Product Hunt isn't dying, it's becoming gentrified
launchpointzero.com
launchpointzero.com
One: "VC backed companies have the funds to be able to boost their launch on PH to guarantee their launch will be in the top 5." - absolutely not. We do not tolerate paying for votes or other means of artificially boosting score.
Two: "its going to be a lot harder for you, the side hustler, the soloprenuer, the full time bootstrapper" - It's true that the bar is higher, but it's because The Market is more competitive. It was a personal goal of mine when I stepped in a year ago to make Product Hunt into a place where you can launch your side projects and they can rise to the top. To do that, we need to reduce the noise a bit and ensure that community and organic signal are balanced. This is difficult, but we're working on it. For example, Chris Van Pelt's side project OpenUI (open source v0) was #2 of the day a little while ago - hunted by a friend without any launch prep.
Product Hunt changed my life - I launched a side project that got tons of traction and it caused me and my friends to jump in full-time and start a company. I want to make Product Hunt an even stronger force for changing lives than it's been in the past, but that requires evolving the platform for the market in 2024.
This post is certainly being critical, but I'm also not here to bring the hammer down. I am saying that it has grown very popular, and that makes it harder to get noticed. I know more than a few people have publicly complained on twitter about how their startup listing has been removed or bumped.
I also know there are a lot of scammers out there that PH has to battle against, trying to game the system. I know the people at G2.com when they started and were giving away free ipads for the top people with the most software reviews in a month, and someone tried to jump ahead by downvoting all the reviews of the people ahead of them in a month.
Clearly though expectations have changed. I'm certainly bummed for the 60% of the staff who were laid off. You can't just share your startup without some serious work beforehand or else you risk blowing your shot at 15 minutes of startup internet fame.
My point is not that PH is dying or not, but the game has changed and it has hurt makers who do this for the hope of making a full time living, and we're being crowded out by VC funded startups and previous PH launchers who have had past success (i.e. Tallyforms) that are "relaunching" and sucking up the little amount of attention available on PH. It's frustrating.
Compare that to our HN post requiring no additional lift, which resulted in ~10k unique visitors, no bots, and great critical feedback we couldn’t get anywhere else.
I do want an authentic PH! But it feels like a vanity landing page in its current state.
I thought PH was great when they came out and Ryan was a super nice guy - gave my startup a small boost when PH just came out
Reality is there was never a business there in any real way that was sustainable and not subject to enshittification, so I’m not sure what’s surprising
Likely not a ton of signups or paid users.
i have been recipient of many many many many many many DMs from startups asking for upvotes at 12.01am PT. this erased whatever respect i had left for PH. when you make this pointless is when i will pay attention to it again.
Most people value critical feedback and interesting discussions, that is the main reason why all of us visit HN every day.
> We do not tolerate paying for votes or other means of artificially boosting score.
Let's be honest, posting a PH and getting top 5 has NOTHING to do with the product. It's all bots and politics.
As soon as I posted on PH, I kept getting spammed (via email, Twitter) of people offering to sell upvotes and guaranteed top spots.
My PH comment section started getting filled with bots (with almost identical comments) and also with people who were also launching and just wanted to have their name visible with the "LAUNCHING SOON" badge.
I reported the bot comments immediately, but I got no response: https://snipboard.io/fDzVXU.jpg
Overall my launch on PH went ok, I got some traffic, but almost all upvotes were from the communities I'm involved in, where I promoted my launch.
To get first, you simply need to have the largest community. The product doesn't really matter. It should be "InfluenceHunt" not "ProductHunt".
Product Hunt's value proposition since the beginning was to launder credibility from "friends"/VCs promoting apps without having to disclose conflicts of interests. It never was fair to indie creators and able to fulfill its stated purpose of surfacing the best products.
I found the exercise of listing the app and creating the content for the listing a worthwhile exercise, but nothing else about the experience worthwhile.
Every day its listings are filled with redundant apps, template shovelware, wrappers around AI APIs, and random non-app content (think ebooks, blog posts, courses, etc.) Very occasionally you'll find a useful utility or two by a independent team (but you gotta scroll wayyy down). PH has completely failed to defend their ranking algorithms against spam and brigading.
If you look at it through that lens, it makes perfect sense what is going on there.
I’ve been reading that the same thing has happened to indie hackers.
