Product Hunt Isn't Useful For My Product
After launching on PH last week, getting 70 upvotes and 15 comments, and seeing effectively 0 useful conversions, I'm upset at the whole PH ecosystem.
The most annoying thing was that I did "everything right", and probably 60 of those 70 upvotes were from existing users, friends, family, and traffic from my badge on the homepage.
PH does a TERRIBLE job of showing their users the "hottest" or "rising" products. To me, it felt like you need to manufacture 300 upvotes artificially and only then will people see you on the front page and give you additional votes.
If you're curious, this was my PH page: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/qvault-3
Trending on Indie Hackers
As long as PH fanboys exists. And people like you keep pushing it while noticing the fact "you need to manufacture 300 upvotes artificially". They are not going to change or improve anything. The system works as it is.
Same as every other platform to be able to get more impressions you'll need keep it in the top. You can't easily fake that engagement in hackernews or reddit while it's much easier in ph or ih for example.
Today in 2023 it's even getting worse.
ASObot
Product of the Day
Almost 1k upvotes, ~200 new users, 2 payments
What I tend to do is to launch in "beta" and do another full release later on. Here is my latest products beta launch, and this is the full launch. 75 vs 329 upvotes.
The difference is that we could test out the waters with our first PH launch and build upon that on our second attempt. We also had an existing user base for our second launch. We changed the design, reached out to our users by email and on our dashboard (from the news dialog), and had someone to hunt our product.
PH isn't special. You need to have an audience upvoting your product. I also feel frustrated sometimes seeing some toy project getting more votes than a fully-fledged product. It is what it is.
This is great advice, thanks. Yeah, this is why I've started hating PH, to be honest:
"You need to have an audience upvoting your product".
The whole point of launching on something like PH should be to FIND a first audience. The fact that you have to come with a huge following upfront is super lame and scammy IMO.
They're really just stealing users from indie hackers it seems, rather than supplying them to us. It's like, the ideal PH would be one where cool stuff rises to the top automatically without the creators needing to pre-build an audience offline.
I'm also not saying that Qvault deserved that, but their algo/experience doesn't even allow for it.
I completely agree! Ages ago (before 2 launches that died on their "new" page) I thought PH was this super cool platform where people could post their products and get to reach an initial audience & first potential users.
Now I think that it can potentially add a growth bump, if used in a very specific way & not in early stages.
You pretty much pay them by bringing your audience to the platform and in exchange, if you make it to the featured page, you will benefit from all the other people bringing their own audiences to the platform & all these potential eyeballs on your product. But only if you were "lucky" enough to not die on the "new" page.
What I really didn't like was that when I contacted their support to ask were I went wrong, all I've been told was that they cannot disclose how they determine what products go to the featured page & been sent a blog article about launching on PH (which I think all of us read about a million times). Not a great experience.
Yup, this is my understanding of the sad situation.
Not great at all! Actually being pissed off at that process was one of the reasons I started working on an alternative to them, where you can actually have a chance at tapping into an existing audience, without such tricks & vanity metrics. Still work in progress though, but will hopefully get it there soon!
As someone being new to using product sharing platforms, I've always thought of Product Hunt to be a good ealy instrument to get feedback and get my product off the ground. As I read more about it, I feel this is not how it works. However, I'm glad to see that you @m5blum were able to do something like this with a beta launch followed up by the actual launch. Following two questions I have:
Hi Alexander,
we've simply added "(beta)" behind the product title. I didn't know there is a status attribute we could have used. Thank you for letting me know :)
For the relaunch, we did indeed add a lot of features and redesigned most of the app. It's a nice strategy to launch early and do it again once you know the direction of your product. I wouldn't launch a product in beta if it isn't.
Thanks for the response, Marvin.
Hope the beta attribute is even a thing. I don't have any launch experience yet and have just read about it on the help page. It too makes me sceptic that I can't see any products on Product Hunt with beta indication.
That makes sense and I'll keep the strategy of beta and then relaunching in my mind because I value getting early feedback a lot.
I love this approach! Thank you! I like the idea of a "beta" approach to get emotionally attached to the outcome. :)
Maybe your target audience (aspiring developers who want to improve their skills) aren't on PH? Or maybe they aren't looking to do that right now.
So I agree with the statement that "PH isn't useful"...if you add "for my product" at the end of it :)
Honestly I don't think that's the problem. Now, that might have been an additional problem for me, but the root problem is that there is no way (at least, not an easy or obvious way) for the average user to discover the "hot" or "rising" products.
