Hacker News Keyword Alert Monitoring

Responding to Hacker News posts is one of the most effective marketing channels for new startups. Syften makes it so easy you'll feel like you're cheating.

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Do you really search every Hacker News comment live?

Yes, we aim for at most a 1-minute delay. And because we specialize in live content delivery (as opposed to searching historical data) we're able to perform a more advanced search that is not possible for search engines.

You can get your results delivered through our Slack integration, email, RSS or an API.

So what can Hacker News monitoring be used for?

Did you ever discover that someone submitted a link to your blog to Hacker News, but the submission just withered and died? With Syften you'll be notified instantly the next time that happens. This way you and your team can give it that initial upvote and comment needed to reach the top.

You'll also be notified every time someone mentions your competition. That way you can join the conversation and mention your tool. You'll not only get some initial eyeballs, but also steal some of Hacker News' SEO for years to come.

How to configure Hacker News keyword alerts?

The no-brainer must-have is your product's domain name. Missing comments where people mention your product is a bad idea.

The second most important type of keywords are your competitor names. You always want to jump in on a thread where someone recommends a competing product.

Other than these high-value keywords, you can get notified when someone replies to you, or when one of your friends posts something.

Hacker News is just one of the communities we monitor:

Reddit X Hacker News Product Hunt Indie Hackers Slack Quora Stack Overflow Lobste.rs Dev.to Server Fault GitHub Podcasts Stack Exchange etc

How can I use keyword monitoring to find customers online?

Configure filters

Check out what our customers have to say


At Rewardful, we're huge believers in word-of-mouth marketing. I've used most of the social monitoring tools on the market and most have a lot of noise in the results or miss important conversations happening online. Syften returns the most relevant social mentions with the least amount of noise out of all the tools I've tested so far. Their community listening is the best on the market and I love how you can fine tune by source.

I love that Syften monitors all the communities I am part of but don't have enough time to check all day. Now, I can check my email and see conversations happening on Twitter, Reddit, Indie Hackers, and many more places. It's incredibly useful. Worth every dollar.

We use Syften to react to people saying things about us on the internet every single day. It's a set once and forget tool that just helps your team keep your pulse on whatever it is you care about.


Syften is awesome. I use it for my business so I can monitor the brand, and participate in online discussions which can help us attract new customers. I also use it personally to keep track of niche subjects that I'm interested in like emerging tech and products.


I've written a couple books and like to keep an eye on how and where folks are talking about them. Syften has helped me catch several key conversations that I otherwise wouldn't have seen. Even on the days without any notable alerts, I'm still happy to know that I haven't missed anything. A very useful tool.

We love Syften at PostHog and find it incredibly useful for listening to our open-source community. The Slack integration enables our entire team to find ways to connect with our users, whether it's the Marketing team sharing new content or the Engineering team answering technical questions. The filtering system is especially powerful and helps us separate the signal from the noise.

Syften has become integral to our business. It allows us to monitor *and* respond in real-time using their super simple webhooks. For example, when people mention our competitors being expensive on Twitter, Syften finds it and enables us to respond instantly with Zapier. It's paid for itself many times over. It even helped us secure $5M in funding for one of our community members. Michael has been overwhelmingly supportive over the past 18+ months we've been a customer and we couldn't be more grateful.

I use Syften every day and have been for a year. I looked at various other social listening tools but they were mostly aimed at big brands and enterprise customers and carried a hefty price tag. Syften tracks all of the major networks that I'm interested (even ones the big tools don't) and it's affordable for businesses of every size. Every day I get an email digest of people talking about my product for me to take immediate action on.


I gather the mentions I get from Syften and add them to our customer sales and partner presentations to show how our product is gaining mindshare amongst users on Reddit and forums. These slides are very impactful.

Syften has been a great tool to understand in which communities my website is being mentioned, or topics relevant to my business. It allowed me to engage in meaningful discussions and to identify some important actors in my niche.

Syften has enabled us to keep an eye on the topics related to our product. We can easily track posts about discount codes, email marketing, and e-commerce. We can then suggest using our service, or just be helpful answering questions on subjects that we are familiar with.

That could be you! So let's get started!

Spike from one comment

Watch your organic traffic grow overnight

Regularly engaging in online discussions will drive large amounts of organic traffic to your business, free.

We alert you

Monitor up to 100 keywords, generating thousands of weekly opportunities to promote your business.

Drive traffic

See an uplift in landing page visits from referral, the lead source of acquisition for early-stage startups.

Delivered however you want, live

Slack E-Mail RSS API

It pays for itself if you find just
one customer (easy)

Small

$19.95 /month
$16.62 /month
  • 3 filters
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Medium

$39.95 /month
$33.29 /month
  • 20 filters
  • Slack notifications
  • Twitter monitoring
  •  

Full

$99.95 /month
$83.29 /month
  • 100 filters
  • Slack notifications
  • Twitter monitoring
  • Quora monitoring

Examples

Get notified when a new official "Who is hiring?" thread gets created

Get notified when a new remote Go job is posted

Get notified when someone from your team posts something

Get notified about new GitHub Actions

Get notified when someone replies to you

Implementation Details

  • Syften scans Hacker News using the official Hacker News API
  • Syften sees the content from the perspective of a logged-out user
  • Alerts are available with an up to 1-minute delay
  • Only the story has a title (comments do not)
  • Item edits are not tracked

Bugs

  • There is a bug in the API where every once in a while an item is unavailable. Those "invisible" items are displayed on news.ycombinator.com, but cannot be accessed via the API. Hacker News staff is aware of the bug but don't intend to fix it due to ongoing work on a new version of the API. Given that we try to fetch those missing items by scraping the website's html, which goes a little against their recommendations.

Resources

Configure your Hacker News alerts now

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(procrastination is unhealthy)