Hacker News "Who is hiring?" to HubSpot leads, monthly

On the 2nd of every month at 10am ET, turn the latest Hacker News 'Ask HN: Who is hiring?' thread into qualified outbound leads in HubSpot.

My ideal customer profile (edit this before running): B2B SaaS companies, Series A to Series C, actively hiring AI engineers, ML engineers, or platform engineers, based in the US or fully remote. Skip agencies, consultancies, government, crypto, and anyone outside that stage range.

Step 1: find the thread. Use Hacker News Search Posts (Algolia) with the title 'Who is hiring? (Month Year)' for the current month and the filter tags=ask_hn,author_whoishiring. Take the top result's objectID as the canonical thread id. If no thread exists yet for the current month (sometimes it lands late), stop and report that no thread was found.

Step 2: pull the postings. Use Hacker News Get Item on the thread id, then walk the kids array. Each top-level kid is one company's posting. Call Get Item on each kid to fetch the comment text. Ignore deeper replies (those are candidates responding, not companies). Skip kids where deleted or dead is true.

Step 3: parse each posting. From the HTML text, extract: company name, website or domain, roles being hired, remote vs onsite vs hybrid, location(s), tech stack mentioned, and any application email. The format is unstructured so do your best and leave fields empty when not stated. Build a permalink to the original comment in the form https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id={comment_id}.

Step 4: qualify against my ICP above. If the posting clearly does not match, skip it. When in doubt, include it. Track the count of scanned vs matched.

Step 5: dedupe against HubSpot. For each match, use HubSpot Search Companies with a filter on the domain property equal to the extracted domain. If a company with that domain already exists, skip it (do not update existing records).

Step 6: create the company in HubSpot. Use Create Company with: name, domain, city or country if known, plus a short description summarizing the roles and stack. Then use Create Note associated with the new company, where the note body contains the original posting text (HTML stripped to plain text) followed by a 'Source:' line with the Hacker News permalink. This gives a rep full context before reaching out.

Step 7: end the run with a one-paragraph summary: how many top-level postings were scanned, how many matched the ICP, how many were already in HubSpot, and how many new companies were created. Include the thread permalink so I can spot-check.

Rules: never write to existing HubSpot companies, only create new ones. Never touch deeper comment replies. If a posting has no resolvable website domain, skip it (we cannot dedupe without one).

Additional information

What does this prompt do?

Reads the monthly Hacker News 'Who is hiring?' thread on the 2nd of every month, once the post has had a day to fill up with companies.
Reads every top-level company posting and pulls out the company name, website, roles, location, remote policy, tech stack, and any contact email.
Compares each company to the ideal customer profile you describe (industry, stage, hiring focus, geography) and skips the ones that do not fit.
For each match, checks HubSpot first so it never duplicates an existing company, then creates the new company with a note attached containing the original posting and a link back to the comment.

What do I need to use this?

A HubSpot account with permission to create companies and notes.
A short written description of your ideal customer profile (industry, company stage, the kinds of roles they are hiring for, and any geography rules).
Nothing for Hacker News. It is public and does not require a login.

How can I customize it?

Rewrite the ideal customer profile in the prompt to match your own targeting, for example 'fintech, Seed to Series B, hiring backend or data engineers, US only'.
Change the day or time of the run if you want the thread to sit longer before the agent reads it.
Add extra HubSpot fields you want populated, like a custom 'source' property set to 'HN Who is hiring' or a lifecycle stage for new outbound leads.
Send the end-of-run summary somewhere visible, like an email to yourself or a Slack channel, so your team sees how many new leads landed each month.

Frequently asked questions

Where does the agent get the hiring posts from?

From the official monthly 'Ask HN: Who is hiring?' thread on Hacker News, posted on the 1st of every month by the whoishiring account. It reads only the top-level company postings, not the candidate replies underneath.

Will it create duplicate companies in HubSpot?

No. Before creating anything, the agent searches your HubSpot for the company's website domain. If a company with that domain already exists, it is skipped.

How does it decide which companies are a fit?

You describe your ideal customer profile in plain language as part of the prompt. The agent reads each posting and decides match or no match based on the rules you wrote, things like industry, company stage, roles being hired, and location.

What happens to companies that do not match my profile?

They are skipped. Nothing is written to HubSpot for them. The end-of-run summary tells you how many were scanned, how many matched, and how many were created.

Can I run this for a different recurring thread, like 'Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?'

Yes. Tell the agent which monthly Hacker News thread to use and what to extract. The same shape works for any of the recurring whoishiring threads.