Show HN Founder Lead Extractor

Turn Hacker News "Show HN" launches into ready-to-pitch founder leads.

For each Show HN post, this Actor discovers the story via HN's official keyless Algolia API, resolves the founder's own project website (the story url, or a link in the post body), and enriches that site with the same MX/DNS-verified email + phone + social + tech-stack + A–D lead score layer used across the API Factory lead-extractors. Each lead also carries project metadata (HN points, author, launch date) and a fresh-founder-readiness signal (HN traction + launch recency + contactability → A–D grade).

No HN author/commit emails are mined (that is the ToS-gray personal-data harvest we reject). The contact always comes from the founder's own project website.

No API keys. No residential proxy. No compose cost. Works straight out of the box — HN's Algolia endpoint is public and keyless, and we fetch each founder's own public site directly.

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Use cases

• Founder / VC outreach — find founders who just launched in a space you care about (AI agents, dev tools, fintech…), with a verified contact on their project site.
• Agency / dev-tool vendor prospecting — sell hosting, observability, auth, payments, or growth tools to freshly-launched projects that don't have a vendor stack yet.
• Monitoring / "newly launched since last run" — schedule with sinceDays to get only Show HN launches from the trailing N days.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
searchQueries	string[]	["Show HN"]	Keywords to discover Show HN launches. Use the literal Show HN to sweep all launches. Only stories whose title starts with Show HN: are kept.
maxPerQuery	int	10	Cap per query (1–50).
sinceDays	int	0	Keep only launches from the trailing N days. 0 = all time. Monitoring mode.
minPoints	int	0	Minimum HN points (community traction).
verifyEmails	bool	true	MX/DNS-validate the best contact email's domain.
enrichWebsite	bool	true	Fetch the founder's project site for emails/phones/socials/tech. Disable for metadata-only runs.
concurrency	int	5	Parallel launches enriched (1–10).
proxyConfiguration	object	{}	Optional — only if you hit rate limits.

Provide searchQueries and/or sinceDays. With neither a keyword nor a recency filter the Actor sweeps all-time Show HN launches.

Output

One dataset item per Show HN launch that resolves a project website:

{
  "inputQuery": "Show HN",
  "storyId": "42797260",
  "title": "Show HN: I made an open-source laptop from scratch",
  "author": "Hello9999901",
  "points": 3237,
  "launchDate": "2025-01-22T20:41:52+00:00",
  "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42797260",
  "projectUrl": "https://www.byran.ee/posts/creation/",
  "storyExcerpt": "Hello! I spent the past ~6 months engineering a laptop…",
  "emails": ["..."],
  "emailVerified": true,
  "phones": ["..."],
  "socials": {"github": "..."},
  "techStack": ["Cloudflare", "React"],
  "founderReadiness": "A",
  "founderLabel": "Prime fresh-founder target — strong HN traction, recently launched, reachable contact.",
  "leadScore": "A",
  "hasContact": true
}

Launches with no external project website (text-only Ask-HN-style posts) or no contact signal are returned as metadata-only rows and are not billed.

Pricing (pay-per-successful-result)

Event	Price	When charged
Show HN Founder Lead (primary)	$0.008	once per launch that returns a real contact signal (email/phone/social) from the founder's project site
Verified Founder Email	$0.003	when a launch yields an MX/DNS-validated email
Fresh-Founder-Readiness Signal	$0.001	when the A–D readiness grade is computed
Actor Start	$0.0001	once per run

You are charged per launch that produces a real, contactable lead — never for empty/stale results (the #1 complaint about flat-rate launch-dump scrapers). Pricing is set well above per-run compute cost: there is zero upstream compose cost (self-contained — HN's keyless Algolia API + each founder's own public site).

