Get your first 100 users with an empty account history

Your launch post is not ready because the account is empty. Pick two or three communities where your first users already ask questions, answer there for a few weeks, and keep the launch draft ready while the gate forces a wait.

A launch without an existing audience is a test of whether the community will read your work. The first hundred are usually won before the first link goes out. You need a short public record that says you have been useful, not a bio that says you are a founder. Bigger reach can wait.

The restriction is the drafting period

Hacker News introduced a temporary gate on Show HN submissions from brand-new accounts around April 2026. An April 2026 Hacker News thread asking for restrictions on new-account posting received 721 points and 515 comments. The limit was temporary, caused by a large influx of users unfamiliar with the site or its culture. By September 2026, Hacker News was still restricting Show HN submissions from accounts new to the site.

That changes the plan. You do not wait for the restriction to clear and then scramble. You use the wait to make the account history worth checking. A product launch community will often reward a short history of useful comments more than a polished link.

The account history is the launch asset

• Choose two or three communities where your users already are. You need a short list of places where the exact questions your product answers are being asked. Look for a place where a useful comment will be read by the people you need, not the largest audience.
• Make useful comments for two to four weeks. Answer a question, point out a missing edge case, share a small example, or ask for feedback on a narrow problem. The comments should still make sense if your name were removed. The mistake is posting your link first and then explaining yourself.
• Keep a record of your participation. Save the questions you answered, the links you found useful, and the problems you kept seeing. Keep a short note you can read before writing the launch post. This is the unscalable part, and it is the part that works.
• Draft the launch post and demo while the restriction forces a wait. Write the post as if the account already has history. Include the problem, the smallest useful demo, and the first thing a reader should do. You want a post you can paste, not a blank page at launch time. Use the saved questions to shape the opening line.
• Post where the record can survive. If a subreddit or forum has a karma gate, check the rule before you post. The post should stay up long enough for a human to click it and survive the first moderation pass.

A new account's showcase post in r/ClaudeAI was removed on July 22, 2026, under a community rule that blocked showcase content from accounts with fewer than 50 karma. A moderator reapproved the launch post on July 23, 2026, and the dashboard it linked to had 86 cumulative views by the following day. In September 2026, two of the three subreddits checked by an Indie Hackers commenter banned link posts outright. Do not chase every channel.

Manual replies are the first growth channel

Once the post is live, the work is manual. Reply to the first questions, fix the first bugs, and answer the first objections in the thread, not in a separate inbox. Do not run a growth tactic that needs scale to work. The first hundred users are a set of people who saw a useful account, clicked the link, and got a reply.