[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Is ProductHunt Worth It?
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Ask HN: Is ProductHunt Worth It?
I have a feeling that ProductHunt is only read by people who post
to ProductHunt in a sort of pyramidal echo chamber. Is it the case,
or does ProductHunt reach further than product managers in small
companies?
Author : d--b
Score : 79 points
Date : 2022-01-09 15:40 UTC (7 hours ago)
| marstall wrote:
| (tl;dr: crapshoot as to whether you get featured, but worth it if
| you do.)
|
| my personal experience with it was positive.
|
| I posted my site on PH over the summer (plug: https://avant.fm, a
| customizable feed of new releases from the best indie music
| labels).
|
| After a couple weeks it was featured for a day. Not sure how that
| happened, but someone with some pull "hunted" it I guess. About
| 30 other sites were featured that day.
|
| I eventually made it to #4 and got 1000 hits, roughly, with a
| very slowly decaying tail. I still get a couple referrals a day
| from PH.
|
| Now the traffic was nice, though temporary.
|
| But I also appreciated it as a an additional reason to get out
| there shout about my site. I had already announced it on twitter,
| but this gave the opportunity to spend another day hyping. I made
| a couple twitter posts as I climbed up, and then a final one when
| I had reached my peak and the day was over.
|
| But I also reached out individually to many people via DM or
| email, asking them to upvote me. This was an unique opportunity
| because it's a less awkward ask than "check out my website and
| tell me what you think."
|
| This created some nice networking moments and opportunities where
| I felt like the site got on the radar of a few people in a
| helpful way, hopefully paving the way for something in the
| future.
| sdevonoes wrote:
| From my limited experience, the prototype PH user is someone who
| is into startups/sass/software/design. If such kind of people are
| not your target market, then I see no reason to post your product
| in PH.
| ianbutler wrote:
| I made it to the front page of ProductHunt twice in the last year
| and was above the fold for the first product. In that case it
| drove a couple thousand page views and some signups and for the
| second it drove like 10 signups and a couple hundred views but
| the long-term effect in both cases was negligible. For what it's
| worth it's always cool to see something I've built hit that front
| page but as far outsized effect and the fact that I've since
| canned both projects it's not going to make a difference in your
| viability.
| OJFord wrote:
| As a consumer/user, I take a ProductHunt logo/link/etc. on a
| landing page as a negative signal.
| koshersalt wrote:
| I tried using it a few years ago to find new stuff to use and was
| turned off by the amount of meaningless, buzzword laden
| vaporware. I also didn't like the weird long comment chains
| between the product's founder/cofounders/CTO in an effort to make
| it look like the page was more active or something. It all felt
| shallow and like a shinier version of cork board of business
| cards by the Lowes bathroom
| tnolet wrote:
| My initial launch on ProductHunt was total and utter _crickets_.
| Now we have ~500 customers, multiple $100K in ARR and two rounds
| of venture backing.
|
| Without the humble brag, use a platform like PH as any marketing
| channel: email, blogs, Twitter etc. Never, EVER think a post on
| PH will be your defining marketing launch. Just like there is no
| magic one email, tweet or post that will define your product or
| make/break you. Expect nothing. The real work begins after
| launch.
| emdowling wrote:
| Pre-ProductHunt, HN was the place to launch your product[1].
| Having a "Show HN" post reach the front page was (is?) the
| ultimate brag, and founders would always mention it in
| seed/Series A pitch decks if it had happened to them. Being
| featured on HN would usually mean being contacted by a TechCrunch
| reporter, and that was a Big Deal. So, you'd use your personal
| connections to make sure everyone upvoted your post. If you were
| all in the same location (eg: co-working space), you'd tell
| everyone to use a VPN or tether to their phone to avoid being IP-
| blocked[2].
|
| Then, ProductHunt came along with the pitch to be more curated,
| and to speficially solve the launch promotion problem. Now,
| people have figured out how to game it, just like they did with
| HN.
|
| I fully expect the cycle to continue with a new ProductHunt with
| the same value proposition. For Web3, Twitter seems to be doing
| that job pretty well.
