Aproov

here to answer anything

It serves as a good reminder that followers count doesn’t always matter much influencer. ~

When the audience trusts the creator and cares about the problem, a smaller audience is more beneficial for the creator than a viral audience.

The fact that people are still around a week later is arguably the strongest indicator here. By clicking a button once. To get someone back is a whole new level of interest.

It’s easy to default to bigger numbers, but this is a good example of why the quality of the audience matters more than its size.

The real lesson is sharper than "small beat big," and the wrong version will mislead your matching. It wasn't fewer followers, it was three things that coincided at 1K: tight niche match, high trust (sparse sponsorship, so a rec still means something), and an audience not sold to death. The causal variable is trust density, not size.

That matters because "prioritize smaller creators" just swaps one lazy proxy (reach) for another (smallness). A 1K account posting sponsored junk daily converts worse than a devoted 40K niche.

So build into Aproov not a size filter but a trust signal: sponsored-post frequency, comment-to-like ratio, how often recs get acted on. Measure what predicted results, not what came with it.

What did her engagement look like, real conversations or just volume?

Just checked out Aproov and I think the idea is interesting. The biggest challenge for early-stage startups is often not building the product, but getting it in front of the right people. Matching founders with creators who already have a trusted audience could make distribution much more accessible.

I also like that the deal structure isn't limited to one payment model—access, pay-per-click, or cash gives both startups and creators flexibility.

One thing I'd be curious to see is how Aproov handles creator quality and audience relevance. A good matching and performance-tracking system could be a major differentiator here.

Overall, it feels like a promising approach to solving the “how do I get my first users?” problem. 🚀

This perfectly illustrates the power of micro-influencers. Follower count is just a vanity metric; trust, niche alignment and audience engagement are what actually drive meaningful conversions. It makes total sense to prioritize fit over reach. Great share!

here to answer anything

Im in!

This is a great initiative. The 2–5 minute live format feels much more authentic than a polished pitch deck, and the real-time Q&A can give founders valuable feedback from an actual audience. Excited to see the products that get featured!

Great idea a nice way for rounders to practice there pitch and get feedback.

This is a good idea because founders can get real feedback without making a polished pitch deck. One thing I would add is a short form before the live show. Ask each founder for their one-line pitch, target user, and biggest problem they solve. Then share those before the event so people know who they want to hear. After the show, give each founder a short recording or clip they can reuse on X. That could make the event useful even for people who cannot join live.

bro this is actually a great idea. respect for helping founders. hope u get some awesome products.

This is a great opportunity. I’m building StockLens AI, an AI-powered platform that helps investors analyze stocks and make research faster and more structured.

Would love to pitch it live, get feedback from the audience, and share what I’ve learned building it. 🚀

X: Nitesh Nagpal
Product: StockLens AI

Great initiative

Just DM you. Eager to participate. Very cool idea!!

Love the idea. Real products, real founders, and live feedback—much more valuable than a polished pitch deck. Great opportunity for indie builders!

Thanks that's a great initiative. Here's my product : Built to close the gap between self‑awareness and real change, AEGIS is a clinical AI OS for leadership and whole‑business transformation: it maps your inner architecture (Shadow / Light / Balance) from raw data (quiz, sessions, tracking), and operationalizes it via a People Board, Decision Log, Pulse Cards, and a toolkit of sovereign practices that scale from individual to organization.

I admire the choice to maintain this understated! ~

When a founder discusses what they're building in the moment, it’s more impactful than a well-practiced pitch. When you receive the product, you also get a feeling for how clearly they understand the problem.

It’s especially interesting to restrict to one sentence. If you can’t explain to us what you are constructing simply, a few more slides will probably not fix us.

The interactive question-and-answer session gives it an extra dimension. Sometimes the questions asked reveal more about the product than the pitch itself.

The constraint that makes this work is forcing a one-sentence pitch before anyone gets stage time. I've sat through hundreds of founder pitches as an angel investor, and the ones that can't compress to one sentence rarely have a real wedge, they have a feature list. I'd apply that same filter to who gets on air: reject the vague one-liners before the live show, not after.

This is a great format for discovering products beyond the usual polished launch posts. GeekyAnts would be an interesting company to hear from too, especially around the AI products and engineering work happening in this space.

This is a great initiative. A lot of founders focus heavily on getting distribution, but once the right customers start showing interest, especially enterprise clients, compliance and security questions can quickly become a bottleneck. I help SaaS and AI startups assess their compliance gaps and prepare privacy, risk, vendor due diligence, and security readiness documentation. Would be interesting to see how founders here are handling this side of growth as they scale. 🔐

Building StareBrain — natural language commands for Android (say what you want done, it shows you exactly what it'll do, you confirm, it happens). Waitlist's open, prototype's working for a handful of commands, still pre-launch.

