It's a ProductHunt baby!

Thanks for sharing this! Brutal read but it's so factual !

Your story reminds me of this strategy shared by this indie founder: Launch on Product Hunt multiple times

Many founders mistakenly believe a successful Product Hunt launch is the primary gateway to startup success.

The reality is that a launch is just a single day of visibility that rarely leads to long-term growth.

All the best!

Brutal read. I’m building an AI interviewer and was planning a PH launch. Now? Not anymore.

Deleting real comments from real users is unacceptable. That’s not “anti-bot”, that’s anti-founder.

Thanks for the warning. You helped more people than PH will ever admit.

Very interesting and thanks for providing this information, its indeed not the only channel and as with anything its important to diversify the channels!

HAAANK. DONT ABBREVIATE PRODUCT HUNT!!! HAAAAANK...

Thanks for sharing your experience on PH, much appreciated.

Fascinating breakdown of the PH algo shift. The part about them penalizing older accounts and prioritizing weight-based upvotes is brutal but smart from their perspective. Real insight here: PH is one marketing channel, not THE channel. The fact you got 14 points with ~15k engaged reach is actually solid if it converted. Most indie builders obsess over ranking #1 when what matters is qualified traffic. Did the launch drive real signups or mostly vanity metrics?

Interesting perspective. It feels like most platforms are shifting towards filtering “quality signals” more aggressively, but sometimes real users get caught in the same system.

I think the challenge is balancing anti-bot systems without killing organic engagement.

Deleting the actual comments and reviews is the most brutal part here. It's one thing to tweak upvote weight to fight spam, but wiping out genuine feedback from your real users and colleagues is just hostile.

Your point about traffic is a massive wake-up call for all of us. Funneling a warm, highly engaged audience of 1.5k people to PH just to have them filtered out as "bots" is a massive waste of marketing leverage. Direct traffic to your landing page is always king.

PH has felt like a pay-to-play directory for a while now, but this is a new low. Keep building, man. Real active users matter way more than a "Product of the Day" badge.

This is the most useful thing I've read ahead of my own PH launch on June 23rd. The algo cutting 90% of upvotes is genuinely alarming — I'd assumed organic outreach would move the needle.

The traffic breakdown is the real lesson though. IH outperforming PH directly tells me where to focus energy. Thanks for being honest about the numbers rather than dressing it up.

Good luck with Achiv — the problem you're solving is real.

The PH algo change is a real one - I've seen the same pattern with another launch this week. The kicker for me is the "hide them from others" part. If they're going to discount votes, fine, but at least let the maker see what their actual reach was. The silent discounting destroys trust. Sorry it hit you on launch day man.

exactly!! i have launched my product to 2 days back in PH i felt the same.
i got only 3 points because of this originally i got emails of upvotes but PH shows 3 points to my product.. really upset with that..

btw if you wanna know about my product here it is

Driftless : it is a documentation drift detection platform for GitHub repositories. It analyzes your actual codebase, generates accurate READMEs, detects when docs fall out of sync with code, and alerts you before contributors or users run into broken instructions. Think of it as automated quality checks for documentation.

link : https://driftlessx.dev


thank you !

Thanks for sharing this — really useful timing for me, I'm launching on PH next week.

The algo cutting 'suspicious' upvotes makes sense in theory but clearly hurts solo devs who just have a real network. Did you notice any pattern in which upvotes counted vs got cut?

Any advice on what you'd do differently