[HN Gopher] Show HN: A Product Hunt alternative where products D...
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Show HN: A Product Hunt alternative where products DON'T compete
with each other
I am an indie hacker and have been launching my products on Product
Hunt. Like many of you here, my experience with PH sucked: Lots of
bots. Hard to compete. There's also been many new launch platforms
coming up, but all of them make you compete for upvotes. Ugh. So I
have been working on something different: https://saascurate.com/
It's a community-driven platform where indie hackers and SaaS
founders help each other grow their products. The idea is simple -
list your product, engage with other founders, gain exposure and
social proof. No upvote system. It's hard and expensive to turn a
side project into a viable business, especially for solo makers, so
my longterm vision is to be able to help founders grow their
products in lots of different ways, like helping with cold
outreach, partnerships and other channels. I know there are a lot
of "list your product and forget" platforms, so I am trying to
build something different - where the community helps each other
grow. Let me know what you think! I'd love to hear your thoughts
and see if this platform can help you grow your products.
Author : FilipPanoski
Score : 10 points
Date : 2025-01-21 15:18 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (saascurate.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (saascurate.com)
| FilipPanoski wrote:
| I built SaaSCurate. AMA.
| tommy_axle wrote:
| Is there supposed to be an icon next to the "Featured Products"
| and Leaderboard headings? Just pointing out that it seems to be
| a missing font/icon box for me.
| WesleyLivesay wrote:
| If there are no upvotes, what dictates something being "Featured"
| on the homepage, the items of which are said to be the
| "Greatest"?
| FilipPanoski wrote:
| When you list a product, you can choose whether to feature it
| or list it for free.
|
| Featuring it costs $9 or 500 karma points (which are earned by
| contributing). There are also other benefits to featuring: -
| Get spotlighted in a newsletter sent to all community members -
| Featured embeddable badge - Dofollow backlink for SEO
| theogravity wrote:
| Is the new grift to start a product-hunt style website and charge
| $$$ to be featured / listed? I've encountered a few of these
| types of websites already and they seem to be growing in numbers.
| FilipPanoski wrote:
| Seems like it! I've started building SaaSCurate since June
| 2024, but since then quite a few platforms like this have
| emerged. My vision for SaaSCurate is more than to just list a
| product - I want to build a strong community that helps
| founders acquire new customers through partnerships and earned
| media. SaaSCurate is still in MVP phase.
| theogravity wrote:
| I like your honesty! Best of luck in your launch!
| FilipPanoski wrote:
| Thanks!
| Centigonal wrote:
| I appreciate that you've put months of effort into this project,
| and your site looks slick. I'm going to share some candid
| feedback. Not trying to be mean, but I am trying to help you
| think through your service's value prop and business model.
|
| What you've actually created here is an advertising platform that
| helps indie hackers and startups get in front of... other
| bootstrappers. This is a limited audience, in size, in scope, and
| in available spend.
|
| If you want to build a community, you may be better off with a
| Discord server and spreading through word of mouth - or something
| more personalized and closed like Inbox Startup if you want to
| monetize it. If you want to sit in the middle of the indie hacker
| community and collect fees on featured slots, you've got find a
| way to sell access to an audience that's worth $9. You're
| competing with product sites which are free and ad networks that
| give you very fine grained targeting of a wide range of
| audiences.
|
| People go to sites like PH to be surprised and delighted by
| interesting new products. Even if the upvote system is borked,
| users have some faith in the wisdom of the crowd and the PH
| brand. Why would I, as a user, want to see a list of "everyone
| who had $9 to give to Filip today" over a list of "products other
| indie hackers thought were cool?"
|
| Finally, a very diligent user might look at 20 products a day on
| a site like PH or this one. Let's say you sell out your top 20
| feature slots every day. That caps you at $66K gross revenue per
| year... unless you raise your prices.
| FilipPanoski wrote:
| Thank you so much for taking the time to write this detailed
| feedback! I actually agree with everything you've outlined
| here.
|
| My longterm goal with SaaSCurate isn't to rely on the $9
| featured slots as the main monetization or draw for users.
| Instead, I am working to build a community where founders
| actively support each other through their growth journey.
|
| When someone publishes a product on the platform, other
| community members receive an email notification so that they
| can check out the product, leave endorsements and connect. I've
| also got a Discord server linked in the platform as a space for
| founders to engage directly.
|
| The $9 featured slots are more of a stepping stone to help fund
| and shape the broader vision I have for SaaSCurate. I want to
| help founders grow their products not just by publishing, but
| with other features that go beyond just product visibility.
|
| Thank you again for your detailed feedback, I truly appreciate
| it and I am glad to see that we're aligned in the thought
| process.
| trod1234 wrote:
| Any karma/voting system is going to have issues with bots
| eventually. By having the system in the first place, you
| crowdsource, and eventualy that crowd is going to be bots because
| there is always someone that can derive benefit from manipulating
| markets, and other related things.
|
| Additionally, competition is important. Adversarial individual
| decision-making is required for economic calculation to take
| place. Cooperation is the anti-thesis of this, and it generally
| fails in ways Mises describes back in the 1930s. You can read
| more about it in his collected works on Socialism. It applies
| broadly.
|
| The main issues you'll be immediately faced with once your reach
| a self-starting saturation, is controlling the noise floor. If
| its not useful, people won't use it.
|
| Many of these problems don't have any good solutions. GPT makes
| it cost-effective to destructively manipulate aspects in ways you
| can't predict as well.
|
| In my general opinion, you cannot develop or preserve community
| when you have bad actors taking advantage of community. This is
| most notably seen recently with the many LLM developers crawling
| any public sites available. Performing what amounts to DDOS
| attacks.
|
| There can be no goodwill when the status quo is bot driven, and
| those bots are all about taking or imposing cost through
| interference.
|
| Its a cursed problem series. Open platforms fail to the flood,
| Closed platforms fail to lack of engagement, and Semi-Open
| platforms eat up all your time for little return.
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(page generated 2025-01-21 23:02 UTC)