I launched on Product Hunt today and realized something uncomfortable
people say Product Hunt is about your product
it’s not
it’s about distribution
you can build something useful
you can get real users
you can even get great feedback
and still end up invisible
meanwhile, products with strong networks dominate early
not because they’re better
but because they start with momentum
after 3 launches, I’m starting to see it clearly:
Product Hunt is less about “what you built”
and more about “who shows up for you in the first 2 hours”
still valuable
but not in the way most founders think
curious how others experienced this
Trending on Indie Hackers
This is a harsh but necessary reality check. As a backend developer currently launching my first APIs on RapidAPI, I've been focusing 100% on the 'utility' and 'clean code' side, but your post reminds me that the 'distribution' part is a whole different beast. It's not just about what you build, but how you get that initial momentum. Thanks for sharing this perspective!.
This is something I didn't know before reading this.
I always thought PH was purely about the product quality. The "first 2 hours = network test" point really shifted my perspective.
As someone just starting out, this is exactly the kind of thing nobody tells you upfront. Thanks for sharing it honestly.
I keep saying to myself that I wanna become a big shot so that I could call PH out and it'd matter.
But that's conversation for another day. Have you tried other launching platforms like Peerlist?
Your line about "who shows up for you in the first 2 hours" rings true from my own indie launches with a small iOS memo app — first PH attempt I went in cold and got 14 upvotes; the second time I built a 6-person Slack of beta users who all set Tuesday morning calendar reminders and the curve by hour 2 looked completely different. Painful realization: distribution work has to start months before launch day. One push-back though — even a quiet PH still seeded 4 of my best long-term users, so I've stopped treating the 24h chart as the only success signal. Curious: after 3 launches, do you now budget specific pre-launch weeks for relationship-building, or do you treat each launch more opportunistically?
for context - this comes from launching the product a few times and seeing how different the outcome can be depending on early momentum
happy to share the launch if anyone’s curious
would be interesting to see the launch, happy to check it out
sure - here it is:
https://www.producthunt.com/products/vidi-3
curious what you think, especially around positioning
distribution is 10x harder than building. Maybe more.
I always thought is 50-50 but is not...
agreed
You're right that PH is a distribution game, but the more uncomfortable truth is that PH rank doesn't tell investors anything useful either. We see decks all the time that lead with '#3 Product of the Day' as traction. It's not.
What matters after the launch is what happens in week 2. Did the people who signed up on launch day come back? Did they invite someone? A #1 PH launch with 40% week-2 retention is fundable. A #1 PH launch with 4% retention is a spike.
That’s fair, but for me it’s still hard to treat PH as a reliable signal.
If the initial distribution is skewed, what happens in week 2 feels more like a reflection of who showed up early rather than pure product demand.
On Product Hunt, success depends more on your network and early support than just your product. Real growth comes from actual users, not just upvotes.
Yeah, that’s been my experience too - network drives visibility more than the product itself.
That’s why I’ve been focusing more on getting real users in a specific segment rather than optimizing for launch traction.
This is hitting me right now because I'm prepping for a PH launch next month with a new SaaS product. I run a marketing agency and even with that background, I massively underestimated how much pre-launch distribution work goes into a successful PH day.
The product is maybe 20% of the equation. The other 80% is the months of community building, content, relationship-building, and audience warming that happens before you ever hit that launch button. The founders who seem to go viral on PH almost always have 6+ months of groundwork you don't see.
Distribution is a skill most builders never develop because it feels like the opposite of building. But it IS building — you're just building an audience instead of a feature.
I get the audience-building angle, but it feels quite different from how startups usually move.
Spending months building distribution before knowing if people actually use the product can be risky - I’ve been leaning more toward getting usage first, then scaling from there.
I find it very unfortunate. I launched my first product on PH this week and was disappointed with the results (~10 upvotes). My product isn't groundbreaking, more of a free neat little tool. It also seems like a majority of products that get any traction on there are AI-based, which mine is not.
I wouldn’t read too much into the upvotes.
A lot of launches there come down to who shows up, and many of the same people support each other - it doesn’t always translate into real users.
If people in your target segment actually use your product, that’s a much stronger signal than PH traction.
