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Are Product Hunt's featured products still online today?

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Re: Are Product Hunt's featured products still online today?

#21

Post by daolf »

roansh wrote: post #18

It would be interesting to see: 1. How the online ones are doing financially. 2. Which sectors are doing well - what are the trending tools. Skimmed through PH APIs, don't think this is possible. Courtland's Indie Hackers (they have stripe verified revenue) maybe of help - a quick google resulted in this¹ result There's also microconf report on SaaS's² [1] https://www.indiehackers.com/post/indie-hackers-are-making-6.…

Revenue would be near impossible to do, however we could have analyzed traffic using SimilarWeb or Ahrefs API.

We could also have analyzed the sitemap to check the last update date.

Those articles are really fun to write (I haven't written this one, I'm just the editor), but at some point you have to stop otherwise you end with a 20k words essay.

Re: Are Product Hunt's featured products still online today?

#22

Post by halpert »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #17
daolf wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find your warning a bit unfair as there are literally no CTA inside the blog content promoting our product and only 2 internal links toward other educational posts. But anyway, I thought about taking a random sample of pages who returns a "200". Let's say 150, and manually tagging them to find if they're "dead" or not. And then reuse the "dead or alive but a 200" ratio for all the pages but I was afraid that I'd ne…

> I find your warning a bit unfair as there are literally no CTA inside the blog content promoting our product It’s obviously blog content designed to promote your product, hosted on the company’s product website. I don’t see how the FYI is unfair. I added it because the content was valuable but HN can be finicky about blog posts from companies advertising their own products. Trying to get ahead of indignant dismissa…

Where do they promote the product? It looks like they’re using a random http library.

Re: Are Product Hunt's featured products still online today?

#23

Post by time_to_smile »

daolf wrote: post #4
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #3

Fair warning: This is a blog post advertisement for ScrapingBee. The data is still interesting. The most interesting chart is one of the last: Proportion of Failures over time. As expected, more recent product links are less likely to 404 or 5xx. Going back to 2014, almost 1/3 of the featured links give a 4xx or a 5xx response. That’s a lot! More surprising, links as recent as 2020 show a 1/4 failure rate. Those proj…

I find your warning a bit unfair as there are literally no CTA inside the blog content promoting our product and only 2 internal links toward other educational posts. But anyway, I thought about taking a random sample of pages who returns a "200". Let's say 150, and manually tagging them to find if they're "dead" or not. And then reuse the "dead or alive but a 200" ratio for all the pages but I was afraid that I'd ne…

> I find your warning a bit unfair as there are literally no CTA inside the blog content promoting our product and only 2 internal links toward other educational posts.

I've worked in or adjacent to the content marketing world long enough to know that a CTA is not necessary for the post to be marketing/advertising. One of the major goals of content marketing it to establish the authority of the brand. You are well aware that the raison d'etre of that post is to spread awareness of and establish the authority of ScrapingBee.

It doesn't mean the post is not interesting, useful or valuable. But that post exists fundamentally for marketing/brand purposes.

Parents warning is completely fair, especially since they immediately point out the value of the post.

Re: Are Product Hunt's featured products still online today?

#24

Post by dewey »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #17
daolf wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find your warning a bit unfair as there are literally no CTA inside the blog content promoting our product and only 2 internal links toward other educational posts. But anyway, I thought about taking a random sample of pages who returns a "200". Let's say 150, and manually tagging them to find if they're "dead" or not. And then reuse the "dead or alive but a 200" ratio for all the pages but I was afraid that I'd ne…

> I find your warning a bit unfair as there are literally no CTA inside the blog content promoting our product It’s obviously blog content designed to promote your product, hosted on the company’s product website. I don’t see how the FYI is unfair. I added it because the content was valuable but HN can be finicky about blog posts from companies advertising their own products. Trying to get ahead of indignant dismissa…

> It’s obviously blog content designed to promote your product, hosted on the company’s product website. I don’t see how the FYI is unfair.

There's so many blog posts posted here that could fall under "content marketing" umbrella if you want to be strict. I feel like there's no problem with that if the content is valuable and people like/upvote it. After all this is a platform that is doing marketing for YC where YC companies are supposed to post their content too.