On Reddit or HN, once a post gets just 4 or 5 votes, it breaks out of "new" and more people start seeing it. If they like it, it keeps going higher. On PH, as far as I could tell, you're in "new" until you hit the front page. That basically means that all you likes until you get to the front page need to come from your own sources. No one is paginating through "new".
It looks like your problem is you didn't get featured, which means you couldn't make the front page.
From my experience, they generally don't feature products that are spammy, or don't meet their guidelines (like people posting an Airtable database or something along those lines.
If you do post again, make sure to ask the PH team why you aren't featured yet. Often times this was an oversight on their part.
You'll know you are featured because it says so (rather than posted) https://pasteboard.co/4GJt0AzrLxMH.png
Hmm interesting. I'll need to look into that I guess. I actually chatted with the PH team a couple months ago for permission to do a 2.0 launch, so I hope it wasn't that.
Really cool idea! I've had the same experience with PH. My product is for a specific market niche, so I assume my post didn't do well for that reason.
What's the marketing design tool you're using? Looks impressive, I'd love to check it out!
Thanks, I'm glad you like it. It's all custom design actually. We have a WordPress site for the blog (I use the generatepress theme) and the platform itself is a custom Vue.js app
I agree with @zerotouser maybe you target group is not on product hunt. But honestly, your target group is probably a pretty small proportion of product hunt readers and e-learning for programmers is a crowded space. Without being a programmer/developer, your website did not make it clear to me what is your USP. Maybe add some comparisons like qvault Vs competitor 1, qvault Vs competitor 2 ?
And maybe you could incentivize the 10.000 developers using your site better to vote for you on product hunt for qvault4.?
Yeah, I actually did go into the whole affair fully aware that PH people aren't my target audience. Maybe I did a bad job communicating my complaints. My complaint isn't that no traffic converted, it's that there seems to be no "organic" way to do well on PH. It's a "bring your own audience" voting board.
Curious what your goals were for the Product Hunt launch? With 10,000+ developers' emails, spending more time on email marketing might be more worthwhile.
Also curious if there was an internal launch for the existing community prior to the Product Hunt launch.
Yeah the email list does okay, it's been a long journey with Qvault and not all the emails exactly align with my target audience either which is a unique side-project challenge haha.
And yeah Qvault launched 1.0 like a year and a half ago, this was a 2.0 launch.
I have seen good results for multiple SaaS apps on ProductHunt. Many founders have mentioned that they got some good conversions.
But this can also depend on 3 different factors i.e. Timing, Upvotes and Type of Product.
Yeah, I'm wondering if the "bring your own audience" expectation is getting worse with time. I remember 3 years ago it was easier to just have an interesting product and do well.
We’ve actually been going back and forth on whether we should launch our start-up (launched Mar 31, MeetHarlow.com) on product hunt and what we should actually expect in terms of value.
Our target audience is freelancers (design, marketers, writers, biz consultants) and we’re just not sure it’s the right platform to get in front of them.
Besides PH - what other areas have you guys found for early user acquisition that have worked??
I've found that consistent direct outreach and commenting on potential users social media posts has been a slow but useful approach
Why do you believe your product should have been more featured?
the strategy of moving your ih readers to your ph with this emotional engagement is great.
Product Hunt's campaigns work if you have famous backers and the community behind your profile / company / product.
I don't have any useful input for you but if it makes you feel better; I don't have any audience or friends. I'm hoping to get at least 5 votes but am prepared to get 0 when I launch on PH.
Just say "at least I'm not like that guy". I hope i helped with some frustrations. =)
PH is not for everything/everyone. Let's say I'm launching something better than PornHub, my potential users may not be on PH. How about a business about farming? See where I'm getting at? I, too, was there. I got upset with PH but then I figured PH was not for me. As for your business, are you sure your students are on PH?
Also, those toggle terms, on the homepage, should be off by default 😉
I agree with you, but it's sidestepping the point I'm trying to make I think.
Remember. Product Hunt is a channel, not a strategy.
There are some UX issues with your website, but I think some of the comments on Product Hunt were really positive!
Speaking of UX, I agree that PH's current user experience is terrible. I have to intentionally dig for interesting products and services.
Thanks for the feedback, would you mind sharing with me the UX issues you found so I can work on them?
My (limited) experience with PH is that we luckily did manage to get some buzz and traffic, but the quality of signups from there was very low (meaning people with no money or intention to buy).
I still think it's a great platform though. Since it's free and it can work for some startups. You can't complain about free marketing ;D
Our next launch on PH will be with all the "hacks" that I afterwards heard about.
PH might be broken in that way. You need to fake it to make it :D