Skip Product Hunt, Focus on Building First
I see a lot of posts about people pushing to PH and acting like this is the only source of success.
Product Hunt is a great community and creation curation. However, it's not the only measure of success.
There is a lot of value in other online communities, getting feedback from friends and family, social media, or expanding the network of your business to find users.
You should be trying to grow a community around your business and a brand so that users have something to interact with besides your service or product.
I think you can learn a lot more by trying to expand your reach into different parts of the web, or even getting offline feedback. Try building a brand, or a content following around your service instead of trying to get hunted. It just might organically get you placement.
Create content. Don't just consume it. Then ask to be hunted and your success will likely be much higher.
I think in general you need to be aware of where your audience is, be it PH, IH or HN. For some this is indeed PH, but for most B2B a little bit less so.
I have a fairly popular article here on IH, while useful for the community, it does not nothing for my business (b2b). It could have been completely different if the product was for (solo) makers.
Just because others had success with it, doesn't mean it will work for you too.
I totally agree. You only get one shot to launch on producthunt. Most people think they need to post as early as possible. However, if you talk to your customers first and tweak your product to find a better product-market fit, then you’ll have more success on Producthunt. There are plenty of ph posts here of people who posted too early and couldn't get a single sale with all the traffic. Best to learn from those.
Hey, I'm over here posting an article about ranking on Product Hunt and you're killing my vibe not 10 minutes later.
What is your problem, man :D
But the thing is, PH is one of the steps to building your community, especially eraly on.
Ah I just saw that! I've wanted to make this post for a while.
There's definitely a technique to it which is fine and important.
My focus is that there should be more to the business and the brand first before people go about submitting.
Spoken to and seen a few IH's who deflate if they are not on PH and I don't think that should be the success standard for creating projects. It creates the wrong impression
Amen to that. You can't hack your way out of poor product and bad performance.
Agreed.
Look for the community relevant to your product across the web, get people engaged and then tell them about your product.
Give it time and be consistent
I see it like surfing (disclaimer: which I don't do):
PH and the other communities are waves that you can try to catch.
You need to look if the waves are heading in the direction that you want. If not, find another one.
Meanwhile, keep working on your product - the surfboard - and make it better.
Perhaps then you can dive into the water, and grab a bigger wave which will take you further.
Hope my analogy isn't too salty 😅