16 Comments, 6 Insights: Using HN and Reddit as a Positioning Lab

I spent an afternoon writing 16 comments across Hacker News and Reddit. Not to promote anything — to test which pain points actually resonate with developers. The result: 6 content principles I now use to decide what to build, what to write about, and how to position my product. Here's the method. The Method: Comments as Micro-Experiments The premise is simple: a comment is the cheapest possible A/B test. Writing a blog post takes hours. A landing page rewrite takes days. A comment takes 2 minutes. If it gets upvoted, the angle works. If it's ignored, you saved yourself a blog post nobody would read. The process: Find hot posts in your domain (automation, scraping, developer tools, AI) Write a comment that tests a specific angle — one pain point, one insight Track which angles get traction Turn validated angles into blog posts and landing page copy I posted across 10 subreddits and HN front-page posts spanning AI, infrastructure, open source, and developer tools. The 6 Insights #1 Sile