Comment by csallen

Launch platforms are terrible businesses.

In fact they're terrible products, too, even if you don't aspire to run one as a business.

People don't realize this, so they keep building more launch platforms to replace the previous launch platforms, thinking that a different design will "work." But it won't work. Because the idea is flawed from the get-go.

Launch platforms are inherently competitive. There is no way for "everyone" to get to number one. As you scale and get more and more people adding their products to your platform, your homepage and your visitors' browsers' viewports stay the same size. So the ratio of launches:visible_launches grows and grows, and therefore the percentage that get any attention shrinks over time.

You can try to remedy this by making it less competitive to launch, e.g. by cycling through submissions so no one is at the top all the time, or giving products second-chance days, or adding more launch lists so there's more real estate of products to upvote, or whatever. But this just leads to a second and more impactful problem…

…which is that you won't get any traffic. A launch platform is a marketplace, and the only value the supply side has for posting to a launch platform is to get users and/or feedback. Those users and feedback come from traffic, i.e. the demand side of your marketplace. And traffic comes from people referring their friends/audiences to the launch platform to upvote their product. In other words, it's the competition that drives traffic. That's it. Nothing else brings traffic. People en masse don't tend to make a habit of frequenting launch platforms, nor do launch platforms show up for popular search keywords, nor do they get shared on social media (except when first launched), nor do they receive traffic in any other way other than people promoting their launches.

So when you kill competition, you kill the only source of traffic you're ever going to have, and your launch platform ceases to be valuable. You killed the demand side of your marketplace, which made it useless to the supply side.

Limiting your platform to 10 launches per day seems like a clever way to circumvent this, but even if that "succeeds", the result will be that you have many more than 10 people per day who want to launch. And you will either have to expand to accommodate them (and thus encounter all of the above problems), or you'll have to implement some sort of rules or system for who gets to launch and who doesn't. Which is just you picking the winners/losers, and doesn't avoid the entire problem you sought to solve, which is preventing people from losing. All the people who don't get to launch will be on HN in a month writing about how they're making a new launch platform that works for everyone.

So what's the solution?

It's to understand and accept that marketing is competitive. And launching is just marketing. So launching is competitive.

Attention is zero sum. Not everyone can win. The vast majority of all products built will die in obscurity, and it's not because of a flaw in the design of launch platforms, social networks, search engines, etc. It's an inescapable fact of reality. It might as well be a law of physics. It's better to just embrace it.