That "warning" also stuck out to me as a bit unfair as I was even looking for how it hooks into ScrapingBee (as I was curious how these scraping-aaS platforms interface with custom code) and couldn't find anything.

Re: Are Product Hunt's featured products still online today?

#26

Post by brimble »

nicoburns wrote: post #8
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #3

Fair warning: This is a blog post advertisement for ScrapingBee. The data is still interesting. The most interesting chart is one of the last: Proportion of Failures over time. As expected, more recent product links are less likely to 404 or 5xx. Going back to 2014, almost 1/3 of the featured links give a 4xx or a 5xx response. That’s a lot! More surprising, links as recent as 2020 show a 1/4 failure rate. Those proj…

> Going back to 2014, almost 1/3 of the featured links give a 4xx or a 5xx response. That’s a lot! Is that a lot? I would have been less surprised if it were 1/3rd of links still live.

I thought the same thing until I realized that dead domains are often snapped up by squatters/spammers (or just by other people who want that domain for actual reasons) so may not error when requested.

Re: Are Product Hunt's featured products still online today?

#28

Post by 1123581321 »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #17
daolf wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find your warning a bit unfair as there are literally no CTA inside the blog content promoting our product and only 2 internal links toward other educational posts. But anyway, I thought about taking a random sample of pages who returns a "200". Let's say 150, and manually tagging them to find if they're "dead" or not. And then reuse the "dead or alive but a 200" ratio for all the pages but I was afraid that I'd ne…

> I find your warning a bit unfair as there are literally no CTA inside the blog content promoting our product It’s obviously blog content designed to promote your product, hosted on the company’s product website. I don’t see how the FYI is unfair. I added it because the content was valuable but HN can be finicky about blog posts from companies advertising their own products. Trying to get ahead of indignant dismissa…

Yours ended up coming across as the indignant dismissal. As a community member I didn’t appreciate the warning. From the second paragraph on your comment was an interesting contribution, though. I’m surprised that many of those PoC businesses have stayed online at all, but I guess romaine are easy to renew.

Re: Are Product Hunt's featured products still online today?

#29

Post by granshaw »

city41 wrote: post #12
martin_a wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> More surprising, links as recent as 2020 show a 1/4 failure rate. Those projects basically launched on PH, then shut down shortly afterward. This would very well fit a "fail fast" attitude with testing MVPs, wouldn't it? At least that's what I would guess. Got a great start with PH but didn't move on from there, so the domain was not renewed...

Does a great start on PH mean very much? The chances your target audience is there for most products seems very low. I would love to see this data compared to all products/startups in general, but of course that's probably difficult to do.

Bingo. IME Producthunt is lazy marketing for indie founders. Their main user base is other founders, wannabe founders and super tech literate power users who are itching to use “the next new beta thing”, who’ll be a tiny percentage of any userbase.

Granted there are cases where that market IS aligned with your product, eg if you built a low cost site-builder or low cost social media publishing platform

Re: Are Product Hunt's featured products still online today?

#30

Post by brimble »

stickfigure wrote: post #19
BlewisJS wrote: post #16

Unrelated to the article - is it just me or is this scrapingbee product borderline nefarious? From the homepage: > Thanks to our large proxy pool, you can bypass rate limiting website, lower the chance to get blocked and hide your bots! > Scrapingbee helps us to retrieve information from sites that use very sophisticated mechanism to block unwanted traffic, we were struggling with those sites for some time now and I'…

No more nefarious than the measures websites put up to avoid scrapers? This just rehashes the Linkedin vs Hiq case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn (not a user, but I do some amount of scraping through other means)

It is definitely super annoying that companies are allowed to spy on us and do all kinds of crazy things with our data, all using computers and automation and "bots" and such, but individuals are increasingly not allowed to use automation to help us out online. Seems rather one-sided. On the other hand, I get that abuse is a huge problem. I do wish at least bots operating at roughly human request rates & daily total requests were considered OK and universally allowed without risk of blocks or other difficulties leading to increased maintenance costs (so, making them less valuable).
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