HN Opportunity Finder

Find warm developer-tool opportunity signals hiding in Hacker News conversations.

This Actor searches recent Hacker News stories and comments, scores them for pain/buying-intent signals, and outputs explainable opportunity records you can review, filter, export, or pipe into your own research workflow.

Why it stands out:

• Free public data source: Hacker News Algolia API. No proxy. No scraping account. No API key.
• Honest lead tiers: separates research chatter from warm leads and rare direct buyer asks.
• Explainable output: every row includes score, matched keywords, pain signals, lead quality, reason, suggested offer, and contact angle.
• Built for action: the run SUMMARY tells you what happened at a glance, including zero-result hints.
• Small useful first run: starts with sane defaults instead of dumping thousands of noisy rows.

Best first run

Use this input first. It keeps the run small and returns the useful middle tier: warm + direct opportunities.

{
  "keywords": ["webhooks", "api"],
  "days": 45,
  "maxResults": 100,
  "outputLimit": 10,
  "minScore": 50,
  "includeWeakSignals": false,
  "requireKeywordMatch": true,
  "excludeHiringPosts": true,
  "excludeShowHN": true,
  "leadQualityMode": "qualified"
}

Expected shape from a live smoke run:

Scanned: 100 HN items
Output: 4 qualified opportunities
Lead quality: 3 warm_lead, 1 direct_lead
Top matched keywords: webhooks, api

The important difference

Most “lead finder” tools blur together three very different things:

1. Someone explicitly asking for a tool.
2. Someone describing a painful workflow.
3. A general market discussion.

This Actor keeps those separate.

Mode	Output	Use when
qualified	warm_lead + direct_lead	You want useful opportunities without research-only chatter. Recommended.
direct_only	direct_lead only	You only want rare explicit asks like “what do you use?” or “I need a tool.” Expect fewer results.
all	research, warm_lead, direct_lead	You want broad market research, topic clustering, and trend discovery.

directLeadOnly=true still works as a legacy alias for leadQualityMode=direct_only.

Good starter niches

Copy one set into keywords:

• postgres, backups, monitoring
• webhooks, api
• kubernetes, deployment, logs
• customer support, zendesk, tickets
• openai, api, costs
• email, deliverability, transactional
• stripe, billing, invoices
• llm, rag, evals
• scraping, data, api

Dataset output

Each dataset item is one opportunity signal.

{
  "id": "example-hn-id",
  "source": "hackernews",
  "type": "story",
  "title": "Ask HN: What's your go-to queue system?",
  "text": "Example HN discussion text...",
  "author": "hn_user",
  "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=example-hn-id",
  "externalUrl": "",
  "points": 3,
  "commentsCount": 2,
  "createdAt": "2026-06-21T14:32:35Z",
  "opportunityScore": 73,
  "painSignals": ["keyword_match", "need", "tool", "service", "api", "queue"],
  "matchedKeywords": ["webhooks", "api"],
  "opportunityType": "developer_platform_need",
  "buyerIntentReason": "States an active need or production pressure.",
  "suggestedOffer": "A small API, integration, or hosted developer utility for webhooks, api.",
  "contactAngle": "Ask a narrow follow-up about the pain behind webhooks, api; validate before building.",
  "estimatedValue": "medium",
  "whyNow": "Recent HN discussion; best used as a lead or research signal while context is fresh.",
  "difficulty": "medium",
  "leadQuality": "direct_lead",
  "leadQualityReason": "Direct ask plus buying, operational, or high-score pain signal.",
  "directLead": true,
  "opportunity": "Research this pain point around webhooks, api",
  "suggestedAction": "Save for market research; cluster with similar items before building.",
  "searchKeywords": ["webhooks", "api"],
  "lookbackDays": 45
}

Run summary

The Actor also writes a SUMMARY key-value record for quick review:

{
  "query": {
    "keywords": ["webhooks", "api"],
    "leadQualityMode": "qualified"
  },
  "count": 4,
  "summary": {
    "scannedCount": 100,
    "candidateCount": 4,
    "outputCount": 4,
    "leadQuality": {"warm_lead": 3, "direct_lead": 1},
    "opportunityTypes": {
      "operational_reliability": 1,
      "developer_platform_need": 2,
      "paid_alternative": 1
    },
    "topMatchedKeywords": ["webhooks", "api"],
    "directLeads": 1,
    "warmLeads": 3,
    "researchSignals": 0,
    "zeroResultHint": ""
  }
}

If a run returns zero items, zeroResultHint tells you the next useful move: broaden keywords, lower minScore, switch from direct_only to qualified, or use all for market research.

Practical workflows

Use this Actor to:

• find developer pain points worth validating
• monitor a niche before building a SaaS/productized service
• collect raw market language for landing pages
• discover “what do you use?” recommendation threads
• compare warm opportunity volume across niches
• feed lead/opportunity rows into Sheets, Airtable, Notion, or your CRM

Input tips

• Start with 2-3 specific keywords.
• Prefer product/pain terms over generic words.
• Good: webhooks, api, queue.
• Weak alone: software, startup, data.
• Keep excludeHiringPosts=true unless researching hiring demand.
• Keep excludeShowHN=true unless doing competitor/product-discovery.

Local API mode

The same logic can run as a FastAPI app for local or hosted HTTP access.

cd hn-opportunity-api
python -m venv .venv
. .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e '.[test]'
uvicorn hn_opportunity_api.app:app --app-dir src --host 0.0.0.0 --port 8000

Example:

http://localhost:8000/v1/opportunities?keywords=webhooks,api&days=45&maxResults=100&outputLimit=10&minScore=50&leadQualityMode=qualified

Privacy and data source notes

• No secrets are required.
• No Apify Proxy is required.
• No paid data source is required.
• Results are generated from public Hacker News data returned by the HN Algolia API.
• Runtime output can include public HN usernames and post/comment text because those are part of the source data.
• Treat results as opportunity signals to validate, not guaranteed buyers.

Development

python -m venv .venv
. .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e '.[test]'
pytest -q
uvx ruff check .