Research question
What observable marketing gaps appear most often on the homepages of 100 recent products launched through Show HN, and which gaps should a founder inspect first?
Sampling frame
The collection script reads the latest IDs from the official Hacker News showstories endpoint. When that rolling window does not yield 100 eligible independent homepages, it walks backward from the oldest returned item ID through the official item endpoint until the candidate pool contains 230 Show HN items. It keeps items whose title begins with Show HN: and that link to an external website. It resolves each candidate to the linked origin homepage, removes duplicate hosts, excludes social networks, code hosts, video platforms, and app-store listing pages, and takes the first 100 eligible homepages in reverse-chronological Show HN order.
A page is eligible when it returns HTML and contains at least 25 readable words. Fetches use MarketMaster's SSRF-safe redirect handling, a 12-second timeout, a 2 MB response limit, and at most five redirects.
The dated sample manifest retains the exact item IDs, URLs, extracted fields, results, and exclusion log for auditability. The public CSV replaces the hostname with a 12-character SHA-256 prefix and omits page copy.
Observable signals
These are deterministic page signals, not judgments of business quality or measured conversion performance.
- No explicit audience phrase: the positioning sample does not match a documented set of phrases such as “built for founders” or “helps teams.”
- No action-oriented CTA: no anchor or button label matches common next-step language such as “get started,” “try free,” “book a demo,” “install,” or “download.”
- No concrete proof signal: no precise number, dollar amount, audience count, date, or direct quotation.
- No visible pricing signal: no pricing, plan, trial, billing-period, or dollar-price marker in the sample.
- Weak meta description: absent or outside 70–170 characters.
- No readable H1: the server-returned HTML contains no readable
h1. - Generic phrase marker: MarketMaster's public anti-slop lexicon finds at least one generic phrase marker.
Limitations
- Show HN overrepresents technical, early-stage, and English-language products.
- The sample reflects server-returned HTML on one collection date; client-rendered content can produce false negatives.
- Regex and lexicon signals simplify nuanced copy.
- This study observes homepages only — not traffic, conversion, revenue, or causality.
Dataset license: MIT License.