Real-run sample

Captured from a live Apify run (input: {"searchQueries":["open source"],"maxPerQuery":3}) — the founder of OpenFreeMap ("Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting", 848 HN points):

{
  "inputQuery": "open source",
  "storyId": "41635592",
  "title": "Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting",
  "author": "hyperknot",
  "points": 848,
  "launchDate": "2024-09-24T11:59:22+00:00",
  "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41635592",
  "projectUrl": "https://openfreemap.org/",
  "storyExcerpt": "Hi HN, After 9 years of running my own OpenStreetMap tile server infra for MapHub ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11389989 ), I've open-sourced it and launched OpenFreeMap. You can either self-host or use our public instance. Everything is open-source, including the full production setup — there's no 'open-core' model here. Check out the repo ( https://github.com/hyperknot/openfreemap ).",
  "emails": ["zsolt@openfreemap.org"],
  "emailVerified": true,
  "phones": [],
  "socials": {"twitter": "https://x.com/hyperknot"},
  "techStack": ["Cloudflare"],
  "founderReadiness": "B",
  "founderLabel": "Strong founder prospect — real launch signal and contactable.",
  "leadScore": "A",
  "hasContact": true
}

Verified across distinct inputs — all return real Show HN launches with correct metadata:

Input	Result
{"searchQueries":["Show HN"],"sinceDays":30} (fresh-monitoring)	5 launches from the trailing 30 days; 1 verified contact (team@tilion.dev, MX-verified)
{"searchQueries":["Show HN"],"minPoints":50} (high-traction)	5 launches, 2690–3531 HN points; 2 with contact
{"searchQueries":["open source"]} (keyword)	5 launches incl. the OpenFreeMap sample above + paisa.fyi / restfox.dev

A github.com/... project URL (very common for Show HN) is correctly returned as a metadata-only row (socials: {}, tech: [], hasContact: false) — GitHub repo pages expose no founder business contact and would otherwise leak GitHub's own corporate social links. Such rows are not billed.

Performance & cost

• ~0.5–2s per launch (one keyless Algolia call + one project-site fetch + DNS MX lookup), run concurrently up to concurrency.
• A 10-launch run typically completes in well under a minute.
• Cost ≈ $0.008 × leads_with_contact + the small secondary-event fees. A run that returns 10 contactable leads costs ≈ $0.08 + $0.01 (verified emails).

Troubleshooting

• No results / fewer than expected — the keyword may not appear in recent Show HN titles. Try the literal Show HN (the all-sweep), or lower minPoints. search_by_date (newest-first) is used automatically for the all-sweep and for any recency-filtered run.
• hasContact: false on a launch — the founder's project site had no scrapeable email/phone/social (common for pure GitHub-README launches). The row is still returned with metadata + readiness grade; it is not billed.
• emailVerified: false on a real-looking email — the email parsed from the site but its domain had no live MX record (disposable/misconfigured). Disable verifyEmails to skip the DNS check for faster runs.
• A launch points at news.ycombinator.com — that story had no external project link; we fall back to URLs in the post body, then to a no-contact metadata row (never a guessed address).
• Rate limits — Algolia is generous; a proxy is only needed at very high concurrency against many queries in quick succession.

Frequently asked questions

Does this only find brand-new launches? No — by default it sweeps all "Show HN" launches matching your query, old and new. Use the recency filter if you specifically want fresh launches.

What does founderReadiness actually measure? A combination of the launch's HN points and how recent it is — a highly-upvoted recent launch scores differently than an old post with the same point count that's since gone quiet.

Why is projectUrl sometimes null? Not every Show HN post links to a live product URL in its HN metadata — some are text-only posts. When there's no link, contact enrichment has nothing to work from and returns empty rather than guessing.

Is this scraping Hacker News' website? No — it uses HN's own official, keyless Algolia search API (the same one HN's own search box uses), not HTML scraping.

Related lead-gen Actors

Part of a signal-based B2B lead catalog, each sourced from a different official, keyless public API and each pay-per-verified-result: ATS Hiring-Intent Lead Finder (open-roles hiring signal via Greenhouse/Lever/Ashby), GitHub Org / Dev-Tool Lead Extractor (repo-traction signal), Show HN Founder Lead Extractor (launch-traction signal), Hugging Face AI Org Lead Extractor (AI-adoption signal), SEC Form D Funded Company Lead Extractor (fresh-funding signal), Steam Game Studio Lead Extractor (shipped-product signal), Website Contact & Company Extractor (bring-your-own-domain-list enrichment).