HN Who's Hiring: UK Startups
I run this monthly to find early-stage UK startups actively hiring, the companies I want to work with.
The problem
HN Who's Hiring turns Hacker News' monthly hiring thread into a curated database of early-stage UK startups. The problem it solves: those threads are a goldmine of early-stage hiring intelligence, but filtering thousands of posts for UK roles by hand, then checking each company's funding stage, takes hours every month.
The approach
- 01 Fetch
- 02 Pre-filter
- 03 Extract
- 04 Funding check
- 05 Log
- 01 Fetch
The pipeline pulls Hacker News' current "who's hiring" thread in full.
- Every comment in the monthly thread is retrieved through Hacker News' API.
- 02 Pre-filter
Non-UK posts are removed before any AI runs.
- A keyword filter drops posts with no UK signal up front.
- This happens before the AI step, so the expensive part only ever sees relevant posts, a real cost cut, not a rounding error.
- 03 Extract
Claude reads each remaining UK post and structures it.
- It pulls company name, open roles, tech stack, and location out of free-text hiring posts.
- 04 Funding check
Each company is checked against its funding stage, early-stage only.
- An Apify Crunchbase lookup returns each company's stage; Series B and later are filtered out.
- Companies with no Crunchbase record are kept by default, because for an early-stage startup a missing record is usually a signal, not noise.
- The lookup only runs in the first half of the month, which roughly halves the Apify cost without losing coverage.
- 05 Log
Results are written to a Google Sheet, newest first.
- Rows are deduplicated by Hacker News comment ID, so re-running the pipeline never doubles an entry.
Engineering challenges
- Spending budget only where it pays
A hiring thread is thousands of posts, most irrelevant, and every AI call and Crunchbase lookup costs money.
- Run the AI over every post and most of the spend goes on posts that were never UK roles.
- Look every company up on Crunchbase every day and you pay for the same lookup over and over.
The pipeline filters before it spends, and spends on a schedule.
- A cheap keyword pre-filter removes non-UK posts before the AI step ever sees them.
- The Crunchbase lookup runs only in the first half of each month, cutting that API cost roughly in half with no loss of coverage.
- Early-stage when the data is missing
The feed is for early-stage UK startups, but "early-stage" isn't stamped on a hiring post.
- A post says who's hiring, not what funding stage the company is at.
- And many genuinely early companies have no Crunchbase record at all.
Funding stage is resolved externally, and a missing record is read correctly.
- An Apify Crunchbase lookup supplies the stage; Series B and later are filtered out.
- A company with no Crunchbase record is kept, not dropped, because for early-stage startups absent data is itself a signal.
The workflow