I’ve been noticing something similar. It’s not that the product doesn’t matter, but without early visibility, even good products can just fade into the background.
The “who shows up for you” part is probably underestimated. It seems like having even a small but engaged group early on can make a huge difference in how the launch evolves.
I get that, but that’s exactly the part that feels off to me.
If it turns into everyone just showing up to support each other, the signal gets diluted. You get votes, but not necessarily users.
I’d rather have fewer people who actually need the product and use it, than a spike of attention that doesn’t convert into anything real.
I really feel this.
As a first-time founder, I used to think launch platforms were mainly about the product itself. But the more I watch launches, the more it feels like the product is only one part of it.
The early support, the network, the first few hours — those things seem to decide whether people even get a chance to notice what you built.
Still, I think there’s value in launching. Maybe not always for “winning the day,” but for learning what message actually connects with people.
This is exactly what we experienced building Koda Platform. The product is ready but the launch lives or dies on who shows up in hour one. It's essentially a social proof problem dressed up as a product discovery platform. The insight about distribution over quality is something more founders should hear before they spend months preparing a launch. What's your plan for the next one — building the audience first or finding a different channel entirely?
I’m leaning more toward different channels.
Already started focusing on places where I can reach people closer to the actual decision moment - feels much easier to get real feedback there compared to launch-driven platforms.
Three launches is enough data to see the pattern clearly and you’re naming it accurately. The uncomfortable truth underneath it is that Product Hunt rewards preparation you can’t do on launch day. The founders who dominate aren’t necessarily better they just started the relationship work earlier. I’m launching on May 13th and the thing I’m most focused on right now isn’t the listing copy or the screenshots. It’s whether the people I’ve been talking to for the past two weeks actually know my name before launch day. That’s the only variable that actually moves the outcome. Curious what the biggest difference was between your three launches was it purely audience size or did the positioning change too
I get what you’re saying about preparation and relationships.
But from my experience, the outcome still feels heavily influenced by factors you can’t really control - not all support translates into visibility, and it’s hard to treat it as a clean test.
That’s why I’m a bit skeptical about using PH as a core strategy. For me, talking to actual users and seeing if they use the product consistently has been more useful than optimizing for a launch day spike.
Also, when a launch turns into asking for upvotes, it raises the question of how many of those people are actually users vs just support - which makes it harder to learn what really matters.
The upvote versus actual user distinction is the uncomfortable truth most PH launch posts don't address honestly. You're right that a spike of support from your network tells you almost nothing about whether strangers will find value in the product. I'm treating May 13th less as a validation event and more as a forcing function a deadline that makes me do the relationship and distribution work I should be doing anyway. If the launch flops but I've spent two weeks genuinely talking to founders who need what I built that's still a net positive. The consistent usage point is the real metric someone who comes back three times without being reminded is telling you something a thousand upvotes never could.
Yeah, that distinction is the key part.
For me the focus is exactly on that - consistent usage over time. If people come back without being pushed, that tells you a lot more than any launch spike.
That’s what I’m trying to optimize for now.
Unprompted return is everything honestly. No survey can fake that signal. That’s actually the exact metric I’m watching for ReleaseLog not the first signup, but whether someone publishes their second changelog entry without me nudging them. First time could just be curiosity. Second time means something clicked.
This matches what I'm seeing from my own launch this
week. Not on Product Hunt but across dev.to, Hacker
News, and here. The posts themselves got some traction
but the comments I left on other people's posts drove
more profile clicks than anything I posted directly.
Distribution is the product. The actual product is just
the thing that gives you something worth distributing.
I spent months building and went into launch week
thinking the hard part was done. It wasn't even close.
The "who shows up for you in the first 2 hours" point
is real. If you have zero audience going in, you're
basically launching into silence and hoping the platform
algorithm picks you up. That's not a strategy, it's a
lottery ticket.
What's working better for me so far is treating it as
a slow compounding game instead of a launch event. Show
up every day, leave useful comments, let people find
you through your replies instead of your posts.
I get what you’re doing, but that approach feels more like a traditional business play than a startup one.
Startups are usually about speed - finding something that works and pushing it fast. Waiting for slow compounding over months or years can kill momentum early.
Consistency helps, but relying only on that feels too slow for a startup environment.
the discomfort is the right read.