On Sept 25, Jason tweeted that the CTO (not CEO, as this article states) didn't know who levelsio is. In October, the CEO wrote about levelsio, so he does indeed know who he is. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rajiv-ayyangar_why-doesnt-pro...)
Assuming it's true, I don't know if the CTO really needs to know who levelsio is. The CEO does, but does the CTO?
Like, don't you think the head of growth might have an incentive to cause the issues you're mentioning? Doesn't the CEO implying the story isn't true give you pause?
Did you look at the head of growth's LinkedIn? Did nothing about their resume (which I won't post here) give you pause before writing a whole post?
I agree Product Hunt is different than it was years ago. So is the entire startup ecosystem. But this article just came off as sour grapes, where you cherry-picked stories to try to make an argument.
Maybe I should have shared in the article all the twitter posts where indie hackers are upset how they are getting screwed and how hard it is to get ranked on PH. There is a lot more drama surrounding PH than just the CTO not knowing one well known community member.
If you have a better post, I'd love to read it and I'm sure others here would too. But until I see that, I can only go off the words you've written.
here's a couple of twitter feeds that center on the drama related to product hunt;
https://x.com/WhoWorksThere/status/1840822087868375085
https://x.com/csallen/status/1840792433447391560
https://x.com/HeyImYossi/status/1840634391040577847
theres a lot more in my feed and the people I follow this could be an all day thing but I hope this supports the headline of my post.
1. There are many to launch but most of the sites don’t have the community or credibility that PH seems to have lost.
2. If you want what PH was 3-4 years ago you have to go somewhere else.
3. If you want to build the new Product Hunt you can’t just create a site where people can submit their product and launch. You need affordances that cultivate community.
4. Once you get traction you should expect some members will game your system: successful systems always attract parasites.
https://gwern.net/doc/technology/2005-shirky-agroupisitsownw...
https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2014/09/15/guidelines-for-an-o...
The point of marketing is to get your product in front of customers, not to get it front of members of a community of deadbeat marketers who think they’re doing their job when they get their product in front of non-customers. If your product is “one weird trick” to get your product on the top of Product Hunt that’s appropriate for Product Hunt, but that’s about it.
But what if the customers are deadbeat marketers?
Assuming you believe that getting visibility on Product Hunt will draw the attention of prospects--I agree a potentially dubious assumption--you may need to find ways to cultivate "deadbeat marketeers." From what I understand, not everyone who submits a product the first time gains widespread visibility, so they must submit multiple times. Here might be a second reason to consider how to be a member in good standing of a community whose approval will be of benefit.
Obviously your mileage may vary.
But back in 2023, we created a feature in our app called Peerlist Project Spotlight to showcase and launch side projects. But instead of daily we made it weekly. The idea was to give side projects better visibility and prepare projects for a bigger launch on the product hunt, but now people are considering Peerlist Spotlight as an alternative to the PH launch.
It’s never made sense that PH shows only a selection of the launches and you need to click to see them all … that’s fundamentally unfair.
Also, there should be no new launches to be added to the list - it should accumulate launches for the past 24 hours hidden and then launch them all simultaneously - the time that a product as added to the list in the past 24 hours should not be a factor in how many upvotes it gets. Related, it should not be important to launch at 12:00PM pacific time or whatever it is - makes no sense.
Maybe there should be AI trained to categorise and tag them such that you can filter out all those that you are not interested in, such as #HTMLtemplates or #crypto or #AI
Marketing is hard work, you have to identify who the target customer is and try to get inside their head. Whether you are trying for paid advertising or organic SEO or a bombastic pseudo-event like
https://actiondrivenpodcast.com/salesforce-vs-siebel-protest...
it takes some combination of money, time, energy, elbow grease and creativity. Product Hunt offers a chance to bypass all that. It’s particularly seductive to the independent creator who hopes that can bypass the hard work of marketing altogether. (I am thinking right now of a friend who plans to post thousands of videos to Tik Tok without any marketing effort…)
The problem is not that it is hard to get on the front page, the problem is that there is no pot of gold at the end of that rainbow at all, not for a business which isn’t aimed squarely at the center of the crowd that wakes up and checks Product Hunt every morning (an app that promises you’ll frontpage PH? PH 2.0?)
how many potential real users frequent this site?
it seems like the primary audience is people that are trying to do what your are doing.
The better conclusion (supported by the CEO's response in this thread) is that there may not be a clear reason for Product Hunt-type site to exist in 2024.