Is Product Hunt still worth it, or is it just a numbers game?
We launched on Product Hunt product today, but I was surprised by several things in the process:
- Hunters charging $500 > to hunt
- Teams using bots to raise their votes
- Being offered bot services to get higher
We got new users at least, but has it always been like this?
Trending on Indie Hackers
It's worth it for the backlinks alone. Posting in PH gives you 15 backlinks, even if you get 10 upvotes. So if you've chosen a good domain name that solves the problem well, your product will rank really high
So just by posting and getting some n num of upvotes we get backlinks?
and does it increase with the number of upvotes
I have to do the math on it but just by posting you'll get the backlinks, doesn't matter how many upvotes you get. Obv you want to get more upvotes to increase your footprint and that'll help other people link to your stuff.
That's a good point.
Great point! I didn't even think about the point on backlinks 😱
Any exposure/backlinks worth it.
I guess, it was better before, but it was always and will be the numbers game with PH.
on PH can we reach out to people for backlinks then?
PH is backlink.
Fair, and balanced!
Backlinks bro!
Yeah this completely skipped my mind when I initially posted haha
It is a great place to test your product at initial stage, but as you said too many sellers of the upvotes, and too many "How to launch" gurus...
I think that Product Hunt is still worth it for new products, despite the challenges you faced during the launch process. It is important to focus on the quality of the product and the value it brings to users. The fact that you gained new users is a positive outcome and shows that Product Hunt still has potential to drive traffic and awareness for new products. It is important to approach Product Hunt with a strategic mindset and focus on creating a strong product and building genuine relationships within the community.
Btw, we're creating a new quick capture solution and starting to promote it on PH. Please take a look and leave us feedback at: https://bit.ly/3odZ3JE
I certainly wouldn't pay to get hunted -- PH is like any other community-driven channel in that you'll get out what you put in.
And while there are ways to optimize your launches to drive traffic, it really only makes sense to invest heavily if your ICP is a product person in tech (or adjacent).
Sadly it used to be a great resource but now has turned into a bot machine. Still useful for back links
Also, I just checked out your page on PH! You had an impressive launch
That sound accurate tbh and thanks Tawheed!
it used to be better. the whole community was not about money but about products.
my friend noticed that too:
Yeah agreed, unfortunately.
Sidenote: 82 likes, it's looking like he's gonna make it happen haha!
haha as far as i can see, he is poisoned about this idea. he will make it anyway.
Any resource is useful imho
Too true
damn that sounds bad
The thing is, Product Hunt is GREAT for traffic, especially if you rank high. So it's common for people to game the system. But I feel like they're ruining it entirely.
I launched today for the first try, let's see how it is going and what experience I can give afterwards.
Will post a resume afterwards.
If someone wants to support us:
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/devtool-ninja
All the best and supported :)
I agree that it is worth it. As the startup, it's really a good place to do cold start for the product. It's indeed vibrant and you could receive valuable feedback from an engaged user base, which will benefit with your PMF. Plus, you could even receive additional opportunities that arose from the successful Product Hunt launch(i.e, we were contacted by AppSumo after our Product Hunt launch and we made the cooperation).
I must say, the feedback has been excellent!
Sidenote, I had a call with AppSumo yesterday, haha. Did you partner with them? And if so, how did you find it?
We're launching today as well, and I personally still think it's worth it.
Of course, paid hunt or vote is not my game. What we want from the launch is mostly to validate our product idea, and also get users for feedback, so we can iterate our product better. And I have to say, PH launch is still one of the most effective ways we've found.
I love your product and found it with PH so it's definitely effective :)
Haha, saw you there and really appreciate your support! 🤜
It more of a number game now.
You can't come in top3 with organic upvotes anymore, the more you dm people for upvote higher your chances are.
But it does provide good traffic to your website, good to check your conversion rates, retention and other numbers.
We've had a nice boost and new paying customers, so I can't complain! Yeah, I didn't realise the DM game was so important, which means larger teams can cover more ground much faster.