X: @starebrain

Down to pitch if a not-fully-shipped-yet product fits what you're looking for — happy to be upfront about exactly where it's at.

Jaime. I’m Asad, co-founder of CuToken. We’re building around a problem AI builders constantly face: controlling and optimizing token usage without sacrificing output quality.

I’d love to connect and explore whether there’s a way CuToken and Aproov could help each other reach more AI/SaaS founders. Always better when indie founders can create distribution together rather than compete for attention.

Cool!

Hey I built Buildside . app to be the future of social media for founders. It offers valuable tools for SaaS founders to build in public and grow together. I built this as a necessity to build in public as a means to grow SaaS and services.

I built Whale Core — a zero-latency asynchronous Python engine that tracks Binance Futures liquidations, stop-hunts, and CVD anomalies millisecond-by-millisecond.

I got tired of delayed REST APIs while trading, so I built a direct WebSocket pipeline. Just did a 100% cold launch without a marketing budget to test the waters, and now pivoting hard into technical SEO & dev community feedback.

Check out the live landing & docs at sigma-liq [dot] fun — would love your technical feedback on the architecture!

I built a pre-purchase wardrobe advisor after wasting way too much money on clothes that didn't match anything I owned

I kept doing this thing where I'd impulse-buy something, get home, and realize it didn't go with anything in my closet. Turns out this is a bigger problem than just me: online apparel return rates are 30-40%, mostly from size/style mismatch, not defects.

So I'm building Atayr — snap a photo of something before you buy it, and it shows you how it pairs with what you already own. Second part: a lot of clothes only get worn once (weddings, interviews, one-off events) — so I'm adding a feature where you can share your wardrobe with trusted friends and borrow instead of buying for those one-time things.

Right now it's just a landing page + waitlist — trying to validate demand before I actually build the app (bootstrapped, so being careful not to build something nobody wants).

Would genuinely appreciate feedback — is this a problem you've run into? What would make you actually use something like this vs. not bother?

if you want to see it / join the list. (atayr . site) remove the space

Great idea, definitely helpful for solo founders and builders. I would like to participate.

I'm @pablores on X, and I'm building MixScout, an artist discovery + CRM platform for mix engineers and producers.

Great tool! I also just launched a free AI tool for LinkedIn. DM if you want feedback swap.

Love this idea. Giving founders a chance to talk about what they’re actually building, share the journey behind it, and get real-time questions from an audience feels much more valuable than another polished pitch or demo. Looking forward to seeing how this comes together!

Love this concept! I'm building SoftRankings, a stage-aware directory that helps founders and growing teams find tools that fit their exact stage, budget, and use case without the enterprise noise.

Would love to jump on the live pitch, share how we're helping early tools get discovered, and get direct feedback from the community! 🚀

Product: SoftRankings
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/softrankings

@MHDehalvi146 — QUORVA is a practical toolkit for social media freelancers that helps turn client goals into content plans, ideas, and creatives, reducing the hours spent on repetitive content work.

https://darling-fenglisu-90f358.netlify.app

The thing I’d watch with this format is that a good pitch can create attention without creating understanding.

2–5 minutes is enough to make someone curious, but probably not enough to overcome a vague positioning statement—especially when several products are being pitched back-to-back. The audience may remember the founder or the demo without remembering exactly who the product is for and why they should care.

I’d actually make the one-sentence description the hardest part of the application. If a founder can’t make the value obvious there, more distribution probably just amplifies the ambiguity.

here to answer anything

This comment was deleted 15 days ago

I believe both of these are needed. But if I could keep one, 'tried by 10' any day. I'm curious how Aproov handles the 'right fit' part?

here to answer anything

The 1,000 views feels good.

But 10 people actually trying your product feels better.

We’ve seen founders get more value from 10 relevant users, 5 pieces of real feedback, and 2 people who stick around than from a post reaching 1,000 people who scroll past.

Reach is nice. Fit is what converts.

Would you rather be seen by 1,000 people or actually tried by 10?

I’d take the 10 real users almost every time. Ten people actually touching the product will teach you more than 1,000 impressions ever could. The hard part is getting the right 10 though.

I agree. I think 10 people who genuinely try something and give honest feedback can teach you much more than 1,000 views. For someone building a new product, meaningful engagement seems more valuable than just chasing numbers.

It really depends on who's eyeballs are seeing it, and who's trying it. If it's 1000 people who could have a use for my product then That's what I choose. If it's just people at random, I'd still go with the 1000, but if it's 10 people who could really use the product, then that's the way I'd go.

The 1,000 vs 10 framing is right but there's a layer under it worth naming: the problem isn't just volume vs depth, it's that "seen" inflates your sense of validation while "tried" deflates it. Founders often feel worse after ten real users than after a thousand views, because the ten surface actual friction.