PH doesn't surface good products. it amplifies whoever shows up with momentum. if you have a network, it multiplies it. if you don't, it shows you that.
most founders treat it like a discovery channel. it's not. it's a megaphone. you still have to bring the crowd.
i actually built a site that handles things a little differently. RepoRanker was designed for GitHub repos... and instead of focusing on stars... we focus on peer reviews and discovery. almost like Product Hunt... but for earlier phase projects... or projects that remain totally open source.
I get the “megaphone” angle, but in practice it still makes it hard to separate real demand from distribution.
If visibility depends that much on who shows up, the signal about the product itself gets pretty weak.
The current rankings on Product Hunt don’t necessarily reflect how good a product really is, and there have also been a lot of odd comments popping up lately.
Yeah, I’ve noticed that too.
Feels like the rankings reflect distribution and activity more than the product itself.
my first experience of launching of product hunt was insane. it was on feb 14, 2026 and i got featured. got a lot of upvotes and my product was #5 for the day. i did 0 marketing, and asked no one to upvote. i ended up getting 100+ users for my chrome extension. random people had posted about my product, included it in their email newsletters, it was unbelievable.
turns out it was pure beginners luck.
next time i launched a product, i got 2 upvotes in total. that's when i realised how lucky i had been the first time around.
that's when i started thinking seriously about my next product launch. this time i reached out to a lot of folks, on linkedin, twitter, my own family and friends. some of my friends made new accounts to upvote and i believe (can't confirm it) that ph penalised me for it. the amount of people who upvoted and the total upvotes i got didn't add up.
long story short, if you make it to top 5 on ph, you get a lot of visibility. but it's pure luck (especially if you don't have a huge network), so you can't really count on it.
just treat it as an opportunity to get all your marketing assets + demos in place, and just keep hustling.
and yes, the best products don't always make it to the top, and sometimes random products make it to the top (including my first product).
That lines up pretty closely with what I’ve seen too.
The difference between getting visibility and getting none can feel almost random without a strong network behind it.
Feels like you can’t really rely on it as a repeatable channel - more like a bonus if things line up.
There’s a subtle shift here that might help frame all of this.
Product Hunt isn’t really a growth event.
It’s a signal event.
It tells you what kind of attention you can generate under a specific condition:
high visibility, short window, and a particular audience.
So when something “doesn’t work,” it’s not just distribution vs product.
It’s what kind of signal you actually got back.
Did people show up and recognize themselves in it?
Did they understand it fast enough in-context?
Did it move them closer to a decision, or just create awareness?
Different channels don’t just give you more or less reach.
They give you different types of signal.
That’s why the same product can feel invisible in one place and obvious in another.
So the question isn’t just “should I launch” or “where should I focus.”
It’s:
what is this channel actually letting me see clearly about how people respond?
Once that’s clear, the next move becomes a lot more obvious.
I get the “signal” angle, but from what I’ve seen it’s shifted quite a bit.
Feels less like a clean signal about the product and more about the network behind it. So the feedback you get is often skewed by distribution rather than actual demand.
Yeah, that’s the interesting part.
If the signal gets skewed by distribution, it’s not that it becomes useless, it just starts telling you something different.
You’re no longer seeing pure demand.
You’re seeing how dependent the outcome is on who shows up and why.
Same product, different network, completely different result.
That’s still signal, just not about the product in isolation.
I see your point, but in practice it feels less useful as a signal about the product itself.
If the outcome depends that heavily on who shows up, it becomes hard to separate real demand from distribution effects - which is what I was hoping to get from it.
This is making me reconsider my plan to launch on PH next month. I'm at 24 signups / 0 paying, basically zero "audience that shows up" right now. Would you wait until I've built that pool, or send it anyway and use the launch as a forcing function to grow it? Genuine question, the post hit close to home.
I’d probably still launch, but treat it more as a learning step than a growth lever.
It can give some visibility, but I wouldn’t rely on it - better to keep building that audience in parallel.
Helpful frame. When you say "treat it as a learning step", what's the actual data you extracted from your 3 launches? Comments quality, upvote velocity, who showed up demographically, something else? Trying to figure out what's worth tracking on launch day.
