Launched on Product Hunt, landed at #367. Here's what I learned about my AI video tool
Blinklip is an AI video clipper that runs 100% on your PC — no cloud upload, no subscription. Feed it one long recording (podcast, webinar, whatever) and it finds different hooks for different angles: Comedy, Education, Horror, Business — same footage, completely different clips. One podcast episode becomes a week of content.
I built it solo, in about 10 days.
Launched on Product Hunt yesterday. Reality check: #367, 3 upvotes, 1 comment. Not the breakout launch I hoped for — but it taught me something useful. My distribution was the weak link, not necessarily the product. My LinkedIn network is mostly telecom/ops people (20+ years in that industry), not content creators — so reach was tiny. But the handful of people who did click through actually downloaded it, from 4 different countries.
That told me: the few people who saw it with the right context were interested. I just haven't reached the right audience yet.
Posting here because IH is exactly where I should've started. Would genuinely appreciate:
— Anyone willing to try it and tell me what's confusing in the first 5 minutes
— Brutal feedback on positioning — does "AI video clipper that runs locally" even make sense as a pitch, or is it still unclear what this does?
Link: blinklip.com (Windows only for now, Mac/Linux not yet supported)
woo～
One thing I'd be careful about is how quickly a disappointing launch gets explained.
A weak launch can mean the wrong audience saw it.
It can also mean the right audience saw it but wasn't convinced by the thing you think they care about most.
Those explanations tend to feel very different, but they can produce surprisingly similar numbers in the beginning.
That's a fair distinction I haven't been honest enough with myself about.
My instinct is to blame distribution because the LinkedIn audience was clearly wrong (mostly telecom ops people, not creators) — but you're right that I can't cleanly separate that from 'right audience saw it and wasn't moved.'
The honest answer is I don't have enough signal yet. The 4 downloads came from people I can't fully profile, and I haven't done the harder work of actually putting it in front of content creators and watching what happens.
Reddit and IH are my next test — specifically to see whether the conversion rate changes when the audience fit improves. If it stays flat there too, I'll take that seriously as a product/messaging signal rather than a distribution one
The part I'd pay attention to isn't whether the numbers change.
It's what conclusion earns the right to be drawn if they do.
That's where things usually get more interesting than the traffic itself.
Happy to continue by email if useful.
Same here — launched last week, no pre-built audience = invisible on PH. The algorithm rewards day-1 velocity, which favors people with a list. Did you find any organic traffic from PH after the launch day, or was it all day-1 spikes?
Exactly this. Day-1 is basically a popularity contest for whoever has the biggest email list or Twitter following — neither of which I had going in.
Post launch-day, honestly, very little from PH itself. The listing still exists as a permanent backlink and social proof, but organic traffic from PH after day-1 has been minimal — maybe a handful of views a day at most, nothing that moves the needle.
What did surprise me: the downloads I got came from outside PH entirely — LinkedIn post drove some traffic, and the geo spread (UK, US, India, HK) suggested it reached slightly beyond my direct network somehow. But still tiny numbers overall.
How about you — what's your product? Curious whether you've found any channel that actually worked post-launch beyond PH.
We launched Cadensa — EU-native time tracking for agencies (cadensa.io). Same story on PH: ranked around #300 on launch day, handful of votes, no featuring.
What actually moved the needle post-PH: a LinkedIn post with a specific angle (Schrems II + EU data residency) that got ~250 impressions organically, and a few targeted Reddit comments in niche subs. Small numbers, but higher intent than PH traffic.
The honest answer seems to be: PH is brand validation and a permanent backlink, not a distribution channel. Real traction comes from wherever your specific buyer actually hangs out — for us that's EU agency owners on LinkedIn.