I've watched founders run paid acquisition too early specifically to avoid this discomfort. More views meant they could stay in the "product-market fit is coming" story longer.

The honest filter I've found: did the person who tried it come back without you prompting them? Organic return is hard to fake. Everything upstream of that -- views, signups, even first sessions -- can be gamed by messaging or onboarding tweaks.

Aproov's insight about fit over reach is the right correction. One question though: how do you help founders identify whether their conversion issue is distribution fit or product fit? Those need different fixes.

The gap between "seen by 1,000" and "tried by 10" is even wider than it looks, because a decent chunk of that 1,000 was never a person.

I went through raw server logs this morning rather than a dashboard, and it was sobering. Every link I'd posted had hits on it. Pulling the user agent and IP for each one: Twitterbot, redditbot, Applebot, Discordbot, FlipboardProxy, trendictionbot, plus a pile of "Chrome on Windows" hits arriving from OVH and Hetzner datacentre ranges - headless crawlers in a browser costume, and those are the ones that quietly inflate analytics. What was left as plausibly human was a small single-digit number.

If anyone wants to check their own, two filters need no tooling at all. First, grep your access log for something only a real browser fetches - a web font or a stylesheet - and look at the referer on it. Bots take your HTML and leave; they almost never pull sub-resources. That one filter separates "fetched my page" from "actually rendered my page". Second, look at where the IP lives. Residential and mobile ranges are people. AWS, GCP, OVH, Hetzner and DigitalOcean are not, whatever the user agent claims.

Which I think strengthens your argument rather than softening it. "1,000 views" isn't merely a weak signal, it's often a wrong one - you're being told something happened that didn't. Ten people who opened the thing is a number you can stand behind, and the reason it feels smaller is that it's real.

First, it may seem like 1000 views are better than 10 potential customers, but believe me, even if small in proportion, always go for the real engaging customers rather than the lookers

Definitely tried by 10, especially early on. 1,000 views can be a fun ego boost, but impressions don't give you a changelog.

Tried by 10 for sure. Getting people to see you isn't relatively hard for most. Just a couple of low effort social media videos can get you seen. But being tried by 10 people, people who took the time to view your app, and give it a chance, is a much more benefitting option.

Tried by 10, but I would split it one step further: did 10 people reach the first real value moment?

For early products, that is usually a better filter than signups or traffic. If people click, sign up, and still never hit the core outcome, the issue is not distribution yet. It is activation friction.

Getting tried by 10 is definitely the more important metric. But views and tries both go hand in hand. You can't expect to get users who try without visitors who know and learn about your product.

Also imo, simple "views" aren't as useless as one might think. If you make a good enough impression on the first visit and have a clear use case, people might refer your product to someone they know. I've referred/mentioned tons of products to my friends/acquaintances even though I've never tried them myself -- simply because I saw those products enough times and remembered them.

That being said, I think I'd like to give your product a try.

Yes. I would pick to be tried 10 over a thousand viewers everytime.

I think the interesting part is what happens between the click and the actual use of the product.

Reach can tell you whether the message is getting attention, but activation tells you whether you're reaching the right people. I'd be looking closely at that step rather than optimizing for views alone.

Right now tried by 1, but I’d take either. Get somewhere and learn from iterate and learn

1000 views got me 3 signups. One creator with 800 followers who genuinely loved what we built got me 47. I used to chase vanity metrics because they felt like progress. Now I chase 'did they come back tomorrow?' Everything else is noise."

ATP Tried by 1 would suffice.. Launched yesterday... Loved the building process, but no one told me how much anxiety launch and post launch would cause!

Tried by 10, and my last release is the receipt. My Mac app just shipped version 2.1: nine changes, and all nine came from people who actually use it — bug reports, requests, one reviewer who found a bug I would never have caught myself. A thousand viewers could not have written that changelog.

And the part nobody mentions: the 10 compound into reach later. One of my early triers wrote a 5/5 review on his blog, and that single article is now my #1 traffic source, beating everything I ever posted myself. So I think the choice is slightly false — the 10 are how you eventually get seen by the 1,000 that matter.

I’d take “tried by 10” almost every time, especially early on. Views are useful only if they create a learning loop, but ten people who actually go through the product can expose the real friction: where they hesitate, what they misunderstand, and whether the promise is strong enough to pull them back later.

The trap I’ve seen is optimizing for proof that the launch was visible instead of proof that the product created intent. A smaller audience with the right pain usually gives cleaner signal than a big spike with vague compliments.

Going for 10 trys. 1000 views is essentially fake dopamine that makes you feel good but the direction of a product’s refinement always comes from the user‘s interaction with the product. And that’s the meaningful thing that leads to revenue eventually.