Right now product hunt is flooded with fake accounts and super generic comments from those same accounts, but I still think is worth it because of the backlink you get
I see
it used to be more authentic, but I still don't see any alternatives.
peronally i will leverage it to validate my idea, but making money from the campaign is gonna be a stretch.
We made money off the back of the main launch to be fair! But agreed, I get the feeling it used to be better but still, no better solutions than PH atm.
I appreciate that PH team is trying to validate the authenticity of the user's identity by encouraging them to connect their linkedin profile and trying to remove new and fake accounts that are created just for some product launch.
However, by connecting my linkedin profile, I get a lot of linkedin cold reach out by people who are launching and asking me to support and vote for them, provided the fact that I do not know their product, I do not know them nor I don't feel comfortable connecting and voting for them just because they reached out.
I believe we all have to truly passionate about the product after knowing the product, what problem are they trying to solve and for whom before I really upvote it on the launch day.
I guess the PH team should start raising the bar like only certain user can be able to check the linkedin profile of other user; or certain user can be able to vote after some key mile stone unlocked etc. like IH (speaking of which, i can't be able to vote here in IH but it is ok as i know i am not active here)
That's fair. The problem is, if the reward of ranking high on PH is good enough, then people will jump through all kinds of hoops to game the system. So I'm sympathetic towards it, I don't know the best solution, but I do know that currently its a problem.
Product Hunt is still continue working to improve the platform and combat fraudulent practices. They strive to provide a fair and authentic environment for showcasing new products and fostering genuine user engagement.
Where do you all find the hunter for your launch?
https://upvote-bell.com/leaderboard
Great point, I've noticed that Product Hunt has taken on more of voting competition with bots, and too many AI oriented tools rather than Productivity itself compared to its authentic nature from a few years ago. However, despite these changes, I still believe that Product Hunt remains a valuable platform for launching new products.
The true value of Product Hunt lies in its ability to connect you with a passionate audience and potential early adopters. So, stay committed to delivering a remarkable product and nurturing authentic relationships within the community. With the right approach, Product Hunt can still be a valuable tool for driving growth, fostering connections, and making a lasting impact.
In that manner, we hunted our product today, Vrain- your personal data finder in one place- to save your time and effort finding sth from your email, calendars, drive.
please support us on Product Hunt
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/vrain
Thank you so much🙏🏻
It's worth it if you have a good product. Launching on PH is a good way to test this and get feedback, iterate, and relaunch.
I don't think backlinks are that useful. From personal experience
Worth it for:
But I've launched late last year on product hunt, we definitely got new users, but also had so many spam users that we had to incorporate recaptcha on signup. I wouldn't pay to get hunted, would just follow best practises on launching on PH and just use it as one of the many platforms to launch on.
Awesome
I just did a launch to test this out, and I agree that it's not really worth it.
I hope @csallen and @channingallen strongly think about what's a healthy way to incentivize founders to post and promote without being spammy. I think backlinks are nice and a genuine way to help the community; all the nofollow games for the god of google optimization are long-term counterproductive if you're trying to build successful case studies in your community.
It's great if you are trying to build a personal brand. I think @vedranrasic does a great job of this... I might be wrong, but it feels like he has a following, not his products or company. Both are intertwined, but there's something deeper here to consider when considering how it aligns with your product and growth strategies.
I'll share my stats separately (which were small), but one thing stuck out: upvotes did not equal visits or installs. It's a lot of looky-loos all being "positive".
There are some helpful points here. The product type matters, too, as where you sit on the leaderboard from early on. The whole time there, we slowly slid down from 6th to 9th. Because we sat in that range, we got about 200+ installs on the day and the following day, but we could have gotten more if we had been higher.
Also realised that directly DMing people was an excellent play for our installs, and in the end, that mattered a lot more than getting upvotes. We just wanted to be visible and didn't care about "winning" with all the botters.
Definitely still think it's worth it.
