Product Hunt Upvotes Are Worthless: Real Customers Aren't There

Most Product Hunt users are not real customers; they are just looking for product ideas and are not interested in the products themselves. Launching there does not make sense anymore. I think the best way to get customers is by sending cold emails, direct messages, or talking about your business on social media. The upvote system is useless; sometimes a product with 40 upvotes will help a small niche solve their problems, and most of them will turn into customers. In contrast, a product with 1000 upvotes might be useless but gains traction because someone has a large follower base, helping them reach that upvote number without getting real customers. For example, an HR person will not visit Product Hunt to look for your SaaS to help them manage their candidates. Instead, you should contact every HR person on LinkedIn and explain what problem you can solve for them. Most users on Product Hunt are developers, designers, or founders looking for ideas and inspiration for their next project or competitors for their current projects. Upvotes are the new fake currency, so please invest your time in marketing and talking to people who have the same problem that your business can solve for them.

> Launching there does not make sense anymore.

Just curious, but did it ever make sense to launch on Product Hunt? I would assume that the claim that "most users on Product Hunt are developers, designers, or founders" has always been true.

haha yeah its all glad handing industry people... Countless times Ive see internal slack posts to "upvote my product hunt", and mindless idiots just blindly doing so. I could see that if your customers are tech industry people then maybe- but then again, the promise of social media as marketing is a lie.

You want customers, GTFOO, get the fuck out yer office. Are your customers well defined? how about your tam? If you cant answer these, your strategy is random. Dont be random- define who, find out how that who spends money and target that funnel. The more in person you can do here the higher quality it will all be.

I fucking hate marketing and sales, but it seems like every idiot in these two buckets is just sitting around messaging people online. The internet is dead bro! your are messaging bots! Again, get out there, talk to people!

lol

A founder once shared that launching on producthunt, getting to #1 and acquiring thousands of users ultimately killed his company. He explained that it gave them a false sense of product market fit that they fundraised against to build a bunch a features to solve problems real users never had.