Product Hunt rewards marketing. Not products.
You've launched on Product Hunt.
You spent 3 days writing the perfect description. Crafted a demo GIF. Set up a landing page. Told your friends to upvote. Messaged your newsletter list. Joined 4 Slack groups to get cross-upvotes.
And you ranked #8 on launch day.
Then day 2 came.
You disappeared.
Not because your product got worse. Because a better-networked founder launched theirs.
That's not discovery. That's a popularity contest dressed up as a product platform.
The founders with the biggest Slack groups win. The ones with email lists of 10,000 win. The ones who already have an audience — win. And the quiet builder who made something genuinely useful? Gets buried under 47 AI wrappers before noon.
I've talked to enough founders to know this is the silent frustration nobody says out loud. You feel like the game is rigged. And honestly? It is.
I built Avenir because I was tired of it.
52 products get featured per year. That's it. Not because I'm being exclusive — because if everything gets featured, nothing means anything.
No upvotes. No launch day anxiety. No begging your network.
Just: is the product actually good? Does it solve something real? Is the founder building with intention?
If yes — it gets in. It stays visible. It gets written about properly.
For those of you who joined the waitlist a while back — it's live.
Every system is running. Including the terminal navigation, which sounds intimidating and isn't — it's just faster. Type where you want to go instead of clicking through menus. That's all it is.
You waited. It's here.
Couldn’t agree more. Product Hunt definitely rewards marketing and networking way more than product quality these days, and it’s just not friendly to solo indie developers. But at the same time, many platforms have also turned paid. PH’s current approach is clearly revenue-driven — it brings more traffic and profit. It’s really hard to judge products purely by merit, because how do you even define “good enough”? You need user feedback, which in turn relies on traffic. So I’m curious: how exactly will your platform judge whether a product is excellent? And how will you gather genuine, authentic user feedback?
Great question and honestly the hardest one to answer cleanly. Merit isn't a single score — it's a pattern. We look at whether the problem is real, whether the founder has thought deeply about it, whether the product has a reason to exist beyond "I also built this." User feedback matters but it's one signal, not the whole picture. A product with 10 deeply engaged users tells us more than one with 500 passive signups from a launch spike. We're not trying to be objective — we're trying to be honest. Those are different things.
What stood out to me most is the idea that distribution, not product quality, decides visibility on platforms like this. ~
It’s a bit uncomfortable, but true — the people who already have an audience start with a huge advantage.
When i have lunched taskip in product hunt ended up on #23 rank, tried everything i could bet good upvote but still could not able to make it into a good position.
#23 with a real product is more honest than #1 with a launch campaign. The number was wrong — the product wasn't. Submit it to Pulse.
i registered the account, but something seems happened.
"Something went wrong. An unexpected error occurred. This has been logged and we'll look into it."
Appreciate you reporting this! Good news — your account actually went through fine. It was a client-side glitch after signup, already on it.
You're all set to start submitting products on Pulse — go for it.
Nice job. But i still could not login.
Hey — just wanted to let you know we've identified and pushed a fix for the issue you ran into. Should be resolved now. Give it another try and let us know if anything else comes up.
Appreciate you flagging it early — genuinely helps.
Hey, sorry you're running into that — we're on it. Can you send a screenshot to athenalabs.reym@gmail.com? Want to see exactly what you're seeing and get it fixed for you.
Launched on PH last month. Can confirm everything here.
We ended up around #6 for the day, which sounds decent until you realize the products above us had coordinated launch campaigns with 50+ people in Slack groups ready to upvote at midnight. One of them was literally a landing page with no working product.
The thing that surprised me most: the traffic spike from PH was almost entirely tire-kickers. High bounce rate, low conversion. The users who actually stuck around and became paying customers? They came from a random Reddit comment I left three weeks earlier and a niche Slack community I'd been participating in for months.
The irony is that PH *does* still work for awareness — just not in the way people think. The badge and the social proof ("Featured on Product Hunt") has value on your landing page long after launch day. But if you're counting on PH day-of traffic to validate your product, you're measuring the wrong thing.
The real launch is the 6 months of quiet work before and after. PH is just one Tuesday.
You are always welcome to try Avenir.
happy building!
100% agree, had my first launch yesterday and to say it was humbling is an understatement, in hindsight I invested my time trying to make my launch page look good, I should have spent the time building a network instead!
This is actually true more often than people admit.
The 'better-networked founder launches theirs' part is painfully accurate. I just launched a product this week and the gap between having distribution and not having it is real. The product could be great but if nobody sees it, nothing happens. Curious how Avenir handles the curation - who decides what's 'actually good'?
'Product Hunt rewards marketing. Not products.'
The founders with the biggest Slack groups win. The quiet builder who made something genuinely useful gets buried under AI wrappers.
What I've seen:
— A mediocre product with great launch strategy can rank #1
— A great product with no network launches to silence
— The system isn't broken — it's designed this way
Quick questions about Avenir:
1. How do you decide which 52 products get featured? Who's the curator?
2. How do you prevent this from becoming another 'who the founder knows' system?
3. Will you share traffic data to featured products? That's the real value.
I love the mission. Execution will be everything.
Wishing you success with this.
Good questions, worth answering properly.
On the curator — we have a dedicated review team that evaluates submissions weekly against the same criteria every time: is the problem real, is the solution honest, is the founder building with intention. Consistency of judgment matters more than volume of reviewers.
