Comment by pinkmuffinere

3 days ago

I see a new product-hunt alternative launched every couple months here. Maybe I’m cynical, but I don’t think we’re going to displace product hunt with things like new voting dynamics. They already have the network effects, so I think you’d need to make a relatively large change to stand a real chance.

Edit: Here’s a proposal for a bigger change. do some free advertising for the submitted ideas. Run simple Google/youtube/facebook ads for them, just directing people to their page on your platform. Hopefully this doesn’t burn too much cash, since you’re actually advertising for their page on your platform, so it’s good for you in the end. Perhaps submissions have a small fee in the long-term, to monetize the platform.

Could somebody explain the appeal of browsing Product Hunt? It seems just like a subreddit where people post nothing but ads for their businesses, and I've always been a bit baffled by it. Sure if I had a SaaS to sell I'd post it there, but why is there an audience for a long list of product ads?

  • They are not just product ads, they are ads for NEW products.

    So, the audience gets to stay on top of all the cutting edge products and services.

    • If something becomes important and useful you’ll hear it somewhere else too. Just like you don’t have to be a completionist on the HN New page…just wait until it bubbles up to the main page.

Maybe the bigger question is whether something like Product Hunt even needs to exist in the ecosystem. I think it had its place circa 2012–2014, but does it have any "real" users anymore? Or is it all founders and growth hackers trying to juice their launch, and an army of dummy accounts from people who sell votes?

  • Circular economy. I have seen that creator space is a circular system, they network, they support each other, so sites like these build their own bubble. Only a small percentage of launches break out and are used by users who are not in the creator space. Rest are just their followers(working in businesses) or creators themselves who adopt to most of the products launched there.

    I know there have been big launches on PH but those are outliers because they also have put efforts into digital marketing and PH was just one of platforms for them. Majority are indiehackers, who are happy with a small MRR which is very much possible within this club of creators.

  • This. Why do I even need ProductHunt these days? There’s already so many products already in the market that does any possible use case you can think of. There’s hardly anything new or innovative in there anymore. If there’s something truly innovative (or chatgpt), I would probably have heard of it from ppl already