Find Product Feedback on Hacker News with the SocialListeningAPI MCP

If you're building a product oriented at developers, Hackernews is a great place to find customers and talk about your product.

Unfortunately going in and manually doing product research is time consuming so we're going to use Claude + SociallisteningAPI to do this workflow for us.

SocialListeningAPI lets Claude search public Hacker News stories and comments through its MCP. Claude can group the results into problems, workarounds, comparisons, etc.

This can ask important questions such as:

• Which setup problems appear repeatedly?
• What workarounds are developers building?
• Why do people reject products in this category?
• Which pricing limits cause complaints?
• What questions appear in Show HN launch threads?

Connect SocialListeningAPI to Claude

SocialListeningAPI has a published Claude Connector:

1. Create a SocialListeningAPI account.
2. Open Claude's connector settings.
3. Find SocialListeningAPI and select Connect.
4. Sign in and approve access to your workspace credits.
5. Start a new chat with the connector enabled.

Use this product-feedback prompt

Replace the category and competitor name before running it:

Use the SocialListeningAPI connector to search Hacker News for:
- API monitoring setup
- API monitoring too expensive
- alternative to CompetitorName
- how do you monitor API failures
- self hosted API monitoring
- Show HN API monitoring
- Ask HN monitoring tools

Find product problems, current workarounds, named comparisons, pricing objections, and setup
questions.

Group useful results into:
1. Repeated problems
2. Current workarounds
3. Product comparisons
4. Requests with weak evidence

For every result, include whether it is a story or comment, author, publication date, problem,
workaround, short supporting excerpt, and source URL.

Do not turn one comment into a general product claim. Keep uncertain results separate. Do not
suggest replies or contact anyone.

How this helps do product research

This workflow shows how you can automate social listening so that you don't need to subscribe to a dedicated social listening tool and pay a ton of money just to access social media data.

You can use the brief for:

• Find language for landing pages and documentation
• Identify setup friction worth fixing
• See which competitors enter real buying decisions
• Find workarounds that may point to a product gap
• Separate repeated problems from one-off opinions

Open the full Hacker News discussion before making a decision. Check the date, surrounding replies,
and whether another commenter corrected the claim. One confident comment is still one comment.

Check the same problem on other sources

Hacker News is full of developers. If a theme looks useful, ask Claude to search the same phrase on Reddit, LinkedIn, X, YouTube, or Google through the same MCP.

Use the extra sources to find different examples and language. Do not combine the counts and present them as survey data.

Conclusion

SocialListeningAPI supplies current public search results. Claude groups and summarizes them. The MCP does not provide scheduling, stored history, continuous monitoring, deduplication, sentiment analysis, or backlog management.

If you want a full fledged social listening product, try Mentionkit. It uses SociallisteningAPI under the hood anyways.

Lastly, I hope you found this post helpful. If you want any suggestions for your own workflow, or want to know more about social listening and how it works, write a comment below.