On preventing nepotism — the number 52 is the hard limit that makes this impossible to game. There are no bonus slots, no fast tracks, no "I know someone." If the product doesn't clear the bar, it doesn't get in regardless of who built it.
On traffic data — yes. Featured founders get full analytics on their visibility. That's the actual value and we don't hide it.
'Consistency of judgment matters more than volume of reviewers.'
That's the key. One bad review system is random. A consistent one is reliable.
What I love:
— 52 is a hard limit. No bonus slots, no fast tracks.
— 'If the product doesn't clear the bar, it doesn't get in regardless of who built it.'
— Featured founders get full analytics — that's real value.
Most platforms hide data. You're putting it in founders' hands.
Quick question: do you share why a product didn't make it? Rejection without feedback is just noise.
This is a solid approach
This is exactly the tension I'm navigating building a physical brand. The temptation to launch on Product Hunt is real, but the incentive structure rewards noise over substance. A product that needs a 24-hour leaderboard to exist isn't ready. If it's real, it finds its people without the spike. Building slower, but on solid ground.
Exactly this. The spike is a trap — it feels like validation but it's really just attention, and attention without retention means nothing. The products that last are the ones that found their people quietly, without a countdown timer. What are you building?
A premium performance apparel brand — physical product, not SaaS. Capsule 001 launches April 15, 100 units, founder edition. The whole thesis is that most activewear communicates the outcome of performance (faster, stronger, lighter) but nobody communicates its origin — the intention, the discipline, the energy behind it. We're building around that gap. No visible branding, proprietary construction, made in EU. Building completely in public here on IH. What about you?
"Strong take, and honestly… I mostly agree.
Product Hunt has turned into a marketing & network game more than a product discovery platform. The launch day meta (big email list + Slack army + perfectly timed upvotes) is exhausting, and it buries a lot of genuinely good but quieter products. I’ve seen it happen multiple times.
That said, I think the core problem isn’t just Product Hunt — it’s that we still don’t have a great merit-based discovery platform in 2026. Most attempts either become ghost towns or slowly turn into the same popularity contest.
Curious about Avenir:
How do you decide which 52 products get featured each year? Is it just you, or do you have a small curation team?
Will you accept AI wrappers or simple tools, or are you being quite strict on “solves something real”?
I joined the waitlist a while ago. Glad to see it’s finally live. Will check it out properly this weekend."
I feel like I'm reading my own histories!
That's exactly the point. Most founders have lived this — they just don't say it out loud. What did your launch look like?
There's another layer to this if you're building mobile-native. PH traffic is web traffic, and web users don't convert to App Store downloads at any real rate. You could have a solid launch day with hundreds of upvotes and end up with maybe a dozen installs because nobody's pulling out their phone to search for your app. For mobile builders, probably worth skipping PH entirely and putting that launch energy into communities where people are already on their phones.
Honestly the '47 AI wrappers before noon' line made me laugh because it's so true. I launched something last year and spent more time coordinating upvotes than actually improving the product — felt gross. The 52/year cap is interesting. Bookmarked.
This hits close to home. I'm prepping a PH launch for my SaaS right now and the more I research, the more it feels like planning a political campaign instead of shipping a product.
The part that bugs me most: the "hunter" game. You're supposed to find someone with a big following to submit your product, as if the product itself isn't the point.
My current plan is to skip the optimization game entirely. Validate with real users first (Reddit, DMs, communities like this one), then use PH as one channel in a multi-platform launch. If the product is good, a mediocre PH rank still brings real users. If it's not, #1 Product of the Day won't save you.
Anyone here launched on PH without playing the upvote game and still gotten decent results?
This matches what I've seen too. The products that win on PH tend to be the ones with the best pre-launch audience, not the best product. I've been preparing a launch for Flowly and the checklist is 80% community building and 20% product — which felt backwards to me at first, but the data seems clear. Curious if you think there's any realistic path for a solo founder without an existing audience, or is it just "build the audience first, always"?
Truth. Platforms like PH and Medium are just rented attention, and they always prioritize their "ad-logic" over your value. 🏛️🛰️
I just shared my post-mortem on how my "Too Native" system hit $10k/mo on Medium—only to get nuked because it was too effective for their algorithm to tax. It’s a liability to build on someone else's land.
Stop fighting for their rewards. Build the "Bunker" (your own infrastructure) and own the conversion logic yourself. 🧬
This hits close to home. I've seen products with 20 upvotes on PH that have real paying users and solid retention, while products that hit #1 disappeared within weeks. The whole launch day mechanic rewards coordination, not quality. The 52 products per year limit is a smart constraint because it forces you to actually curate instead of letting volume dilute the signal. Most discovery platforms fail because they try to be inclusive and end up being noise. Interested to see how Avenir's curation holds up as more founders start submitting.
I built Avenir to focus on real product quality, not hype—no upvotes, just meaningful discovery for truly valuable products
This is exactly why I didn't launch on PH for my physical product brand. The mechanics favor software — you can mobilize 500 upvotes in a day if your network shows up. For a clothing capsule, the audience overlap is near zero. Sometimes the best move is knowing which channels don't fit you. The real question is where your actual buyers discover things — and for performance apparel, it's definitely not PH.
nice!
Appreciate it. Come submit when you're ready.
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