|
| --
|
| [1] The launch of my own startup
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4196585)
|
| [2] Source: I was in 500 Startups Batch 5, and we were all
| advised on how to upvote each other's HN posts in a way to avoid
| bans.
| detaro wrote:
| Echo chamber. Can still be worth it, especially if that's your
| target market, but don't overinvest effort into it. And don't
| expect people to think "#1 on product hunt" to be a signal of
| quality and not of "we couldn't think of anything important to
| tell you about our product instead". (you occasionally see people
| try that e.g. on HN. it doesn't work, at all)
| blakesterz wrote:
| I think you're asking if it's worth to get the things you make on
| ProductHunt?
|
| I can't answer that, I'm not a creator, but I can answer as a
| consumer/user/reader of ProductHunt. I get the weekly digest
| thing and I always read it, and often try things, and share
| things I see there with other people I know that might find that
| "new" thing useful. It's really the only thing I follow to find
| new stuff like that.
| hemmert wrote:
| On its launch day, I posted my side project to ProductHunt:
|
| https://www.producthunt.com/posts/escape-team
|
| It got #2 Product of the Day, 563 upvotes (its 'GIF trailer'
| helped a lot, I think!) in total.
|
| It was a great launch, despite the community of PH not being too
| board game-savvy. It's a good activity for your launch day - I
| would, however, not link to the PH page directly, but rather make
| a page on your website that embeds their upvote button:
|
| https://www.escape-team.com/out-now-mission-pack-2
|
| (I did that for the first expansion of Escape Team, which got way
| less upvotes and traction as you can see, but that might just be
| the smaller news value of an 'expansion'.)
| hemmert wrote:
| (Not a single (!) journalist contacted me after Escape Team was
| #2 Product of the Day. I would have hoped / guessed that do
| happen, but it didn't.)
| tnolet wrote:
| Why would a journalist contact you?
| handzhiev wrote:
| I got a free product featured there recently. Got a lot of
| traffic but most of it was crap - visits and upvotes without any
| downloads. And that's for a free product - I guess I would not
| make any sales if it was paid.
| paraknight wrote:
| We were #1 product of the day/week on PH and it didn't really
| bring us a lot of new users (fitness product), but it did bring
| us a lot of VC attention (that was all-in-all too early).
| alexbouchard wrote:
| PH takes much more work and strategy but "success" is somewhat
| deterministic if you did your homework. In our case we saw
| similar uptake, signups and conversion then ~20h on HN front page
| over the course of a week. PH had a much higher half-life and we
| saw stable uptake for a few days while HN was all in the first
| few hours.
|
| It was definitely worth it for us. Some of our best customers
| found us on PH and our lead investor first heard of us during our
| launch and reached out.
|
| For the curious product is https://hookdeck.com
|
| As a PH user thought, I'm not sure how much value you should put
| in the ranking..
| ushakov wrote:
| i know i don't need a product when they advertise their
| ProductHunt rating
|
| it's an echo-chamber of marketers trying to push useless/trivial
| products for huge subscription fees
|
| if you add your product you'll get emails from people trying to
| sell you upvotes, then you know how it works
| askcarlos wrote:
| Seriously, It will depend on the type of product you are
| realising. My experience is PH have built an experience that
| forces sign up; therefore, if you don't have an account, your
| can't upVote; consequently, you will only reach those with an
| account to your point. I prefer Niche slack/ discord communities
| where you may know a leader, i.e. for products leaders; I've
| asked a Fiver freelancer to build a list of all slack communities
| that fit my product. Without spamming, you will find the
| connectors and making a list of those may be a better route to
| distribute your product.
| ajimix wrote:
| Been in product hunt since it was invite only beta. Things have
| changed a lot. In the beginning it was a community about hunting
| great products and nice discoveries.
|
| Nowadays is about paying hunters with a lot of followers to post
| your products and asking all your network to upvote your product
| to brag about how you made it to top X of Product Hunt.
