Ask HN: Is Product Hunt dead?
More and more competition and no startups or scale ups but the likes Figma and other big orgs coming up on PH. Thoughts? Am I over-reacting?
More and more competition and no startups or scale ups but the likes Figma and other big orgs coming up on PH. Thoughts? Am I over-reacting?
As a consumer of Product Hunt (I used to browse it at least 4-5x/week), it has become completely overrun with AI "spam," low effort apps, and comments that are just variations of "this looks nice!" (likely AI-generated spam too). It's genuinely hard to find good apps there any more, although I assume it still brings a decent amount of traffic.
The answer is: Yes.
The answer with more details is: The core of Product Hunt has dead but it could continue to make money because Product Hunt has become a place where people wanting to get traffic has to go but not a website people like to visit.
When it works, it works (as in, when you're first or second product of the day, you can count on it being a consistent source of traffic for months to come).
Don't be fooled into thinking a couple of hours spent on a Product Hunt launch is real marketing though. You need consistent effort, not a big bang.
I was under the impression that Product Hunt and such sites are good if you want to get eyes in general on your product and maybe increase your popularity within the tech scene but those people might not match the target demographic for customers. Is that wrong? I'm guessing it depends on who your market is.
The last time I genuinely discovered a product on PH was 2018 (Coda). I subscribed for a while, but didn't see much since then. I think this is the common experience. Since then, lots of top stuff have been waitlist because people are using product hunt launches to validate demand now.
PH is basically a social media for selling stuff. It's a community for selling stuff. It's for the people who want to say, "hey vote for me on product hunt, I need your support!" It's something like LinkedIn. More effective than using X or getting on a podcast. There's probably better ways to market, but it works for people who aren't good at marketing.
I think the Golden Kitty awards has some value, though. Could probably end up like the GRAMMYs for product or something.
I got bored of it a few years ago when it basically became a thing for people selling expensive notion templates and thinking they had created some form of amazing product or 'operating system'
I never used it to launch any of my apps since its required google signin
Yeah, I always hated that you couldn't set up email/password authentication. It's a stupid idea to use only third-party IDPs for authentication. People usually have multiple accounts with Google or use different emails for Twitter, LinkedIn, etc., which they want to keep from sharing with other apps. And I'm supposed to remember which account I used to log into a specific app?! No, thanks.
So google = no go? - How did you launch your other products?
Once you start adding Google, you'll inevitably be forced to support apple sign in and all the others.
In my past job, we couldn't be bothered with all these big tech politics, so we actually disabled all the third party signups. We would require phone numbers because our value proposition was validating that users were real and easier to ban. Apple was not happy with this and their Apple sign ups allowed more anonymity, just a pain overall. We couldn't enable the others on Android either, because they'd be able to sign up with FB on a Samsung then can't do it on an iPhone, and that was just messy.
You're answering from the implementation side, while replying to someone asking about the user side.
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