Comment by birken
10 years ago
None of these people are bosses or gatekeepers!
Even if I gave you a magical power where anytime you wanted your site would simultaneously be posted on Techcrunch, #1 on HN and #1 on Product Hunt, it probably would make no difference in your success or failure. The bosses and gatekeepers are the people that try your product once, and decide if it is better than the 500 things they are already doing in their lives.
You can spend your whole life getting caught up in the perceived unfairness of it all, but that isn't going to help your company become any more successful. The tech press (and quite a few startup communities) are sirens that call you in and try to sabotage you in every way possible. Just ignore them, or at least minimize how much they are affecting your mental state.
The tech press affects primarily two things:
(1) Your ability to raise early-stage funding
(2) Your ability to hire engineering & product talent
Getting these two things won't guarantee success, nor will not getting these things preclude it. But there is a pretty strong correlation when you try to scale.
People who are well connected are getting preferential treatment on a system that outwardly appears to be fair. That's gatekeeping.
It seems you work for a company that has already broken through, but what of all the others who are trying to get attention from VCs and the media. For them it could be a matter of life and death for their company. One media report can make all the difference between success and failure. Instead connected companies on Product Hunt suck up all the oxygen, and promote products that are not as good as more deserving ones, which are not as well connected. It's also bad for VCs and the media because they are being fed a distorted version of the market.
As a minimum conflicts of interest should be declared and the system revised not to allow abuse of the voting process. I have other ways to promote my site so I don't care about the Product Hunt circlejerk. But it's sad to see a system with so much potential be corrupted.