For me, the most useful signals were around who showed up early and how quickly - not just the total upvotes.
Things like:
That said, it felt more like a distribution signal than product validation.
So I’d track it, but I wouldn’t rely on it - I’ve been getting more actionable feedback from channels like LinkedIn and direct conversations.
This is sadly so. Did two launches on Producthunt. A bigger network is more important than the actual product it seems.
Yeah, that’s been my experience too - distribution and network matter more than the product on launch day.
So from your opinion what is the best way to get first users for your first project ?
For me, LinkedIn has been the most useful so far - more direct conversations and real feedback compared to broad launches.
Still early, but it feels closer to how people actually discover and use something like this.
thank you
I Get that just lauched product on product hunt too
Nice - congrats on the launch.
How’s it going so far?
To be honest, it's not even just having a strong network, it's having a specific network. I did a launch last week on PH and had dozens of people in my network jump on and comment and upvote, but because most of them were new users on PH, their votes didn't get counted. Even some of their comments have still never come through a week later.
The focus on existing PH members heavily favours A) upvote communities and B) paid vote farms. The only things I got out of a PH launch was a load of spam email and 2 penetration attempts. Won't be doing it again.
Yeah, I saw something similar.
Feels like it’s not just about having support, but who that support comes from. Makes the outcome depend more on the network itself than the product.
how did you rank in the end? I'm seeing more and more makers skip PH entirely and just grind reddit + X for months instead. feels like the ROI shifted
I agree. PH lost its luster. Anyone who says otherwise is in denial.
First launch was around #54, second #62, and this one ended up around #49.
Didn’t really do any coordinated push - mostly organic - so it was a good learning experience.
out of the 3 launches, which one drove actual users (not just visits)? wondering if there's a rank threshold where it stops mattering
Across all three, I did see real users coming in - not just visits.
Hard to say exactly how many converted, but it wasn’t zero in any of them.
I experienced a boost with product hunt, Users increased but no paid customers yet.
But I'd suggest keep launching, Let the product gain visibility.
Makes sense - visibility definitely helps.
I’ll think about it, but leaning more toward other channels for now.
Really brave of you to share this. Now that you've had this 'uncomfortable' realization, how are you planning to pivot your distribution strategy? Are you going to double down on a different channel, or are you looking back at the product features themselves?
Appreciate it.
Leaning more toward distribution than product changes - the core use case is already pretty clear.
Focusing on reaching people closer to the decision moment (where they actually need it), rather than broad launches. Still experimenting with channels like LinkedIn and more direct outreach.
In your experience, is it better to build a very polished UI first to gain trust, or should I just ship a 'bare-bones' functional tool and see if people actually use it before making it look pretty?"
I went pretty simple at first - launched with basically a single page and focused on making it functional.
Took around ~9 weeks to get it out. For me, seeing how people actually use it mattered more than polishing everything upfront.
This hits home.
I’m launching my own product today, and this makes me both nervous and more grounded. I know the product may be useful and still not get much visibility if the early momentum isn’t there.
But I’m trying to treat Product Hunt as one step, not the whole journey. After launch, I’ll keep improving the product, talking to users, and figuring out distribution more seriously.
Thanks for sharing this — it helps set more realistic expectations.
Glad it helped - that’s a good way to approach it.
Good luck with your launch, hope it goes well.
That’s a thoughtful take — and honestly, I agree with most of it.
Product Hunt does feel like it’s about distribution first, product second, especially in the first few hours. If you don’t have initial traction, even a solid product can get buried.
But I’ve also noticed something after launching small projects:
distribution gets you visibility, but product usefulness decides what happens after that.
So yeah, I’d say:
First 2 hours = distribution
Next few days = product value + retention
Without distribution → no visibility
Without value → no growth after visibility
Curious — in your launches, did you see any cases where a weaker distribution still worked because the product itself spread organically?
In my experience, organic spread there is pretty limited.
It feels like most of the visibility comes from initial distribution, and without that it’s hard for a product to pick up momentum on its own.
Yes, our team had the same experience. Starting a month before the project launch, we logged in every day to build our network and try to communicate with members, but despite our ambitious plans, we failed miserably.