Do see an uptick of promoted and spammy content and such on Product Hunt, but it has genuinely helped us to broaden our user base and get exposure to folks all around the world.
We did our first launch back in September, and we made a lot of dumb mistakes. Now we're back at it again today and doing better but definitely still struggling (https://www.producthunt.com/posts/betafi-2).
We have been shocked to get lots of random inbound spammy outreach and people peddling pay per upvote schemes. Would avoid those > if you're going to pay money for stuff might as well do real, straightforward marketing at that point.
100% agreed that it's gotten a lot more difficult to break through the noise, but as other folks have mentioned, backlinks are golden. As we get more content out there on the internet and indexed by Google, etc. it really helps to establish this evergreen baseline of inbound traffic for your product.
Also appreciate how the Product Hunt time is trying to constantly re-jigger the formula and rules around listings to weed out spam and artificial upvotes to the extent they can.
In web apps backlinks from PH matter understandably. Does it matter this much for mobile apps also?
For me, it's good to have Product Hunt widget on our landing page, but in term of feedbacks and registration, not much. We got lots of good feedbacks from Indie Hacker instead. Can see an example here https://www.indiehackers.com/post/hey-guys-validating-my-landing-page-kaikul-and-would-like-to-get-some-pointers-from-you-guys-9c277e43d9?commentId=-NVd6a-EiMyo-V6Rudry
We launched our product some days ago. you can check our numbers and reviews at the following link.
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/finbeet
I think you should think before leaping. you should ask some of your friends or followers before the launch. after launching they should support you to get a good rank.
lol
Is it $500 to get product "featured by PH" or just general listing needs to?
It's free to list, but when we spoke to a top "Hunter" they said they'll hunt for prices beginning at $500 lol
Not surprised, lol. all about $ ><
Although my product, GhostCut, which utilizes AI to help users quickly translate subtitles or audio of videos into other languages or remove unwanted text and watermarks, had a rough start on PH, I still gained a lot from the experience.
Before its formal release, we conducted user research and found high levels of demand and satisfaction. However, within the first 24 hours after the release, we only received a few dozen upvotes. Nevertheless, there were some advantages to the launch.
Firstly, it was our first release, and our team managed to match all the materials and plans.
Secondly, we obtained a certain amount of website traffic and even received user feedback and inquiries in the comments section.
Lastly, we gained experience and conducted a review, believing that the next release will be better.
However, we also found that some platforms allow cheating, with some products even able to buy upvotes or comments without any value. Therefore, my viewpoint is that although publishing has its value, it is essential to treat it as a marketing opportunity to seek the most valuable comments and authentic feedback.
Product Hunt is an amplifier, not a launchpad.
You need a tight-knit community of pre-existing super users to really amplify your momentum at launch to enable what often looks like organic growth after successful PH launches.
I recently launched a SEO-heavy product and hoping on PH to be one of the main sources of backlinks to help my boost a bit
I think in some cases it's vital
It's worth doing it for the backlinks alone.
Product Hunt definitely has a good domain rating, so I would suggest at least periodically publishing there. The community is also nice, I personally do like interacting there and follow the new products. But as per the launches themselves, I did like it more before.
I did an analysis for saaS products launched on PH for microsaasdb where I found most money making SaaS couldn't do too well in product hunt and my hypothesis was that PH users have a huge novelty bias. They upvote shiny products even if they are one-time use products or just have a better UI compared to a very useful saas.
Product Hunt certainly isn't useless, but it doesn't have the potential that it once did. The system has been gamed and truly interesting and industry changing projects aren't highlighted as prominently as they once were.
Yes it's still worth it if you invest minimum resources. There are so many variables out of your control that it's safer to have low expectations. And enjoy whatever positive thing comes out.
I am building a place for casual launches without the stress of upvotes, where every maker gets their time at the top. A website where visitors discover new tech products in short videos created by their makers.
Check it out on https://vidrevo.com
can i pls get some support for my launch i did yesterday?
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/chabotix
so far only 1 upvote. i thought ProductHunt launch was a big thing...