> "Here's a successful formula, but takes some time."
Have you looked at the very first sentence of the OP's submission? Their investors are not going to wait around for any of that. The OP all but outright says they want a "lever" that they can use repeatedly that pops a marketing submission to the HN front page as a gauge of interest to satisfy investors and secure funding. That isn't reliably possible even for longtime HN users with a solid posting history and high karma (and thank heavens for that or HN would be a very different place).
Exactly. My response was the polite version of "your investors are using HN as a gating factor, and the gate isn't really gameable."
And if it did become a game, it would become pretty worthless (liked LinkedIn).