Product Hunt is a distribution game where the first two hours after launch determine everything. It is not easy to realize that an extensive network is far more important than a great product. I have seen many founders think of Product Hunt as a merit-based platform, only to get buried by products that were better prepared before launch.
Did you have a specific strategy to encourage early participation during your last launch?
Honestly, I didn’t have a structured strategy for early participation.
I was more hoping that real users would come in naturally and engage with it, rather than pushing a coordinated launch.
Now I see that’s a very different game on Product Hunt.
I share the same sentiment. I often discuss similar issues (especially initial setup problems) with various people on Indiehackers and Product Hunt, but the ecosystems of the two platforms seem fundamentally different. It seems I am still adjusting.
Do you plan to start using Product Hunt again?
For now I’m not planning to focus on Product Hunt again.
Feels like it’s more about distribution than fit at this stage, so I’m putting more attention into channels like LinkedIn and direct conversations with users.
Thank you for your response. Do you think Product Hunt can be used as a criterion for judging project fit? Our team is also currently focusing more on deployment (project promotion); do you think channels like LinkedIn, Indie Hackers, and Reddit are more suitable? Personally, I have been consistently active on Product Hunt since I started, but perhaps because my account rank is low, the results are not satisfactory compared to the time I invest in commenting and being active, so I am considering whether I should focus more on other channels.
I wouldn’t use Product Hunt as a signal for product–market fit.
It’s more a test of distribution and network than actual demand.
For me, channels like LinkedIn, Indie Hackers, and even direct conversations have been more useful - you get real feedback from people who might actually use the product.
Product Hunt can still be useful for visibility, but I wouldn’t rely on it as a core channel, especially early on.
Thank you for your reply. What is your plan for obtaining honest feedback from people?
Our team is also at a point where we need just one honest piece of feedback rather than 100 surveys. We would appreciate your advice.
If you don't mind, would you also provide honest feedback about our team? bunzee.ai or (https://www.indiehackers.com/post/roast-my-ui-ux-my-app-is-beautiful-but-got-only-8-upvotes-on-ph-why-bef9cc88a8)
We will also send you feedback on the project.
Yeah, that’s been my experience too. It feels less like a product test and more like a distribution test compressed into a few hours. The product still matters, but only after you earn enough attention for people to even see it.
Yeah, that’s exactly how it felt - compressed into a few hours.
Accurate, but I'd push it one step further — Product Hunt's algorithm is essentially a social graph test, not a product test. It answers one question: how many people care enough about you personally to act within 2 hours of a notification. That's actually useful signal, just not the signal most founders think they're getting.
The mistake is treating a weak PH result as evidence the product isn't good. It's usually evidence the social graph isn't warm yet. Those are fixable with different inputs.
I'm planning a PH launch at Day 30 of a newsletter I'm building — specifically because by then I'll have real subscribers who've read real issues, and their upvotes will mean something different than "I know this founder."
That’s a good way to look at it - more of a social graph test than a product one.
Also noticed votes can get cut pretty aggressively - saw it on my launch today, dropped from 13 to 6.
The "who shows up in the first 2 hours" frame is the most honest take on PH I've read in a while — the brutal corollary is that the launch is upstream of the launch by ~6 months. I'm a few weeks out from launching a tiny Captio-style iOS memo app, and instead of polishing the PH page, I've been sending one personalized DM a day to 90 ex-Captio refugees on Reddit/Twitter for six weeks — most of them know my name before launch day. Launch day is actually a check on whether the relationships you built between November and now are real. Most "invisible" PH launches I've watched were timeline collapses, not product failures: someone tried to build a network and a product in the same fortnight. Curious — for your three launches, what was the average time you'd been talking to your "first 2 hours" people before launch day?
That’s a really good way to frame it - “upstream of the launch” resonates.
In my case, I didn’t really have that network built ahead of time - most of it was more organic and happened around the launch itself, so I felt that gap pretty clearly.
Also noticed that not all votes seem to carry the same weight, which makes early traction even more dependent on who shows up, not just how many.
Good insight. We launched today and do not have much distribution. Been working different social media platforms. My expectations are not to get the most votes today, although that would be nice, but to earn some visibility and learn from the experience. Keep pushing.
That’s a solid way to approach it - visibility and learning early on matter more than the ranking.
Good luck with your launch, keep going.