|
| The posting about nice products of the internet and discovering
| them is now gone. If you try to publish something because you
| found it online and want to share it with the community, but you
| don't have a network of people to "fakely" upvote it, the product
| will be hidden at the bottom and nobody will see it.
|
| Discovery and community are gone.
| arisAlexis wrote:
| Paying?
| nopenopenopeno wrote:
| About a decade ago, I started a few side businesses that I
| believe, in retrospect, were entirely reliant on a few of my
| personal connections with associates of popular blogs, most
| notably Hypebeast.
|
| Startup culture refers to this loss of curation as
| "democratization" which is a cynical gesture that really just
| means replacing things like person connections with a 'highest
| spender' promotion industry that is even more dishonest than
| the curation model. Neither model is democratic in any sense.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| > Startup culture refers to this loss of curation as
| "democratization" which is a cynical gesture that really just
| means replacing things like person connections with a
| 'highest spender' promotion industry that is even more
| dishonest than the curation model. Neither model is
| democratic in any sense.
|
| For a second there I thought you were talking about the
| crypto and NFT space. Still accurate.
| specialist wrote:
| Yup. "Pay to play."
| steelstraw wrote:
| Is there anything they could do to fix this?
| antupis wrote:
| Start new community around new products.
| anyfactor wrote:
| Worked in a social media startup , want to build one too. My
| opinion -
|
| - High level human moderation.
|
| - Country based communities
|
| - Actually creating services around the community to justify
| a subscription to participate model. You can't build any
| community where people without stake in it, gets to control
| it.
|
| ----
|
| But this comes with the obvious problem of, this won't never
| work. People won't simply signup because there is so much
| loops to jump through to say something freely.
| ushakov wrote:
| implement voting ring detection like on HN
| akadeb wrote:
| so that highlights content that has been upvoted by the
| majority?
| anyfactor wrote:
| I used to be active in various startup subreddits. 2 years ago,
| I will get 2-3 requests per month to upvote their product.
| Those requests even though against producthunt's TOS seemed
| decent and was backed by real people.
|
| Last year I was geting 1-3 spams per week on reddit. They were
| literally zero karma same day accounts. And those products were
| hitting top 5 of the day and staying there. Generic newsletter
| services and repurposed ideas with an SAAS branding.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| I get the impression that _almost every time_ a product-rating
| service becomes highly popular, it get coopted (or at least
| seriously compromised) by sellers. E.g., Amazon reviews, and This
| Old House (Bob Villa).
|
| The only exceptions I can think of are Consumer Reports, and
| probably large newspapers. But I cringe that even relatively
| trusted sources like Reddit, Home Depot customer reviews, and
| RTings are doomed to this fate.
|
| Is this simply as inevitable as death and taxes? Or is there some
| reason to hope for progress?
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| This seems like a game theory problem, doesn't it?
| almogbaku wrote:
| petilon wrote:
| Posting on ProductHunt, if you're a small company, can be
| harmful. Program Managers of big companies prowl this site,
| looking for interesting ideas to copy.
| brianwawok wrote:
| If the only value of your business is an idea to add on to
| another business that is trivial to copy, rather you get shut
| down sooner than later.
| petilon wrote:
| Timing matters. A big company can snuff out a small
| competitor if they respond quickly, before the small
| competitor gets a chance to take root. Once it takes root it
| is harder to snuff out. So it makes sense to stay out of
| sight of big competitors until you have had a chance to
| establish.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| No.
| autonomousErwin wrote:
| Is that a "No" to "Is Product Hunt worth it?" or a "No" to
| "it's a pyramidal echo chamber..."?
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Yes.
| underyx wrote:
| It's a "No" to "Did you care to read the discussion and make
| a meaningful contribution?"