Tried by 10, and here is the investor lens on why: when I evaluate early-stage deals, ten users I can call teach me more than any traffic chart in the deck. Views are a vanity line, retained users are evidence. The answer flips once the product is proven though, at that point reach becomes the constraint and you should chase it without apology.

I would rather be tried by 10. I already experienced a spike in views but it brought no new costumers. And it depends, if in the 1000 there are those 10 or more, then I may pick 1000. But if it's like you said then I'll pick 10 without hesitation.

Tried by 10, and I can put this week's actual numbers behind it.

Roughly 33 tagged visits across five channels in three days - X, Bluesky, Reddit, a Discord showcase, and a long post here. Signups from all of it: zero.

In the same three days, one person replied to a comment I'd left in a thread and said he'd message me when his builds were ready. That is the only thing that has moved.

I'd push on the framing slightly though. I don't think the variable is reach versus depth - it's whether you were there at the moment the person had the problem. The 1,000 saw it at some random point in their day. The one replied because ten minutes earlier he had typed out, in his own words, that he wanted the exact thing I'd described. Same me, same words, completely different outcome, and the only difference was that he was mid-problem when he read it.

Which is a much harder thing to buy than reach. I suspect that's exactly why reach is what gets sold.

I’d take 10 who actually try it. 1,000 views can feel great, but 10 people using the product gives you something you can actually learn from and build on.

That’s where the real signal is—especially if a few of those 10 stick around and become users. Reach is nice, but meaningful engagement is what moves a product forward.

I would take the ten who actually did it. ~

I would like to add some reference to it however it will not be just “tried”. It is what happened after they tried.

Have they returned? Did they see the value without being pushed? Did they explain to you why they stayed or left?

A thousand views can’t teach you as much as 10 people. The actual indicator is whether those 10 modify your building future.

This really resonates. I’ve found that “no” often doesn’t mean the offer is bad — it can mean there’s still uncertainty around whether it’s actually right for them.

That’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot while building my own SaaS. Sometimes the most useful signal isn’t the conversion itself, but understanding why someone hesitated in the first place.

Curious — how do you currently measure whether there’s a strong audience/product fit before making the match?

Good insight!

here to answer anything

fit is everything. not for the creator, but for his audience

Such a relevant topic for indie founders trying to crack creator marketing!

​A huge reason creators pass is friction—if the deal structure, deliverables, or payment terms aren’t crystal clear from minute one, they won't even bother replying.

​When evaluating deals and outreach, do you see founders struggle more with pricing the sponsorship fairly, or is it mostly about pitch messaging?

​(Also curious if anyone uses specialized ROI/rate calculators to set baseline creator offers before reaching out?

Gonna try it!

I can recall this. I tried 3 creators with reach, that’s all I cared, and, even I had budget, they reject me. I was like…. Wtf?

Yeah your right and most cases it just the pay is too low

There are a few in price too. Fit I would say is for true, real, value creators. Agree on that

What he stumbled into is frequency, not reach: the same claim from three different voices in one week reads as consensus, one voice reads as an ad. The tactical version is to compress placements into a seven to ten day window instead of spreading them across a quarter, and to measure audience overlap rather than total impressions. Worth pressure-testing the other side though, creator-sourced signups usually retain worse than search or referral, so I'd look at his day-30 numbers before scaling the playbook.

Spot on insight. This completely mirrors how distribution actually works for early-stage products instead of waiting for a silver bullet.

It’s funny, I’ve been living and breathing a similar grassroots approach while building Serum Health—an upcoming iOS and Android app that unifies fragmented health telemetry (wearables, labs, and medical records) into a single predictive 3D digital twin. I originally started building it purely out of frustration to solve my own health tracking mess, but when you're tackling something complex, you realize nobody is going to find it through one giant mega-shoutout anyway.

Coordinating smaller, niche voices where the audience actually feels the pain point makes the product feel native and present everywhere at once. Have you noticed any specific sweet spot for community size when coordinating multiple smaller creators, or does it scale linearly?

Love this approach. Even small bites can eat the elephant over time

I like this approach. Repeated exposure from several niche creators can build more trust than a single big shoutout. It also spreads the risk—if one campaign underperforms, the others can still generate momentum. I'm curious whether you found a sweet spot for the number of creators to run simultaneously.

Interesting observation. It suggests that trust isn't always borrowed from the biggest voice—it can emerge from seeing the same product appear independently across several smaller ones.

At that point, people stop treating each mention as a promotion and start treating the product as something they've genuinely begun noticing.

This is a good read. It's easy to focus on building, but I think figuring out where the first real users come from is just as interesting. I'd be curious to know if one acquisition channel has surprised you so far.

