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Show HN Lead Scraper

Pulls Show HN, Launch HN, and Ask HN posts from Hacker News. Returns a clean CSV of company URLs ready to feed into the AI Sales Personalizer for personalized outreach.

Built as the companion to the AI Sales Personalizer actor. Together they form a complete B2B lead pipeline: discover startups on HN, personalize cold openers per company.

Why this is useful

Hacker News Show HN and Launch HN posts are the highest-density B2B startup discovery feed available. Every weekday, founders post fresh products with descriptions, links, and an upvote signal that reflects real audience interest.

The output is CSV-ready for:

• B2B SDR teams targeting tech startups (the people on HN actively want to be reached)
• VC scouts tracking new launches in their thesis areas
• Recruiters finding companies that are hiring
• Partnership teams at SaaS companies looking for integration targets
• Content marketers sourcing customer interviews and case studies

What you get back per result

Pricing

• Preview mode: $0 (returns 10 results max, no charges, use to verify the actor)
• Standard: $0.01 per lead returned (charged via lead_returned event)

Typical campaigns:

• 100 fresh launches: $1
• 500 launches across 30 days: $5
• 2,000 launches across 90 days: $20

Compare to manual scraping (3-4 hours of work) or a Crunchbase Pro subscription ($199/month).

How to use it

1. Click Try for free with preview_mode ticked.
2. Set post_types to ["Show HN", "Launch HN"] for B2B product launches. Add "Ask HN" if you want help-seeking posts (often founders surfacing real problems).
3. Set days_back to 14 for fresh, 90 for retrospective batch runs.
4. Set min_upvotes to filter quality. 5 = recent + some traction. 50 = popular. 100+ = front-page.
5. (Optional) include_keywords: only include posts mentioning specific terms ("ai", "saas", "developer tool").
6. (Optional) exclude_keywords: skip "crypto", "web3", "nft" if those are not your ICP.
7. (Optional) max_results: hard cap.
8. Hit Start. Results stream into the dataset.

The pipeline: combine with AI Sales Personalizer

This actor returns URLs. The AI Sales Personalizer turns each URL into a personalized cold-outreach opener.

The full pipeline:

1. Run Show HN Lead Scraper with post_types: ["Show HN", "Launch HN"], days_back: 14, min_upvotes: 25. Get back 50 to 200 fresh launches.
2. Export the url column as CSV.
3. Feed that CSV into AI Sales Personalizer with your product pitch.
4. Get back 50 to 200 personalized openers, one per HN launch.
5. Push into Smartlead or your sequencer for sending.

Total cost: roughly $2 (Show HN scrape) + $30 (200 personalizations at $0.15 each) = $32. For 200 fresh, personalized B2B leads.

Compare to Clay's $149/month or an SDR's $4,500/month, and only $32 buys you exactly what you need.

What this actor does NOT do

• It does not extract email addresses from the linked sites. Use Apollo, Clearbit, or Hunter for that.
• It does not scrape comments. The thread URL is provided so you can read them yourself.
• It does not produce personalized openers. Use the AI Sales Personalizer for that.
• It does not send emails. Use Smartlead, Lemlist, or Instantly.

Tips

1. Run weekly with days_back: 7 to maintain a fresh pipeline of new B2B targets.
2. Use min_upvotes: 25 as the default filter. Below 25, the noise-to-signal ratio is high. Above 100, you compete with everyone who reads HN.
3. For VC/scout use cases, drop min_upvotes to 1 to catch early launches before they go viral.
4. Pair with include_keywords for niche targeting. Example: "developer tool, devops, observability" to focus on infrastructure plays.

FAQ

Q: Is this allowed by HN? The official HN Algolia API is public, documented, and rate-limited. We respect the rate limits.

Q: Are these high-quality leads? Show HN and Launch HN are some of the highest-signal launch feeds available, by design. Founders self-select to be discovered. That said, like all lead sources, you should still personalize and segment.

Q: Refund policy? Apify's standard refund policy. Preview mode is free so you can verify quality before paying. Failed scrapes (HN API down) are not charged.

Tags

leads lead-generation hacker-news show-hn launch-hn b2b startup-discovery sales sdr outbound

Built by Emily Ward, Sydney. Pairs natively with the AI Sales Personalizer actor.