Hacker News is a poor place to advertise and a good place to be found. The site's own guidelines say "Please don't use HN primarily for promotion," so a post that reads like an ad dies quickly. What works for freelancers and small agencies is narrower: the monthly "Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?" thread, plain technical answers in comment threads, and a profile that does the selling for you. The people reading are founders, engineers and technical leads, which makes it useful if you build software, write for developers, or do design and security work for tech companies.

Who is actually there

Hacker News skews toward people who build things: startup founders, engineers, infrastructure people and the occasional investor. That is a strange audience for a wedding photographer and a good one for a developer who fixes slow databases. Before you spend an hour here, ask one question: does a person who reads this site hire what I sell? If your buyer is a dentist or a restaurant owner, close the tab and use LinkedIn or a local list instead.

The monthly freelancer thread

An account called whoishiring posts a set of threads at the start of each month. One of them is for people offering freelance work and for people looking for freelancers. Each top-level comment is one short pitch, and readers scan the whole list. Read two or three past months first so you see what a good one looks like. The ones that get replies share a few habits:

  • They say what the person does in the first line, in plain words ("Backend developer, Postgres and Python").
  • They give a location or time zone and whether they are available now.
  • They link to something real: a portfolio, a repository, a write-up of a past job.
  • They give a way to reach them, usually an email address.
  • They are short. Five lines is plenty.

A post written by a fictional freelancer, Dev Okonkwo, looks like this:

SEEKING WORK | Remote (US Eastern) | Available from December
Backend and data engineer, nine years. I fix slow Postgres queries and write the migration plan so nothing goes down. Recent: cut a nightly report from 41 minutes to 6 for a logistics startup (write-up in my profile).
dev@okonkwo.example

Notice there is no "passionate" and no list of 30 skills. A founder with a slow database recognizes the problem in the second sentence.

Answering questions in threads

The bigger channel is comments. When someone posts "Ask HN: how do I move off a monolithic database without downtime?" and you have done that three times, a clear answer of 150 words with one concrete detail will be read by hundreds of people. Do not end it with a pitch. Put a line in your profile instead. Your profile text is public, so a short sentence there ("I do database migrations for startups, email in profile") is the only call to action you need. The guidelines also ask people not to solicit upvotes or comments, so do not ask friends to push your post.

Posting your own work

Hacker News has a "Show HN" format for things you built. A free tool, a teardown or a benchmark you ran can get real attention, and the guidelines allow you to post your own work some of the time as long as it is not the only thing you do. A freelancer who publishes one honest write-up every couple of months does better than one who submits their services page. Keep the title plain, say what it is and what it does not do, and be ready to answer comments for the first few hours.

Turning attention into an email

Attention here almost never arrives as a hire request. It arrives as a stranger emailing you a question. Answer it fully and fast. If the person describes a real problem, offer a 20 minute call and say what you would look at first. For the other direction, when you see a founder in a thread who clearly has the problem you solve, look for their company site and write a short note from the address on your own domain. Mention the thread, say one specific thing you noticed, and ask a single question. Include your name and a mailing address and a line that lets them say stop, as US commercial email requires under the FTC's CAN-SPAM rules, which give you 10 business days to honor an opt-out. For wording, see how to cold email a potential client.

What gets you ignored or flagged

  • Replying to every thread with a link to your site.
  • A brand-new account whose only activity is promotion.
  • Claims you cannot back up. Readers will check.
  • Arguing with critics. Thank them, fix the point if they are right, and move on.

A realistic budget

Give it 30 minutes a week for six weeks: one month's freelancer post, two useful comments a week, and one longer write-up. At the end, count emails received and calls booked. If the count is zero, your buyers are somewhere else, and Indie Hackers or X may fit better.

The part that takes the most time is not writing the post, it is finding the founders who match after the thread has moved on. Rocketship does that part: describe the company you want to work for, see the first people by name, and it emails them from your own Gmail and follows up. Try it for 7 days, card required to begin.