Automate a daily Hacker News mention monitor for your product

A thread on Hacker News can rise and fall in a day. If your product is named in a comment, the author rarely tells you. The useful moments are small: a user reports a bug in public, a buyer asks for alternatives, a competitor is compared with you. Checking by hand works for a week and then stops, because the search is dull and the payoff is irregular. A daily digest makes the check cheap to keep.

You add the job with your product name and domain. Each day a scheduled agent calls the public Hacker News search endpoint sorted by date, searching stories and comments separately through the tags filter, limited to items created since the previous run. Results carry a title or text, url, author, points, comment count and creation time where they apply. The agent keeps items that really contain your name or domain, drops repeats from earlier days, and records points and discussion size so you can see which threads matter. It reads and reports, and posts nothing.

The CMO agent, as department head, reviews the digest before it goes out: are the matches real, is a story kept apart from a comment, is any suggested action reasonable. Then you approve, edit or skip it, and nothing is sent until you do. Run it for two weeks and compare the digest with a manual search so you know it misses nothing you care about.

Most mentions need nothing, and a few need a careful human reply. A bug report deserves a fix and, if you choose, a short public answer from your own account. A comparison thread shows how buyers describe the problem, which is useful for your own copy. Hacker News guidelines ask people not to use the site primarily for promotion, so the digest is for listening, not for planning campaigns. Keep terms specific, because short product names match unrelated stories, and tighten the list whenever a digest fills with noise.