automation"],
"engagement_score": 4.36,
"confidence": "high",
"sentiment": "positive"
}
}- GCS Bucket
- gs://autobound-hackernews/
- Formats
- JSONL · Parquet
- Refresh
- Daily
Applications
What teams build with Hacker News Signals
03 documented applications
- 01
Developer-Led Account Outreach
When a target account's technical leadership posts on HN, reach out with a technically credible message that references their post. Engineers and CTOs are deeply skeptical of generic sales outreach, a message that starts with their HN thread earns a different kind of attention.
- 02
Open Source Signal Monitoring
Companies that open-source significant projects on HN are signaling a strategic shift toward developer community investment. This is often followed by an enterprise sales motion, exactly the point where they need tooling to manage that pipeline.
- 03
Competitive Mention Tracking
Monitor HN threads that mention your product, competitors, or category. When a target account's engineers are publicly discussing your competitor's pricing in a HN thread, that's an active evaluation signal.
Measured, Not Estimated
What's actually inside Hacker News Signals
Volumes, subtypes, geography, and join-key fill rates audited directly from our production database, so you can verify coverage before you buy.
Top subtypes
5 totalGeography
all 43 countries →Top industries
all industries →Join keys
fill rateSee the real records for yourself.
See full coverage & segmentation across all 35 signal types →
Worked Example
One signal, traced to outcome
One Hacker News Signals record followed from detection, through the action a rep took on it, to the measured result. Illustrative composite of observed customer workflows.
01 signal → 02 action → 03 outcome
Signal detected
Vercel posts 'Show HN: We open-sourced v0, our AI web app generator' and hits #2 on the front page with 847 points.
Action taken
Your AE reads the technical thread, finds the CTO's comments, and sends an email referencing the RSC architecture debate.
Outcome
The CTO replies saying they're exactly at the inflection point you described, intro call scheduled.
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
Do you track comments or only top-level posts?
How do you match HN posts to companies?
How It Works
From Raw Data to Your Stack
Autobound ingests from News APIs, website monitoring, technographic scanners, extracts structured signals with AI, and delivers them however your infrastructure needs.
Autobound Ingests
Raw data from News APIs, website monitoring, technographic scanners is continuously collected and normalized across millions of sources.
AI Extracts & Scores
ML models extract 10 signal subtypes with relevance scoring, confidence levels, and entity resolution.
You Receive
Structured JSONL delivered via your preferred method, updated on a daily cadence.
REST API
Real-time access with subtype filtering
300 req/minGCS Push
Automated delivery to your bucket
JSONL + ParquetEnrich API
On-demand LLM-ranked insights
AI relevance scoringFlat File
Bulk exports for data warehouses
CSV, JSON, Parquet“News and competitive signals give our customers a real-time view of their market. It's the kind of intelligence that used to require a dedicated research team.”
Platform Partner
VP of Product, Sales Intelligence Platform
Ready to License Hacker News Signals?
Custom pricing based on signal types, delivery frequency, and volume. Full schema documentation and integration guides included.