Product Hunt feels like launch theater now. What actually works for early traction?
I’ve been building in public and watching a lot of launches lately, and I can’t shake this feeling:
Product Hunt today feels more like a PR stunt than a real customer discovery channel.
Most launches I see:
• Big upvotes
• Shallow comments
• “Congrats!” spam
• No real feedback
• No real users
It’s mostly network effects, pods, and hype cycles.
So I’m rethinking my own launch strategy.
Instead of optimizing for “launch day,” I’m focusing on:
• Direct conversations with founders
• Cold DMs & emails
• Indie Hacker threads
• Niche Reddit discussions
• Narrative-driven content
• Then maybe paid ads
Not because ads are magic — but because they’re controllable and repeatable.
Curious:
What actually worked for you in 2025?
PH?
Reddit?
Cold outreach?
SEO?
Paid ads?
Would love real experiences, not launch porn 😅
The path to winning now is targeted and warm outreach. Find people that already need what youre selling instead of spam cold emailing people who don't give a fuck. And as a builder i had to automate that. feel free to use it. distributoai
Yes, you are right, cold email feels like spam now, drop your product link, I will check it
Which channel works is so dependent on the type of product and target audience that it is impossible to answer in the abstract.
In general, however, I agree that PH has turned into an overcrowded circus regardless what you are trying to promote.
I also had very bad experiences with paid ads when selling a B2B product to technical audiences. In one of the startups I worked on, we burned $250k on Google Ads before realizing we were not getting anything in return. With that learning, on my other startup we ran a much smaller and better instrumented pilot experiment with $5k to arrive at the same conclusion before pulling the plug.
In my personal experience Reddit is a good platform for getting early feedback to ensure the product market fit before we spend anything on Ads. But acquiring paid customers through Reddit post is very difficult, for that we should run Ads.