Growth · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Soft-launch, first page on HN – here are the numbers
[1/2] Thursday evening (Mar 26) we made a soft launch for https://uidesigndaily.com (a UI website that I built for my wife) The goal was to get some feedback, fix bugs and get about 30-40 subscribers in the mailing list, to see how the newsletter performs. The launch went better than expected, and the feedback was generally positive. Below are some numbers for those interested. I posted it to 4 channels, IH, HN, Reddit and Twitter. It was best received on HN with 203 points, it made it in the top 10, and it stayed on the front page for a good while. Reddit also surprised me, I…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Soft-launch, first page on HN – here are the numbers launched in 2020; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1
A few days ago, I responded to a comment by bloggergirl offering to read anyone's web copy and help. I shot off an email hoping for a paragraph or two of feedback on my startup's copy. Instead I received a professional, detailed deck of tons of invaluable well thought out feedback. It must have taken her an entire afternoon. Here's a link to it: http://www.slideshare.net/shereefb/recommendations-for-bettermeans To top it off, this isn't someone with a lot of free time on her hands, she's only days away from launching her own startup (page99test) This community blows my mind!
2010 · slideshare.net · its alternatives →
- 2RO
I was lucky enough to have my site trending on Friday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25872922). It’s an icon site that lists open source icons. I wanted to share some stats on the results after 3 days. Worth noting was that I submitted it on a Friday morning (at which point I went for a walk and a coffee; eek). - 24,997 page views. I (embarrassingly) didn’t have GA set up when I first submitted it, so this is probably missing a few hundred page views - 21 “feedback” emails (half of which were spam). I assume such a high percentage of these were spam because my Feedback…
2021 · its alternatives →
- 3
I scraped every Show HN from the last 12 months (41,301 posts) plus the full comment tree of every launch with 10+ comments, ~100k comment timestamps, all from the Algolia HN API. The median launch gets 2 points and 0 comments. For launches that do get traction, half the comments they'll ever get arrive within 7.2 hours and 90% within 26, and the top decile decays on the same clock as everyone else. Vote timestamps aren't public, so comment timing is the attention proxy; caveats are in the post. Everything reproduces from the repo with one command…
Jul 2026 · jonno.nz · its alternatives →
- 4
I figured, "what better way to look at a list of (hopefully) inspiring projects?" The upvotes work and are globally synced.
2024 · guycombinator.net · its alternatives →
- 5IB
Hey HN community, I built a tool that helps optimize your post for hitting the first page of Show HN. How it works: I used a Hugging Face dataset of all Hacker News posts from the past 3 years and trained a model that predicts how successful your post might be. There's still a lot of randomness on HN, so nothing is guaranteed, but the tool helps optimize your post for higher odds. A couple of interesting findings: - GitHub repo links work x3 better than regular domains - Open-source tools have a steady virality rate (13.9% - one of the highest) - "I built" outperforms "We built" - Using…
May 2026 · wannalaunch.com · its alternatives →
- 6IB
Hey everyone! My name is Will. I’ve been leading engineering teams for over two decades. Also, first time HN user here! One of the common pains I’d encounter in nearly every product I managed was alerting end users to infrequent events like outages, global announcements, beta launches, planned maintenance, etc. We’d always need to deploy custom, one-off modals or other alerts and then have to remember to revert them later. It was always a time sink for a developer to put aside what they were working on to make this happen. This Is Not A Drill! is a simple-to-install JS SDK that makes it…
2024 · its alternatives →
- 7NF
Hi, I spent the last couple of months developing OurClubFundraiser(http://www.ourclubfundraiser.com) and launched it about two weeks ago.I would love to get some feedback from the HN community on how I could improve the site and tweak the concept. Since launching I have found that: 1) I am not getting enough visits(Average around 5 a day) 2) Any of the visits I do get are not converting. I am working on 1) and will hopefully be able to dramatically increase the number of visits over the next few weeks. I could really do with some third party perspectives on point 2. 1)Is the concept not…
2012 · ourclubfundraiser.com · its alternatives →
- 8FO
I've just launched a landing page for an ebook that I hope to have out sometime in June but I feel like that dog in the meme "I have no idea what I'm doing."[1] I am not a designer (or copywriter) but I've been hanging out on HN long enough to have a good idea where to go for help. I used Bootstrap[2] for a template, Colour Lovers[3] for a palette and Weebly's homepage[4] for inspiration. Weebly's homepage is fantastic but as much as I tried to keep it simple and powerful, like Weebly, I kept getting bogged down in massive amounts copy. I think this is probably where I need to most help.…
2012 · startupprivacy.com · its alternatives →
- 9MS
linkrdr (www.linkrdr.com), a personal link aggregator, was directly inspired by http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3555923 I read while browsing on HN. It's still a bit rough, but the concept is an interesting one and people have already shown interest. Let me know what you think. Also, if anyone knows a good UX designer, email me :)
2012 · its alternatives →
- 10S
We’re about to start promoting our coming soon landing pages and wanted to get some feedback from the HN community first. http://soupnextdoor.com - Marketplace for dinner parties We’re running a competition about where our launch will be. This will give us something to promote other than the fact that we’re coming soon and hopefully get some conversation started. We’re looking for feedback across the board. UI, color scheme, browser compatibility issues, problems with our idea, marketing ideas, issues with how we’ve worded things, etc We’ve left Django in debug mode for the time being so if…
2011 · soupnextdoor.com · its alternatives →
- 11
Show HN submissions peaked at 6.3x their ChatGPT-launch level, while the number of successful submissions remained relatively flat.
