How to Market an AI Product When 45 Launch a Day
In the last 30 days, 1,355 Show HN posts had "AI", "LLM", "agent", "Claude", "GPT" or "MCP" in the title. That's 45 AI launches a day on one site, about a third of all Show HN posts. If you're working out how to market an AI product, that crowd is the problem to plan around. Putting "AI" in your title doesn't hurt you, though: those posts did about as well as everything else.
I pulled the numbers this morning from the public Hacker News search API, covering September 30 to October 30, 2026. Below is what the launches that broke out had in common, and where the buyers of AI tools ask for help once launch day is over.
What 1,355 AI launches on Show HN got in 30 days
The sample is every Show HN post in the window: 4,194 in total. I split them by whether the title used one of those AI terms.
| Result | AI in the title (1,355) | No AI in the title (2,839) |
|---|---|---|
| Median points | 2 | 2 |
| 2 points or fewer | 69.4% | 68.2% |
| Zero comments | 68.6% | 66.7% |
| 10 points or more | 6.6% (90 posts) | 6.7% (191 posts) |
| 100 points or more | 1.3% (18 posts) | 1.5% (42 posts) |
The two columns are close to identical, so Hacker News readers neither punish nor reward a launch for being AI. The label has stopped carrying information, which matches what First Round's Arielle Jackson wrote about AI brands: "AI accelerates sameness." Only 3 of the 1,355 titles said "AI-powered," and none of them reached 10 points.
The skepticism is in the comments. In the same 30 days, "AI slop" showed up in 551 HN comments and "vibe coded" in 738. Readers will click on an AI launch, and plenty of them arrive looking for signs it was thrown together.
Which AI launch titles beat the average
Splitting the 1,355 AI titles by wording shows a spread. The samples are small and a title stands in for the product behind it, so treat this as a pattern worth testing.
| AI titles that... | Posts | Reached 10+ points |
|---|---|---|
| Say "open source" | 86 | 15.1% |
| Include a "for ..." phrase (who or what it's for) | 423 | 8.7% |
| Mention agents | 565 | 7.4% |
| All AI titles | 1,355 | 6.6% |
| Name Claude | 197 | 4.6% |
| Name MCP | 110 | 4.5% |
Titles that named the model or protocol underneath did worse than the AI average. Titles that said who the tool is for, or that anyone can read the code, did better.
The top AI launches of the month read like descriptions of something you can do or feel. Llmspeed (331 points) lets you "feel how fast a local LLM runs before you buy the hardware." Sphinx (253 points) is "a hook that quizzes you on your AI's code before shipping." A third, "Use your OpenAI subscription to create audiobooks" (175 points), answers the cost question in the title. Each one names a moment in the reader's week, and none of them claims to be smart.
How to market an AI product: sell the job it does
The positioning advice that holds up for AI products is old advice applied harder. Pick one buyer and one job, and compare yourself to the way they do that job today (a spreadsheet, an intern, an afternoon) instead of to other AI tools. RZLT's guide on AI product positioning has a good test for this: hide your brand name on the homepage and ask whether the page could belong to five competitors.
Write the launch title as the job
A title like "AI meeting assistant" puts you next to hundreds of others. Write the task and the person instead: what goes in, what comes out, and for whom. "Turns a sales call into the three follow-ups your rep forgot" is longer, and it's the version someone remembers. If your product works with a model people already pay for, say so, because cost is the first question a skeptic asks about an AI tool.
Answer the trust questions before they're asked
People evaluating an AI tool want to know what it costs to run, where their data goes, which model it uses and what happens when the model is wrong. Put those answers on the page and in your launch post. An open source title answers the data question without a word of copy, which may be part of why those launches reached 10 points more than twice as often.
Where buyers of AI tools ask for one
A launch reaches people who are browsing that day. The person who needs your tool is usually in a thread somewhere else, describing the job in their own words. These are the searches worth running every week on Reddit, Hacker News and X:
| Search for | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| "is there an AI tool that" + your job | Someone wants exactly what you built |
| "[incumbent] alternative" or "cheaper than [incumbent]" | A buyer of a competitor is ready to switch |
| "ChatGPT can't" or "Claude keeps" + your job | They tried a general model and hit the gap you fill |
| "how do you [job]" in your buyer's subreddit | The manual workflow you replace, in their words |
On Hacker News, the best of these conversations happen in comment threads, not on the front page (more on that in Hacker News marketing). On Reddit, each subreddit sets its own self-promotion rules, so read the sidebar before you mention your product. Here's how to promote on Reddit without getting banned. These threads also keep paying after you reply, because Google ranks them and AI assistants quote them (see Reddit SEO for founders).
Reply like a person, especially if you sell AI
If your product is AI, readers will check whether your reply was written by it. With "AI slop" in hundreds of HN comments a month, a reply that reads like a template drags the product down with it, so write it yourself.
- Answer the question first, then mention the tool, and say you built it in the same sentence.
- Give one honest limit ("English only for now," "needs a Claude subscription") so the asker can rule you out fast.
- If another tool fits their case better, name it.
- Read your draft for the six tells that make a reply sound like AI before you post it.
A weekly routine for AI founders
- Post your Show HN once, with the job in the title, and stay in the comments that day.
- Each week, run the four searches above for your job and the two or three tools you replace.
- Reply to the threads from the last few days that are still active.
- Copy the exact phrases people used into your homepage and your next launch title. If three people asked for a tool that "reads my bank statements," that's your headline.
Where Social Cue fits
The weekly searching is what gets skipped once the product needs you. Social Cue is a Claude Code plugin that does it. It runs on the Claude subscription you already have, so there's no extra AI bill and no platform API deal that can be repriced or revoked. It opens a dedicated Chrome window, reads Reddit, Hacker News, X, Threads and Product Hunt the way a person would, scores each thread from 1 to 10 against your product, and drafts a reply in your voice for you to edit. Nothing posts until you approve it.
Scheduling your launch posts is easy, and plenty of tools do it. Posting is solved. Reach isn't, and for an AI product in a crowd of 45 launches a day, reach means being the first good answer when someone describes the job you do. Discovery and drafted replies are free.