What is Customer Finder?

Customer Finder is a free tool that turns your website or product description into a targeted Google search across Reddit, LinkedIn, X, Hacker News, Quora, and 25+ other communities. It surfaces threads where people are already asking for what you sell, so you can join an existing conversation instead of starting one cold.

How does Customer Finder find customers?

Paste your URL or describe your product. An LLM picks the most relevant communities and keywords for your product, then builds a Google search using site: operators. You land on a normal Google results page filtered to threads matching your ideal customer profile — typically complaints, recommendations, and product comparisons.

Is Customer Finder really free?

Yes. No signup, no credit card to try it. The paid plan (USD 19 per month) adds unlimited searches plus a daily digest of new conversations matching your product, delivered to your inbox.

What communities does Customer Finder search?

Reddit, LinkedIn, X (Twitter), Hacker News, Quora, Indie Hackers, Product Hunt, GitHub, Stack Overflow, and 20 more — 30+ communities covering B2B, B2C, indie founder, and developer audiences. The picker auto-selects the best 5-9 communities for your product so you do not drown in irrelevant results.

How is Customer Finder different from Sales Navigator or cold outreach?

Sales Navigator and cold-email tools find people who might want what you sell. Customer Finder finds people who have already said they want it — warm intent expressed publicly. You enter an existing conversation about a need, instead of interrupting someone's day with an unsolicited pitch.

Will I get banned posting on Reddit?

Only if you spam. The communities Customer Finder surfaces are public, but each one has rules — most prohibit overt selling. The right approach: comment helpfully, answer the original question, and mention your product only if it is directly relevant and the rules allow it. Learn each community's norms before going wider.

Hacker News for Customer Discovery: A Practical Guide

Published 21 May 2026~8 min read

Hacker News works for customer discovery if your product is technical, developer-facing, or 'interesting' to a startup audience. The three patterns: a well-timed Show HN can produce 50-500 signups in 24 hours from a high-credibility audience; Ask HN threads surface direct buyer intent for tooling; and Google's site:news.ycombinator.com operator finds historical threads where your category was discussed.

Who Hacker News works for (and doesn't)

HN's audience is heavily concentrated in: software engineers, infrastructure/devops, AI/ML practitioners, startup founders, and tech-adjacent investors. If your product serves any of those, HN is one of the highest-leverage free channels you have. If your product is for marketers, designers, lawyers, accountants, teachers, or consumers — HN is a poor fit. The audience is wrong, and self-promotion gets flagged fast.

Show HN — the one-shot launch

Show HN is a tag for "I built this, here it is". A successful Show HN can deliver 50-500 signups in 24 hours from an audience that, if it's your ICP, converts at very high rates because they know exactly what they're signing up for.

The rules that work in 2026:

Timing: Submit Tuesday-Thursday, between 7am and 10am Pacific Time. That overlaps with US East Coast mid-morning and European evening — the two biggest blocks of HN traffic.
Title: Show HN: [Product] – [What it does in <10 words]. No clickbait, no hype. Direct titles outperform clever ones on HN.
First comment: Post immediately after submission. Explain why you built it, the technical approach, the limitations. Be honest about what's broken — HN respects builders who acknowledge tradeoffs.
Engage in the first 6 hours: Respond to every comment, even hostile ones. The thread dies if you go silent.

A common Show HN antipattern: launching with no website, no landing page, no signup form — just a GitHub README. HN will click, see no path forward, and bounce. Have your landing page and signup ready before you post.

Ask HN — finding buyer-intent threads

Ask HN is where the community asks each other for recommendations. Examples that appear regularly:

"Ask HN: What's the best [category] tool for [use case]?"
"Ask HN: How do you handle [problem]?"
"Ask HN: Looking for a SaaS that does X — does it exist?"

These are gold for B2B SaaS founders. Use Algolia's HN search (hn.algolia.com) — it's the canonical way to search HN — with your category keywords, sorted by date. Bookmark the searches and check daily.

Reply only when the question explicitly matches your product and you have a substantive answer. Be transparent that you're the founder. HN community tolerates founder responses in Ask HN threads if they're genuinely helpful and disclosed; it downvotes pitches.

Historical search — site:news.ycombinator.com

Google indexes HN deeply. The site:news.ycombinator.com operator surfaces historical discussions of your category, your competitors, or problems your product solves. Examples:

site:news.ycombinator.com [your competitor] — past discussions of competing products, often with comparisons.
site:news.ycombinator.com "[problem statement]" — threads where people described the problem you solve.
site:news.ycombinator.com alternative [category] — switching-intent threads.

Even threads from 2-3 years ago are useful — they tell you what the buyer journey looked like and what objections were raised. Customer Finder includes HN as one of its 30+ communities; paste your URL on the homepage to run these searches automatically.

Reading HN threads for product insight

HN's comment culture skews toward technical critique and contrarian takes. That makes it especially useful for product feedback because complaints are surfaced rather than hidden. Patterns to look for:

"Why didn't you use [tech]?" — when this appears in three threads about your competitor, you've found a stack-choice complaint that's table-stakes for your differentiation.
"This is just [existing thing]" — comparison to incumbent solutions, often with specific reasons. These comments tell you what you have to be different from.
"I'd pay X for this if it…" — direct willingness-to-pay signal with feature gating.

What doesn't work on HN

Self-promotional submissions outside Show HN. Posting your product as a link without Show HN gets flagged and removed.
Marketing copy in comments. Comments that read like ads get downvoted into invisibility (collapse threshold). Engineering-style honest comments rise.
Astroturfing. Multi-account upvoting is detected. Mods (specifically dang) email founders directly when they see it. The brand penalty is permanent.

The HN cadence

Realistic cadence for an indie founder:

Once a quarter: a major Show HN for a real milestone (initial launch, version 2.0, major feature).
Daily 5-10 minutes: check Ask HN search for your category, reply substantively when relevant.
Monthly: historical search of competitors and category, look for patterns.

This is enough to make HN a recurring source of signups and product feedback without burning hours per day.

Frequently asked questions

When is the best time to post a Show HN?

Tuesday through Thursday, between 7am and 10am Pacific Time. That overlaps US East Coast mid-morning with European evening — the two largest concurrent traffic blocks on HN. Avoid weekends (lower traffic) and Mondays (mods are reviewing weekend submissions and yours can get buried).

What kinds of products work for Hacker News?

Developer tools, infrastructure, AI/ML, security, novel-tech consumer products, and any B2B SaaS aimed at startup-stage companies. Products that don't work well: marketing tools for non-technical buyers, HR tech, sales tech for non-tech industries, traditional B2C, anything regulated. The audience is heavily engineering-skewed.

Can I post the same product on Show HN multiple times?

Yes, for genuine milestones — initial launch, a major version, a significant new capability. Don't re-post the same thing every few months hoping for better traction; HN's mods (dang) will email you directly if they see patterns of self-promotion. One Show HN per real product chapter is fine.

Should I respond to negative comments on a Show HN?

Yes, calmly and substantively. Hostile-toned comments on HN often contain real critiques underneath; engaging with the critique (not the tone) earns respect from the audience reading the thread. Defensive responses or no response both kill the thread. Engineers respect builders who acknowledge tradeoffs.