Indie hackers stage a revolt against Product Hunt
The indie hacker community is revolting against Product Hunt. Here's everything you need to know.
Product Hunt’s wild week that began with the sudden resignation of Head of Growth Jason Levin continued in full force this weekend with a mass indie hacker revolt led by Nico Jeannen.
The uprising began with a tweet from Nico decrying that Product Hunt has “turned to sh*t” after his newest launch, Landing Analyze, was not featured.
To Nico, this oversight was particularly outrageous because of the products that did get featured: a coding course, a white noise app, an AI reel generator, and a food delivery app boilerplate.
Nico's theory is that Product Hunt is in financial trouble, so they are prioritizing featuring VC-backed startups that have enough money to buy ads. If true, that obviously leaves indie makers out in the cold.
The attitude among indie hackers was overwhelmingly supportive. Tibo, Product Hunt’s 2022 Maker of the Year, describes Product Hunt as nothing more than a SEO tool:
Adam Lyttle thinks Product Hunt is now just something you do out of habit:
Martin Donadieu describes Product Hunt as a joke:
Damon Chen finds the criteria very subjective:
And Alex Szczurek provides us with a nice summary of the comment section:
However, not everyone had negative things to say:
Rajiv Responds
In a surprising turn of events, the Tweet went so viral (606k views at the time of publishing) that Rajiv Ayyangar, the CEO of Product Hunt, responded.
Basically, Rajiv is telling indie makers to stop complaining and build better products. This includes Nico and his landing page analyzer, which he describes as uninteresting.
As you can expect, indie makers were not buying what Rajiv was selling.
Ben Tossell of the extremely popular Ben’s Bites newsletter and former Product Hunt curator pushed back by saying that lots of bad stuff is on the homepage every day, and that because Nico is such an accomplished indie hacker, he deserves the benefit of the doubt and a feature:
But Rajiv wasn’t buying it:
Nico was still in disbelief over the products that beat him out:
Rajiv, however, stuck to his guns:
Praneeth Pike was confused why the Product Hunt team had to be involved in featuring decisions:
But Rajiv explained that because there are so many products launched each day, there had to be some curation to help the good ones stand out:
And, more than anything else, Rajiv reminded people that the guidelines for getting featured on Product Hunt are publicly viewable:
Jim Raptis sums up the conversation the best:
The Alternative Rush
The other notable conversations over the weekend were concerned with what alternative options exist or what a better Product Hunt might look like.
On the alternative side, Said Aitmbarek pitched MicroLaunch:
Thomas Sanlis pushed Uneed:
Falak Sher stumped for Fazier:
Yossi Segev announced the inception of launching.today:
And Dagobert Renouf did the same for LaunchDay:
Indie Hackers might even be getting into the game:
While John Rush wants to either buy Product Hunt outright or start a competitor if he’s unable to do so:
However, Tibo thinks you should think twice before building a Product Hunt alternative:
And Product Hunt seems to welcome the competition.
As for what a better Product Hunt might look like, Dan thinks a $99 fee per launch and clear featuring rules would solve problems from all sides:
But John Rush disagrees, instead favoring a Reddit-style system:
Nico wants clear guidelines, public upvotes, and upvotes graphs:
While Ben Tossell has a ton of ideas:
A Reality Check
Although there has perhaps never been such widespread animosity to Product Hunt, it remains a giant in the industry with dozens of daily launches, millions of monthly page views, and 800,000 newsletter subscribers.
We're all here talking about it, aren't we? And, even if you do build a competitor, odds are you'd launch it on Product Hunt:
Or, as I put it:
Ultimately, only time will tell if this is truly the beginning of the end for Product Hunt, or just another chapter in a dominant history.
I have heard that PH became pay to win and it really turned me off. Before that, I knew that launching on PH is that it's not something you could do haphazardly. Best launches require courting a high-profile hunter to actually launch your product. In addition to preparing all of networks for days and weeks in advance and then promoting like mad on the actual launch day - including email blasts, socials, and forums. Sad to see the state it is in now.
Yeah I think the makers who say just launch what you got and don't stress about the results are right. If you get featured, great. If you don't, well at least you still got a nice backlink.
I am sure PH could do better. But what I don't like is train hate, where people jump easily to express their frustration that was created somewhere else. PH is a great platform; it can be better and probably will be.
Everything comes into waves, up and down, up ...
People love drama. Including me, just watched 2 hours drama movie.
There's always money in the drama.
I somewhat agree with nico. I have used product hunt from a long time and was again an active user couple of months ago for almost 6 months. In that time frame, I observed many things have changed in the PH, some for good but mostly for bad. PH kind off promotes products which are of big startups having good marketing budget and those companies literally pay PH hackers having huge whatsapp/discord groups to purchase the Upvotes. Right now, there is almost little to no chances that an indie product would be in top 5 even after passing the guidelines provided by PH.
