Open Hunt is shutting down
openhunt.co
openhunt.co
The code and production database is available (with all the users and projects), so you'd be able pick it up right where it left off.
I was going to write up a post-mortem but haven't gotten to it yet. Anthony Franco's comment on HN was pretty spot on: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10940729
Would like to reiterate (as I said on the original launch threads on HN), OpenHunt had no animosity towards ProductHunt. The community (including me) had some critiques against how PH was being run, but instead of constantly complaining about things, we launched an experiment to see if things would be better with an open source community.
It didn't work out this go around, but I'm hopeful another team can do better.
Respectfully, I believe the content issue tells only a small part of the story (or is even more a symptom). The far greater challenge was that there was no notion that the audience included influencers, as does ProductHunt's audience.
That single fact creates the value of ProductHunt. It contributes to the belief that what's being posted there actually matters, which then keeps the content providers (submitters) and consumers coming back.
You had a great launch that showed a lot of interest from the community. I still think there's room in the ecosystem for an open competitor to PH's closed model. But what did you do to capture that initial surge of visitors and bring them back? What were your plans to keep user engagement strong?
Here's an example:
When you posted this on HN 78 days ago, I asked if you had a daily summary email [0] like Product Hunt did. This is primarily how I interact with Product Hunt. An informal survey of my coworkers shows the same thing. We all read the daily email. It keeps us coming back to PH. This, IMHO, essential feature that Product Hunt had Open Hunt lacked on launch day.
For some reason I think you may have added it later, and I seem to recall I may have signed up for it. But looking through my emails I never received a single email from Open Hunt and, after awhile, I forgot it existed at all. Until today, when you announced you were shutting it down.
Engage your users. Capture visitors. Give them a reason to keep coming back and engaging with your product, or they'll forget it exists.
We should have had it at launch. It still might not have been enough, but it would have been a much better shot.
It's relatively easy to get the "hey look over there!" viral bump, but beyond that it turns into a game of retention with ugly words like "drip campaign."
People are always interested in "new," but they need a reason to keep returning. That's what makes a business run.
(kinda like how, for movies, the opening weekend gets all the news, but not so much the 22nd weekend.)
Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the server for the recipient domain openhunt.co by mx1.improvmx.com. [192.241.186.150].
The error that the other server returned was: 550 relay not permitted
Community building is a long term thing, not something you get through in a few months or so. I mean yeah, it won't be Product Hunt 2.0 right off the bat, but you need to give it more time than this.
Legally, it would be fine: lobster.rs would get a license, the original poster does own copyright. It's also "clean", if it's done in a manual, selective way. And boom, you get higher quality comments "for free".
Would that be completely unfair to HN?
Imagine that I was one of those cross-posted commenters, and you were not. The comment, as it would show up on lobsters.rs, would start "It doesn't work unless everyone moves over." Uh...what doesn't work? Moves over to where? My comment makes zero sense without the thread context...which is the case with most of my comments. Check out /threads?user=<username> or /newcomments - you can sometimes find interesting discussions that way, but by themselves, the comments are useless.
Maybe they could try selling it or something? Or seeing if someone from an admin or promotion site would be willing to take it over?
Momentum is vital for stuff like this. No one wants to contribute to an echo chamber. It's not very realistic that it'd regain momentum without major changes or a big sustained push from somewhere.
That said, it's not impossible that it could revive, but it's really unlikely. And once such a drop off has occurred, it's hard to stay motivated.
Maybe I have to recalibrate that particular heuristic.
At first, it seems at though Product Hunt legal went after them, but the fact they're offering to hand off the domain and the codebase itself suggests otherwise.
To avoid making noise here, please email or tweet me [both in profile] something with "HN Product Hunt" instead of commenting. I will update with a comment once they're all accounted for.