Never thought about it as "coordination vs one big placement" but that's a good reframe curious how you pick which creators overlap enough to compound but not so much it feels repetitive to the same people

This makes a lot of sense. A few smaller creators can create repeated exposure across relevant audiences, which may build familiarity and trust better than a single large shoutout. It also spreads the risk instead of relying on one creator to drive all the results.

Thank you. This post gave me a lot of inspiration.

As a beginner working on the OPC path, this is very helpful for me!

This is actually really cool. I'd try it. Building a photographer discovery-to-booking platform.

"Congratulations on reaching 400 user! This is highly inspiring for me as a 14-year-old SaaS founder building Corely AI. Keep crushing it!"

Not creators, but we accidentally ran into the same thing with communities. Posted the same finding — six bot bypass tools, all of them walked past reCAPTCHA — on three different places within about a week, and the third one performed noticeably better than the first two even though the content barely changed.

My read at the time was that I'd gotten better at writing it. Reading this, I think it's more likely a few people had just seen the name somewhere else already.

The timing detail is what I'd want to know more about. Was he deliberately clustering them into the same week, or did it just happen that way and he noticed after?

Zero to 400 users as a first-time founder is genuinely impressive. Would love to know what your single biggest lever was for that early growth — paid, organic, community, or something unexpected?

Love this. “Presence over praise” is such an underrated growth lever early on. 🙌

One big name = a spike. A handful of small creators = ambient awareness. When people see the same tool pop up twice in a week from accounts they already trust, it stops being an ad and starts feeling like a pattern.

We’re seeing the same in the Shopify space—merchants trust a chorus of niche experts way more than a single “guru” promo. The coordination part is the hard bit though… doing this manually without sounding robotic is an art.

Curious: did he stagger the posts or blast them all in the same 48 hours?

This makes a lot of sense. A few smaller creators can create repeated exposure across closely related audiences, which may build familiarity and trust better than a single large shoutout. It also spreads the risk instead of relying on one creator to deliver all the results.

I’d be interested to know whether you noticed a difference in conversion quality too, or mainly an increase in signups?

This matches what I’ve been seeing too, one big shoutout fades fast, but a few small niche creators in the same week makes the product feel more “real.” How did he pick those creators (audience fit, engagement, or price), and did you track which ones actually converted vs just drove views?

I am reading a book called “change” by Damon Cenola and it talks about this… its going to the periphery to find initial traction

This resonates. I've found that repeated exposure often matters more than one big splash. We're still early, but I've started seeing better results by focusing on multiple niche channels instead of waiting for one breakthrough source of traffic. It feels like trust compounds when people encounter your product from different places rather than just once. Curious if you've measured whether there was a tipping point where the repeated mentions really accelerated signups.

tried as well. not as many creators, just a few. currently setting up terms. sharing results soon.....

Here to answer anything

This tracks with something I’ve noticed running outreach for my own agency — one mention rarely moves anyone, but the same name popping up 2-3 times across different sources changes how people perceive it. It stops looking like an ad and starts looking like consensus.

I’d guess the overlap matters more than the reach. A few small creators whose audiences actually intersect will beat one big creator whose audience only sees you once. Repetition across trusted voices does something reach alone can’t.

Curious if you’ve noticed a minimum number of touches before it “clicks” for someone — 2 mentions vs 3 vs 5?

This matches what a lot of first-time launchers run into, PH rewards whoever already has an audience lined up, not necessarily the best product that day. Going in without a hunter or pre-built community and barely showing up in the rankings is a rough but honest lesson. Good post for setting realistic expectations before a launch, thank you.

I’m curious about your launch experience. Besides Product Hunt, what channels helped you get your first users?

Interesting, thanks! We're planning to launch on PH in a few months - does anyone have any advice? I'm not planning to game it, just like the OP here - post and hope!

The leaderboard is a distribution audit, not a product test: it measures who you brought, not what you built. Across the startups I have backed, the founders who got real value from PH treated the day as a forcing function for positioning and kept the page as a permanent SEO asset, while the ones chasing rank without an audience got exactly what you describe. Your creator-matching angle works for the same reason: borrowed distribution only converts when the audience already has the problem.

That's a problem I've faced when finished developing my 2check checker. Although idea was perfect, there were no clear competitors, the idea mostly lives in my mind

Spot on about Product Hunt, the leaderboard is 90% pre-launch distribution and hunter reach, not product quality on the day. Mihir’s comment above nailed it too: PH is way better as a permanent SEO footprint and positioning tool than a one-day miracle. Great thread!

Launching my own product (Lumynax, an AI companion app) on PH tomorrow with the exact setup described here - no hunter, no built-in following, first submission ever.

One thing that's helped calibrate my expectations going through PH's own pre-launch dashboard this week: they hand you tools that have nothing to do with a hunter's reach - a forum thread to start ahead of launch, trackable share links for wherever you post outside PH, an embed badge for your own site. None of that moves the leaderboard ranking, but none of it depends on already knowing someone with a following either.

