"We reached #1 on Show HN and stayed there for over 12 hours. This wouldn't have happened without Jakub's feedback."
GlassFlow had most of what a strong Show HN launch needs: an open-source product, a genuinely technical infrastructure problem, and founders who could explain how they had solved it.
The first draft was promising. But the most interesting parts of the story were still buried.
Armend sent me the Show HN draft shortly before the planned launch.
The core story was there, but it stayed too high-level. It explained what GlassFlow did without showing enough of the technical pain, the alternatives the team had tried, or the decisions behind the product.
That matters on Hacker News. A Show HN post is not a press release or a polished founder pitch. People want to understand:
The draft answered some of those questions, but made readers work too hard to find the answers. Btw I cross referenced it vs my guide on How to launch a dev tool on Hacker News to assess.
There were also places where the language sounded more like business messaging than one developer explaining a problem to another.
The answer wasn’t to make the post more clever. It was to make it more specific.
I recommended rebuilding the narrative around a simple sequence:
We also reworked the title and one-liner, added the missing technical specifics, and made the pain behind the product much more concrete.
The Show HN post was only the beginning of the journey.
If the launch worked, developers would visit the website, inspect the GitHub repository, look for documentation, and decide whether trying GlassFlow was worth their time.
I asked the team to audit that path before sending a large amount of attention into it. A successful launch does not help much if an interested developer cannot quickly understand what to do next.
The team made the right decision: postpone the launch by a few days and do the additional work.
They rewrote the post, added much more technical depth, explained the failed alternatives, and made it much clearer how GlassFlow solved the problem.
This distinction matters. I diagnosed what the story /developer journey was missing and recommended the changes (they audited their core developer journey). Armend and the GlassFlow team did the execution, and they did it very well.
The rebuilt post reached #1 on Show HN and remained there for more than 12 hours.
More importantly, it brought the team the kind of technical attention and discussion they had hoped for.
The result did not come from a headline trick. It came from presenting a strong technical product in the detail, language, and tone its audience expected.
This is what Armend had to say about this:
When preparing our Hacker News post, I already knew that the one resource I needed to check was Jakub's article about it.
After drafting my first version, I asked him for feedback. What he provided in a very short time was on point.
He guided me from a draft that was too high-level into a more technical but more straightforward explanation of GlassFlow, which was perfect for the Hacker News crowd.
We reached #1 on Show HN and stayed there for over 12 hours. This wouldn't have happened without Jakub's feedback.
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