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Not worth it. You get a tiny number of visits (compared to
| what you need to make a viable marketing plan.) The people
| who visit are interested in their own products, not in yours.
|
| If your product was something that guaranteed some other
| product could get a handful of visits from Product Hunt that
| would be a good product for Product Hunt.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Not used it in years, conversion rate fell. Eventually ended up
| much like SoundCloud where it's mainly creators rather than
| consumers.
| pictur wrote:
| Since producthunt first came out, it's a weird community with
| just people clapping. I don't really understand what it does
| exactly
| ushakov wrote:
| yeah right, it's like founder's church
|
| when you launch everyone claps and congratulates
| bze12 wrote:
| A lot of startup/indie people take product hunt as false
| validation. It's only worth it if you're launching a tool for
| startups or remote work or something like that, anything else
| you're just getting a false positive signal from early tech
| adopters. PH also lacks the sometimes brutal, honest feedback
| that HN has.
| replwoacause wrote:
| Most of the comments on I see on Product Hunt look like they were
| paid for, are made in broken English, and sometimes don't make
| any sense. I don't trust what I see there.
| askcarlos wrote:
| No
| kmckiern wrote:
| Who is your ideal user? Do you think this person frequents
| ProductHunt? That's your answer.
|
| My experience is that the main users of PH are those launching a
| product.
|
| I'll also add: after my PH launch, I experienced a lot of email
| spam from "growth hacker" types. I suspect they scrape PH. I
| tried to take down our post (because the spam was overwhelming),
| but PH refused.
| chuinard wrote:
| It's probably more worth it than Hacker News. I submitted my new
| site Cancel Culture Live (cancelculturelive.com) yesterday
| evening and it was just removed. Months working on a new shiny
| webapp, it starts getting a few upvotes and traction on HN, only
| to be removed?
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| 'Cancel culture' is a political thing and against the
| guidelines, since it could create flame wars and unwanted
| discussions that are rarely useful:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| So it's more about the related topic than the webapp itselve.
| It's always been that way fyi
| jabo wrote:
| Unlike HN, Product Hunt explicitly encourages posters to go out
| and ask their network to upvote. This one key aspect makes
| ProductHunt much less meritocratic IMO and just a mirror of how
| large the poster's network is.
|
| So I've stopped paying too much attention if a product claims
| they made it to #1 product of the day/week/month on ProductHunt.
| Julesman wrote:
| For an industry centered on innovation it is possible to be in a
| dry period where there are just too many people trying to make
| the 'latest thing' using older things. New tech tends to show up
| and keep things interesting.
| sto_hristo wrote:
| Yes it is. It helped me discover the "New mac smell" candle. It
| improved my life and helped me reach perfect nirvana well before
| the 40-45 hours if its burn time.
|
| This message has been written from across the Universe at the
| Heavenly plane.
| swyx wrote:
| its just a massive pyramid scheme. everybody goes there to vote,
| and roll the dice on getting the #1 tag for fake social proof.
| its useful for social proof insofar as the vast majority of
| people dont know that product hunt is fake.
|
| semi related fun fact, i had a friend run the numbers for fun -
| 8% of "#1 of the day" winners die within a year of launch
| https://twitter.com/jakobgreenfeld/status/146816583831853875...
| s_severus wrote:
| I spent ~3 years building a product before launching on PH.
| It's a real product with an existing community of (at the time)
| around 1k on Slack and real companies using it. Got ~80 up
| votes and finished the day somewhere around position 10. I was
| moderately happy with it.
|
| Around the same time, a known smooth-talking vaporware peddlar
| in the same industry launched on PH with literally a bare GH
| repo and a minimal landing page. I knew 100% that there was no
| actual usable product. The founder had recently been involved
| in a similar project that collapsed under huge promises. He got
| hundreds of upvotes and plenty of "awesome product, LFG man!!!"
| type comments.
|
| That's the moment I really understood PH.
| tjs8rj wrote:
| I don't think there's much that can be taken from that. There's
| a lot of reasons products die within a year, the non-product
| hunt #1 rate is probably much much higher. People post products
| on there all the time that aren't meant to be some startup in
| the first place
| WHA8m wrote:
| Idk, but I don't like the sentiment there. It's nothing like HN.
| And all the emoji cluster everywhere... bah. This stuff puts me
| off immediately.
| IceCoffe wrote:
| I agree here, one thing to note is that I can never find any
| good constructive criticism.
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