Feels like the real split isn't "hunter vs no hunter," it's "ranking day vs the rest of the surface area PH gives you that has nothing to do with the leaderboard." Will find out tomorrow whether that holds up in practice.

Yep, lived this exact one two weeks ago. No hunter, no existing following, first-time launch. Ended up buried below products that got there first with a hunter's audience already primed. Still got some real signups from it, just not from the ranking itself, more from people who happened to see the page and actually needed the tool. Aproov's approach makes a lot of sense to me: the hunter system basically rewards who you already know, not what you built.

Yeah besides product hunt I just use social media for my marketing

two launches, 20 and 8 upvotes, no hunter either time. third one for bunzee goes up sunday so i'll find out again. did yours bring any signups at all, or was it flat?

Thanks for your post, had the same experience and in the end the ground work in dedicated communities was the more valuable channel.
What were your beste channels in the end?

Yes, but it's much harder. A great product helps, but early visibility and distribution often matter more than the product itself on launch day.

I've seen it happen without a hunter, but every case I can think of had something else compensating, usually an existing email list or community the founder could mobilize in the first hour to get early upvotes and comments going before the algorithm decides the launch is dead. The hunter isn't really the mechanism, it's a proxy for "this person already has people who'll show up for them." A hunter with 10k followers gets early engagement because their audience notices the launch, not because being hunted by them carries some inherent ranking bonus.

So the honest answer to "can you rank without a hunter" is probably "not without something that does the same job a hunter does," which for most first-timers means building even a small owned audience somewhere before launch day rather than showing up cold and hoping the product carries itself. The frustrating part is that's exactly the chicken-and-egg problem you're describing, you need visibility to get the audience and the audience to get visibility.

Great point about the importance of community and visibility when launching a product. Many first-time founders underestimate how much preparation, networking, and learning are involved before getting real traction. Platforms, resources, and online learning opportunities can help entrepreneurs improve their marketing, product strategy, and launch skills. Building genuine connections along with a great product seems to be the key to long-term success. Thanks for sharing this insight!

From my experience with two projects I faced the same issue, not forgetting the amount of Spam emails I received as well after launching their. It is good to have one place to explore new projects, but also listing new tools from big names is not fair as well. Maybe having different sections for that might also help.
As for what I've done beside PH, I just tried to be more active on X, Reddit & Stackoverflow. Also, a fellow indie hacker shared an interesting guide that allow GPTs to find/reference your project "How to rank #1 on ChatGPT?"

Skipped PH entirely for this exact reason - no hunter, no network, so I knew day one would just be shouting into the void. Went the slow boring route instead: kept shipping small browser-based tools and let a couple of them get picked up organically through search. Way less dopamine than a launch day, but the traffic actually compounds instead of spiking and dying. Curious though - for the founders who DID get traction without a hunter, was it the product itself pulling people in, or did it come down to grinding comments/DMs in the right communities beforehand?

I can't claim traction yet — I'm in the run-up rather than the aftermath, so treat this as a report from the experiment rather than a result.

What I'm doing instead of lining up a hunter is slow and unglamorous: every day I comment on launches with only a handful of comments, ask the maker something specific enough that it's worth answering, reply when they reply, follow them. Ten days in and a decent number of makers now recognize the name. It's the same goal as a hunter — people who'll show up on the day — just accumulated one conversation at a time instead of borrowed from one person's audience.

Which makes me want to push on the mechanism a bit. Is the hunter effect really their followers, or is it early velocity? If the ranking rewards a fast first hour, then thirty makers who know you might do the same work as one hunter with three thousand followers, and the difference is just how long it took to build. If it's genuinely follower reach, the distributed version can't substitute and I'm wasting my time — which I'd rather find out now than on launch day.

Curious whether anyone in this thread has data on that split, because it changes what a first-time founder should actually spend their pre-launch weeks doing.

I think Product Hunt works best when it is only one part of the launch. Before launch day, try to build a small list of people who already know your product. Email users, post progress on Indie Hackers, and ask beta users for honest support. That way you already have some attention before Product Hunt starts. Even if the ranking is not great, you still get feedback, signups, and people who may become long term users.

I've noticed the same. Product Hunt is less of a product discovery platform and more of a network discovery platform. Having the right people behind you can make all the difference.

About to launch one..entirely new world for me. Your assessment will go a long way to keep expectations grounded to the ACTUAL reality.

launched there three times now and each one taught me something different about how little it actually does on its own. what's the one you hit?

That’s a very interesting thought—in fact, I’d say it’s a fact. Without a hunter's support, I think even the best product has slim chances.

yes, real PH traction without a hunter happens — but almost never from cold zero. The launches that work already warmed Twitter / IH / email; PH is conversion day, not the discovery engine. A hunter amplifies that; it doesn’t invent demand.

