There is an anti-pattern in Product Management where some PMs want to build the product launch around making a big splash on Product Hunt. Anyone who knows the drill won’t allow this and will instead do what’s best for finding customers, but I’ve seen some naive startups get pulled into chasing the Product Hunt launch follows by disappointment when the Product Hunt launch signup cohort has the worst retention rate of any of their signups.
You know how we joke about RDD - Resume Driven Development for developers who push projects that will look good on their resume even if it doesn't benefit the company? Playing games like this is the equivalent for product managers
Product Hunt is the tech founder equivalent of refreshing your social media profile, watching the like count increase on your latest selfie.
I even used to play a game that I've called PH-roulette: I'd open the top 10 or so products in separate tabs without reading their taglines. I then try to guess what they do based on the copy of landing page.
On most days, only one or 2 products had clear descriptions that are actually useful.
I started playing this game out of boredom but ended up learning a lot about what not to do while building my own landing pages.
I launched on PH last year and came to the same conclusion as the author of the post. The platform is dead, and deserves to stay dead.
When I've posted projects on there, I found so many bots commenting and then later got several emails from people wanting to "help" me with upvoting for a fee, it made me realize how fake it was.
Seems like these days people try to announce products in communities that might use them.