Is Hacker News better than Product Hunt?
I wonder if HackerNews is lately better than ProductHunt for legit feedback. I've worked on WriteNext and currently, we're looking to gather as much feedback as possible and to get early adopters.
When we submitted it to HackerNews, a month ago, it had amazing traction. In 24 hours, we got over 15000 unique visitors on the website and over 1300 signups. Moreover, there have been 262 upvotes and over 100 comments on the HN post. I find all of them legit feedback and good product validation as we did nothing to promote it. I appreciate all the feedback we got there! Link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23314664
Today, we decided to post WriteNext on Product Hunt to see how it works. We're 2 founders and we have previous experience with Product Hunt campaigns and we know the science beneath it, and what you should do to get to the top of the day. We previously launched another product on ProductHunt and got it the most upvoted product on the day with over 1000 upvotes (https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-get-and-what-is-the-impact-of-1000-upvotes-on-product-hunt-251bd13fd068). Though, we decided not to apply any of these marketing tricks and see how things evolve. Contrary to the great interaction from HN, we had a little over 10 upvotes on PH and almost no traffic. Link: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/writenext
All in all, I think these days if you're looking for honest feedback and market validation, PH is not what it was 2-3 years ago. It's all marketing and the results might not truly reflect the reality. IndieHackers and HackerNews seem much better places for early startup validation and growth.
What do you think? Do you upvote products on Product Hunt or are you looking in other places?
Cheers, Stefan