LTD or small-commission creator matching is a smart wedge for founders who can’t write a cash check for distribution.

When you match, do you weight audience fit first, or willingness to post on launch day?

Yes, but it changes what you're optimising for.

The hunter mostly buys you one thing: a notification to a list of people who already opted in to hear about launches, firing at the moment the day starts. That's a distribution head start, not a ranking mechanic. You can assemble the same thing yourself, it's just unglamorous — a list of 50-80 people who have actually used the product, told a week in advance, with a direct message the morning of. Not "please upvote", just "we're live today, here's the link". The people who already got value will show up; the ones who didn't were never going to move the needle anyway.

The two things that seem to matter more than volume: early engagement concentrated in the first few hours rather than spread across the day, and a first comment that's a real story about why the thing exists instead of a feature list. Then answer every single comment within minutes for the whole day — that's the part that's genuinely hard solo and the part most people skip after hour four.

The harder truth, and the reason I'd reframe the goal: PH traffic is overwhelmingly other founders and builders. You get a signup spike and terrible week-two retention, because most of them aren't your buyer. So judging the launch on rank or signups will make it look like a failure even when it worked. The things that actually survive the week are the qualified conversations, the aggregator and newsletter pickups it triggers, and having a dated public artifact you can point at later.

the part nobody optimizes is the comment section of other people's launches. i'm in the new launches most days and one genuinely useful comment there sends more relevant profile visits than a middling ranking on your own day does.

launch day is one day. being in other people's threads is something you can run every week.

I am the founder/operator of Lisar Connect, so rather than a theory here is a concrete negative data point.

Self-hunted, launched 7 July: 3 upvotes, one comment (my own), 9 followers, zero reviews. So no, no traction from the ranking.

But I would push back gently on the diagnosis. Looking honestly at my own launch, the missing hunter was maybe the third most important factor.

Category fit came first. Product Hunt's audience skews AI, productivity and design. I launched VPN profile tooling aimed at people who already use standard OpenVPN clients. Most of that audience was never on the site that day, and a hunter's followers would not have been either.

Early velocity came second. The ranking rewards the first few hours, and a hunter is really a proxy for "do you have people ready to show up at 00:01 PT." I had nobody. Borrowing a general audience would have bought me views, not signups.

What did pay off was the residue rather than the day itself. The product page and the forum thread still exist and still get found weeks later. For a narrow technical product I would now treat a launch mostly as a positioning and documentation forcing function, and get distribution from the places where the problem is actually being discussed.

Which is really your own relevance-over-reach argument from the other post. I would just apply it to the hunter question too.

here to answer anything

Here are several polished headline variations, depending on the tone you're after:

Direct & Curiosity-Driven

• The Product Hunt Problem Nobody Warns You About

• The Hidden Problem With Product Hunt

• What Nobody Tells You About Launching on Product Hunt

• The Biggest Product Hunt Mistake No One Talks About

• The Product Hunt Reality Most Founders Discover Too Late

Founder-Focused

• Every Founder Should Know This About Product Hunt

• Before You Launch on Product Hunt, Read This

• The Product Hunt Trap That Catches Most Founders

• Why Your Product Hunt Launch Might Not Deliver What You Expect

Contrarian

• Product Hunt Isn't the Growth Engine You Think It Is

• The Uncomfortable Truth About Product Hunt

• Product Hunt Can Hurt More Than It Helps—Here's Why

• Why Product Hunt Isn't Enough to Get Your First Customers

I cna help products to list on various high authority platforms like PH with https://listmy.site/

For realll bro

This matches what I'm seeing with my own product (rental management for small self-managing landlords). It's such a tight niche that a big real-estate account would be mostly noise for me — the people I need are watching some 8k-subscriber landlord on YouTube who explains rent spreadsheets, not a property influencer with 500k followers.

The no-brainer for me: let me paste my landing page URL and get back a shortlist of creators whose audience actually overlaps with it — with some evidence of the overlap, not just follower counts and engagement rate. I don't have budget to test blind, so the pitch that would get me to pay isn't "access to creators," it's "we already did the relevance filtering, here are the 3 worth your money." Pay per booked collaboration, zero subscription until something converts.

Bonus if I could see what a creator's audience actually converts on — a creator who's sent traffic to other B2B/SaaS tools before is worth 10x one who's never sold anything to their audience.

Love to try your sevices and provide genuine feedback. all the best

so true. niche over reach. congrats

here to answer anything

the "bigger number looks more impressive on paper" line is the trap, it's so hard to argue for the smaller creator in a room. and yeah, flat results from a big broad audience is a lesson that only really lands after you've paid for it once.

