Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Is ProductHunt Worth It?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 68 posts

Re: Ask HN: Is ProductHunt Worth It?

#51

Post by tnolet »

hemmert wrote: post #43
hemmert wrote: post #42

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 th…

(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.)

Why would a journalist contact you?

Re: Ask HN: Is ProductHunt Worth It?

#52

Post by emdowling »

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.

Re: Ask HN: Is ProductHunt Worth It?

#55

Post by s_severus »

swyx wrote: post #29

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...

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.

Re: Ask HN: Is ProductHunt Worth It?

#56

Post by aspenmayer »

nopenopenopeno wrote: post #25
ajimix wrote: post #13

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…

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…

> 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.

Re: Ask HN: Is ProductHunt Worth It?

#58

Post by commoner »

Product Hunt is useful if you treat it as a software directory. It lists free and open source software (especially self-hosted B2B services) that can be hard to find elsewhere.

Here's a list of the most recently submitted open source products on Product Hunt:

https://www.producthunt.com/topics/open-source#order=by-date

Re: Ask HN: Is ProductHunt Worth It?

#60

Post by jimz »

jabo wrote: post #5

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.

Are you sure? PH's official line has always been "share with people you know but no bots/asking for upvotes/manipulation" or something akin to that. It's still in their community guidelines, albeit with language that gives them a bit of wiggle room.

https://help.producthunt.com/en/articles/2690626-how-do-i-sh...

https://help.producthunt.com/en/articles/484935-can-i-ask-my...

I think the problem is that they don't seem to have a good enforcement mechanism, and so for what must've been years I haven't really seen staff proactively go after those who do game the system. The only times when I've seen action taken is when the community comes out and basically calls out a product/maker. Most people don't care enough to do that kind of stuff, I'd imagine. I've done it a few times (either outright illegal stuff like peddling American legal services from overseas without qualifications, or obviously scam crypto projects) but these should have been obvious. The staff is also unresponsive on email, although better on the forums.

Post reply on HN