In short, the platform is widely abused by money and power of VC backed startups which makes it not suitable for indie hackers anymore
Yeah that seems to be the consensus among indie hackers.
The biggest problem is the lack of clarity on what gets featured, if they cant be honest and open why should anyone invest anything in helping PH build their community.
Otherwise this is super one sided in PHs favour, makers provide the quality content, and PH reward them with nothing but a backlink.
My last launch wasn't featured (which is fine) but the total traffic from PH? 7 unique visitors. An off the cuff Reddit post? 500+ unique visitors. Which community should I invest more time with? To me, the answers obvious
Can you post a link to the Reddit post I'm trying to get better at marketing on Reddit lol
Reading all these telling me that I should resurrect Owwly
We should reward creators who build something after hours., for sure
If there was ever a time to do it, now's the time.
I am also planning to do the same to AINave as well. Good Luck! Let's make a good PH alternative.
Such a neatly done summing up. Thanks for your work.
Thanks for reading!
This is my first time user either of these apps.
Still waiting for an AI toggle on product hunt...
Where is PH founder Ryan Hoover in this discussion?
Probably enjoying a mai thai somewhere
Product Hunt stopped being worth using a long time ago - and that is 100% their own doing. This whole "Featured" thing is the problem. Why are they needing things to be "Featured". Drop this whole manual review thing and let the people decide.
If you look at something like HotUKDeals its all based on public voting. If people like it, they vote it hot, if they dont they vote it cold - that determines where something shows up. For people who want to find the latest deals, theres a "New" tab. For the best of the day/week/month/year theres a tab for that - zero intervention from the sites owners and 100% decided on by the community.
ProductHunt doesnt like that as they can charge a fortune for what is essentially a sponsored post being pinned to the top of the site for a given length of time.
This is absolutely, 100% on product hunt.
Product Hunt is not worth using if you are an indie maker as you will be dropped to the bottom of the page.
Really there needs to be a better alternative with a few basic rules:
No AI products on the home page (sorry but its just noise at this point), and make people actively filter to see them.
No VC/Funding backed products - indies only.
Max of 1 launch per domain per year, you shouldn't be able to submit a new product launch when you slap a new page on your site or tweak the design.
No boosting, featuring, or otherwise paying for higher exposure. If the site needs funds then take donations or show ads on the sidebar.
Seems to be the consensus among indie hackers, but don't know if I agree with the no AI products on home page. That seems to be a non-starter these days.
Tbh this is looks like marketing for product hunt only , they r gaining fame, any views ?
It reflects a broader trend in tech communities, where creators feel sidelined as platforms scale and evolve, prioritizing profitability over original values. Whether this "revolt" leads to lasting changes or fades as a temporary flare-up will depend on how Product Hunt navigates this discontent
I personally think that Product Hunt will continue being the dominant place, and everyone will continue launching there.
Think about it. If Nico finished #1, this revolt would've never happened.
That was a really nice article with so much details. I m more interested in using reddit for my business now
Thank you! And yeah, I'm interested in Reddit too.
It was shocking to me how many bots there are on Product Hunt after I tried launching my product. Also bots with automated messages offering to promote your listing for money.. Product Hunt is just not it anymore, especially as an indie hacker.
If you are looking for an alternative, I am building one specifically built for indie hackers to promote their products and gain exposure. It's still in early beta, but feel free to try it out at @SaaSCurate (twitter). Let's build something better.
I am all for the PH competition. It can hopefully make PH a better destination and provide alternatives for indie developers to get their apps in front of an audience.
This strikes me as a win-win for devs
My biggest complaint about the modern iteration of Product Hunt is the endless spam—I've never expected to be able to "win" anything more than a few more eyeballs than I had before.
A few years ago, it felt like it was populated by real people. You'd get fewer upvotes, but the comments were at least from real people. Now it feels like just an endless string of bots and spam emails. 😭
Product Hunt is like any cool place that gets too popular and eventually loses some of its charm.
But that’s exactly why everyone joined—because it was so good.
Anyone shitting on it, thinking they can do better, will face the same growing pains if they ever succeed. That's just how it goes.
I'm relatively new to PH so it's interesting to me hearing all of the "PH is dead" commentary happening right now. Hope I'm not too late to the game, have been really getting into it.
Team, I need some support on this. I have launched our platform RAVA AI on Product Hunt and have been trending since the start but Product hunt has not featured us and its truly works to your disadvantage. I wrote a very detailed post about this on my linked in.
This is a serious problem and I need your help to get Product hunts attention. Our launch closes in a few hours and this does not work in our favor