The no-brainer would be evidence of audience-to-problem fit before I ever talk to the creator: 3 sample posts where their audience asked about the problem, plus a suggested offer/test. Follower count is a proxy, but repeated pain language in the replies is the real signal.

It depends on what you’re selling and who you plan to sell it to. If you’re selling adult diapers for the elderly, you don’t need an influencer.

X is totally like this

here to answer anything

Founder recommendations work because there’s built-in trust. I’ve found a short “we use this for X” mention often beats a polished launch post.

Spot on! Recommendations from fellow builders feel authentic because they’ve actually tested the tool in real scenarios. Ads just don't carry the same trust.

Founder-to-founder recommendations carry way more weight than traditional ads because there is built-in trust and context. Facilitating genuine distribution through peers who actually use and believe in the product is a brilliant angle. Spot on observation!

Founder-to-founder recommendations carry way more weight than any paid ad because there's instant trust built-in. Facilitating genuine distribution through other builders who actually use and believe in the tool is a brilliant angle. Great insight on founder-led distribution!

This tracks with something I've noticed the other direction too — I've bought tools specifically because another builder mentioned using them mid-post, not because of an ad. There's an implicit trust transfer: if a founder's own project is legit, their tool recommendation feels vetted by proxy.

Selling a couple of source-available dev tools myself right now, and cold outreach has been by far the weakest channel — a passing mention from someone building in the same space converts way better than anything I've paid for or posted cold. Makes sense once you think about who's actually in the audience: builders looking for tools, not just scrolling.

I am also trying to find out what works and what doesn't? Can anyone help me?

Same pattern here. The recommendations that stuck with me weren’t “top 10 tools” posts — they were throwaway lines in a build log or a DM: “we use X for this, it stopped the weekly rewrite.”

Audience = buyers is the whole trick for small founder circles. Curious whether you’ve seen that work better in async posts or in smaller group chats / office hours.

Hey, I tried to sign up with google and it broke. Have a look at it please.

Expense approvals may be too broad for the first round of interviews because the pain differs significantly between a five-person startup and a finance team with formal controls. I’d focus the calls on one workflow—such as vendor payments—and map exactly where requests stall, who chases whom, and what the delay costs.

What is working more for founders (like me), other founders promoting, or creators?

Just signed up!!

just got on a deal with a creator. lets se how it goes. Cool app, btw. congrats

I recently registered my startup, Hakeemify, on Aproov. As an indie founder, finding relevant creators has always been harder than building the product itself. If the matching quality is good, this could save a lot of time compared to manual outreach.

im in!!!

here to answer anything

This is a refreshing approach. Many early-stage founders can't justify spending hundreds of dollars on influencer posts without knowing the ROI. Matching products with creators whose audience is genuinely interested makes much more sense. Looking forward to seeing how this works in practice!

Pretty cool idea. I’m in Will give you feedback in the coming days

Ohh nice. I will try this out

i will definitely

try it

great, this sound good

B2B here. Does it work also?

Love the idea. Congratss

Im innnnn

I’ve submitted the project; how long should I wait for confirmation?

You planning incorporating more creators from more platforms?

Interesting approach! especially offering free access/rev share instead of cash. How do you decide creator–product fit on your side, and what results have early founders seen so far (signups vs just reach)? Also curious how you handle creators who underdeliver after getting free access.

waoo

I'm trying to sign up but can't get past the initial intake modal. The button remains disabled with no message saying what is missing when I click it.

UPDATE: My description was over the 60 char limit. Maybe a more obvious message would be useful here.

Once in, I click on a creator profile but I see very little information about them. It would be to learn more about them, and know what they're about.

The contract needs one success event that both sides can audit. A match is too early; a post is still not business value. I would define success as creator acceptance, content published, and an attributable activation inside a fixed window, then show that funnel by niche. Otherwise rev share solves the upfront cash problem but moves the argument to attribution.

Is it free, fremium…?

Congrats

Wow

Rev share solves the cash problem but creates a trust problem: creators will only bet their audience on you if they can see conversion data, so build transparent attribution into the product early. At SocialPost.ai we learned small creators convert well only when they actually use the tool weekly, so I'd weight matching toward active usage, not just niche fit. Curious how you plan to keep supply-side quality high once the free cohorts scale.

This is a great idea. I had the same idea of matching sales guys to product guys but never actually got around to implementing it. The way i imagined it, you would get sales guys straight out of uni sign up and be presented with basically a storefront of products they could partner with on a commission basis. My product is a freemium model app. Revenue is only potentially generated when the users trial expires if they choose to upgrade and then either on a monthly or annual basis. Would this system work in your product on a revenue sharing basis? i.e, if the creator shares the app via a link i could provide them, they would earn commission when those milestones are hit?

So, AI can never surpass humans — it'll always just follow the rules and do its job, haha.