Aug 2026 · orangecrumbs.com · its alternatives →
- 12UO
When I see what some HN members have done in a weekend on their projects, it makes it hard to confess that it has taken us 1 year to get to this stage. I kept trying to make things perfect, but finally I have seen the light - it will never be perfect and even in its current state, I see so much we need to improve, but it's something. Instead of delaying even more, I thought I would release it to the best critics out there - HN say hello to MyProperty.com Hope to hear your feedback, criticism, thoughts.
2011 · its alternatives →
- 13
Hello everyone, I doubt this would be relevant to the kind of person who uses HN, but I thought I could share for some feedback. I built this site because there is a whole world of people who believe in new age spirituality and I am very much one of them. It is a site where you get the users gender their goals and their images and use AI and psychology to generate images of them in the process of achieving their goals. I am so deeply struggling with how to get this highly on Google. I don't even know if that is important anymore. What are your suggestions with distribution and getting in…
2025 · visionboardsai.com · its alternatives →
- 14MH
Back in October, the "HN Make November Launch an App Month" discussion was started and it sounded like a great opportunity, so I joined the Facebook group and decided to build my take on an iOS version of the classic Quotefalls puzzle game, thinking I would learn a ton and it would be a great way to get my feet wet with making, marketing, and managing my own software. A week before the group presentation (end of Nov.), I took my project off the project list because I was nowhere near finished. One of the many great things I’ve learned in all this is how easy it is to justify all the feature…
2011 · quotiac.com · its alternatives →
- 15TS
Some interesting posts/comments. Meteor (April 2012) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3824908 Codecademy (August 2011) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2901156 Kimono Labs (Jan 2014) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7066479 Firebase (April 2012) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3832877 Dropbox (April 2007) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 Watsi (August 2012) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4424081 Heap Analytics (March 2013)…
2014 · its alternatives →
- 16
Hey HN, After GPT-3 created waves in the tech industry, a lot of AI tools were emerging and with that, some AI website builders But the results seemed way too generic to us. It felt like the developers were rushing to catch the wave instead of building a proper tool We took our time, did months of RnD and finally came up with something better than what others in the market are doing. It’s got better design output. While it’s still in beta, I wanted to show HN what we did. Will appreciate the feedback when you guys try it out. Here is the link to signup for the beta:…
2024 · dorik.com · its alternatives →
- 17
Upvote.Team▲12Built this to solve the cold start problem for side projects. You browse/support posts from other creators across platforms (LinkedIn, Medium, Instagram, etc.), earn 1 credit to promote yours. Free, no ads budget needed. Just launched today – curious what HN thinks about the model.
Nov 2025 · upvote.team · its alternatives →
- 18SH
This morning I've submitted our project to HN. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4099054 Got pretty helpful feedback. But that wasn't the only thing. 478 people requested invite out of 755. 63% conversion rate. Almost 9K unique visitor visited our website. At some point in the morning I was seeing 400+ active users on the website. Unbelievable. 35 people registered without telling them how to register. ( You cannot register directly, there is only a login form - but they figured out a way :) http://imgur.com/Kbf9J 6K people visited directly from Hacker News, 1K from Twitter ( I guess…
2012 · its alternatives →
- 19SP
Hey, HN -- I just received the following email and I'm not sure what to do about it. Obviously I want to discourage requested-posting like this; is there some structured way that we can do that? One of the things I love about HN is how high the signal-to-noise ratio is relative to...pretty much the rest of the internet. I wouldn't ordinarily call someone out like this, but I want to innoculate HN against this sort of thing. ---- Hey doches, Not sure if it's conventional, but thought I'd ask anyway. Would you be open to posting about my product on Hacker News? I understand that similar to…
2022 · its alternatives →
- 20MW
So I got so involved in setting up AdWords, tracking down WP security bloggers, etc. that I forgot to post it here and get you all to check it out and offer suggestions. It's only been out for a couple weeks or so though, so this still qualifies as "launch window", I guess. Check it out here: http://www.panic-press.com/ Promo code "show-hn" for a free month to try it out. It has 100 uses, so it shouldn't run out, but if it does, let me know.
2012 · panic-press.com · its alternatives →
- 21SF
I have ignored high paying jobs/ several contracting gigs to build Xervmon.com. I would really appreciate help to test the UI for UX. I want folks who can be brutal about the tool and give a feedback on which we can improve the UI and UX. The UI does standout, but to what level it stands out, I am not sure. One catch : You need to sign up to navigate through UI. First I was shy to show my work, then angry and upset when users commented and now am shameless. Be my guest and give me feedback so I can take it as another challenge to improve the user experience.
2012 · its alternatives →
- 22AN
Hi all, Made a little app, its at http://newsinamap.com This is my first project and HN was a source of inspiration I thought of sharing it here. Feedback would be appreciated. Thanks for your time.
2012 · newsinamap.com · its alternatives →
- 23HI
I’ll put the tl;dr up front: I built my first web app with HN’s news.arc: http://hubski.com The long version (I can be verbose): Recently, I was in a startup that sputtered out. It was my seed idea, but my contribution was on the design/UI end. We applied to YC fall 2010, and were rejected (rightfully so, in retrospect). My previous coding experience entails a bit of Fortran from undergrad research, and building a couple of simple websites (Frontpage even. o-O). Anyway, I had tons of energy for the project, but lamented not being able to contribute to coding, where it was badly needed. After…
2011 · hubski.com · its alternatives →
- 24
Hey Hacker News, I'm the maker of Kopage, a free & self-hosted Website Builder. While working on new, cool features (AI, of course), it would be great to hear some HN feedback :) Thanks, Simon
2024 · kopage.com · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →