Ask HN: What do you not like about Product Hunt, Beta List, or Indie Hackers? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What do you not like about Product Hunt, Beta List, or Indie Hackers?

19 pointsRobDukarski4 comments

Tasked with building a website for a "portfolio course" as part of my Web Development B.S. degree I have decided to build an enterprise marketing platform similar to Product Hunt, Beta List, and Indie Hackers.

I chose this project because I realized the use case and potential help it could provide. Startups want to get early adopters and beta testers to help provide feedback for validating their own projects. My understanding is that there could never be too many platforms like that as long as they are quality platforms and not just a list of projects. It is my understanding that these platforms are around to not only help the public find the new projects but to help the companies behind those projects acquire those early adopters and beta testers.

Rather than build a basic MVP I figured I should include what I thought is great about the platforms. As I have already begun doing that I am wondering what users of those platforms, or their developers, wish the platforms had that they currently do not have, or that they did not have of which they currently do.

I have been tasked with validating my project to "potential customers". As my project, and the other platforms in consideration, offer freely the ability to submit content by users of the platforms I am unsure how to validate it any other way than to seek who would use the platform. Imagine it as a mix of the three platforms in consideration, essentially the features you may see similarly among the three platforms.

Do you currently use any or all of the three platforms in consideration? What do you find beneficial from using [platform]? What do you not like about [platform]? What feature(s) would you like added to [platform]? What feature(s) would you like removed from [platform]? Why do you use [platform]?

If you have anything else you would like to add then please share your thoughts about the platforms/market as well!! Thank you for your time and consideration!

Product Hunt: I'm sure many have said this, but it feels like a "cool kids" club, where only the elite members can submit and hold basically all the power. We eventually got "hunted" but not really on our own terms and it took some asking around to do so.

Beta List: We got featured here recently and it got us a few hundred sign-ups (before launch) but it took a while (1.5 months) to get listed. By that time we were nearly launched.

Indie Hackers: Great concept but hard to verify any numbers. We're actually thinking about starting something similar but for bloggers (not entrepreneurs in general). Courtland (the founder) used a very clever tactic in providing interesting information to his exact target market = lots of exposure on HN, Reddit, Quora, etc.

(I do like ProductHunt, so don't take this as an attack on the product)

PH allows anyone to find and vote on anything, and has a follower model that gives hunters with many followers much more exposure. The result of this is that hunters with lots of followers are a lot more effective at getting products attention, as are makers that aggressively market their PH submission, irregardless of the product's merits. Because these mechanics aren't interest-targeted, PH also heavily favors highly-general/mass-market products.

Just brainstorming, but I'd be interested in seeing if a product that eliminates this factor could be better at evaluating products purely on their merits. Maybe you select a couple topics that you're knowledgeable about, and each day you get a small, randomly-allocated batch of products in that topic that you can rate on a five-star scale (as opposed to an approval/participation scale)? In this model, there's no directed way to influence a particular product, the smaller number of products makes it easier to spend more time on each product, and all reviews would be done by people in their area of expertise. It'd probably be best to normalize the number of ratings on each products, to control for varying levels of participation and exposure. This would probably need to run on a rolling weekly model instead of a daily model.

I suspect that marketing this would be more challenging, since this also removes the incentive for makers and hunters to promote the site for votes. It'd probably be better at evaluating products purely on their merits, but I don't know if that's something the world needs enough to be self-sustainable.

Product Hunt:

* Superficial comments like "This is awesome. I was on the beta." An upvote suffices

* Curated/Stack everything jargony, useless terms like curated are now rampant

* Very little transparency from hunters. Did this person invest or have some material stake in the product's success?

* Lack of succinctness from founders/makers. You have one shot at summing up your product/value, and people write a whole essay. Keep your words to idea ratio low.

I don't particularly dislike any of these sites (well, ok, maybe producthunt ... but for balance I like indie hackers a lot), but I think the general problem is that these kind of sites quickly devolve from something authentic to just another marketing channel to be gamed. Same can be said about YouTube, Facebook, etc. But it the case of SV startup sites the cycle is accelerated due to the audience. Good luck solving this problem ...

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