Thoughts on product hunt?

I have literally never heard anyone mention ProductHunt outside the context of "Hi, I just launched on ProductHunt, please upvote me."

I have wondered the same. Do people actually use it to find products? The pessimist in me thinks...no, not unless the products are geared towards other tech people.

I have a B2B SaaS for the non-technical community and I find all of these channels like PH and Twitter, etc. are way skewed towards other tech folks. It's one reason I have delayed my launch on PH, but I think it is probably worth getting zero upvotes for the backlink.

This is my own personal struggle with trying to get my product into the hands of those it's meant to help. I am in these tech communities (which are awesome in their own right) but it's void of my target customers.

I just used it as a platform for posting and an SEO tool. I posted a side project on it without any promotion, and got 100+ user visits, 60+ upvotes, but only 2 registrations. I think producthunt can bring traffic, but it won't help much in the growth of the product itself. The most important thing is to rely on product-market fit and find the community where your target users are, especially for indie hackers who can only survive with niche products. The exposure doesn't bring as much help as imagined.

Also, I think many products now make getting to the top of producthunt their goal, like putting #1 on their homepage, which is a bit of a misplacement of priorities. You should know that on the day I launch the product on it, I received more than five emails offering paid promotion to reach the top, and the cost is very cheap.

BTW, The comments on product hunt are all very friendly, when you feel helpless, reading the comments will bring some hope.

I just launched on Product Hunt yesterday and I was a total newbie. The community is relatively engaging but like others have pointed out, the engaging ones (myself included) are the ones launching themselves! So it's a warm feeling of support from makers alike, but not the channel to drive real user engagement.

I'm just learning the ropes on community engagement. The people who need my product are out there somewhere - I just need to find the right way to communicate. I'm adopting the method of casting a wide net and then let data guide the way.

I really like PH and have launched twice before. The majority of the community is really positive and helpful.

However, I think that people with tons of Twitter followers or an audience to help support them in launching are 1000x more likely to reach the top 10. It’s a lot more than just “how good is my product?”

Anyways, I’m launching a new website design and programming agency on Thursday on Product Hunt and I’m really excited to see how it goes! Check it out at:
https://www.producthunt.com/products/quickly-codes

I think of PH as the presentation of your product to the tech community that can give you precisely this technical feedback and the support to continue working. I think it is "our letter of introduction" to the community.

Publishing in PH is more for us than to get clients. Even more so if your product is not designed for the tech community, or rather if your product is very niche.

Complemented to what @pjbrown11 says, publishing in PH is part of the build in public culture.

For me, ProductHunt was useless. Only one person reacted to the launch.

Here is my experience: I have launched a free tool that got ranked in the top 10 and it attracted a lot of traffic. So many people feature us in their newsletters. We got so many backlinks and still getting traffic because of this.

Registration: We have no login sign-up, so no paid plan. Our Motive was to get out their get traffic, backlinks and initial users and the product hunt helped us

Before that, I launched a paid product their if I remember correctly I got 1 sale. So yeah you will not make money immediately however if used correctly you can make money in long term

Absolutely!
It is a battle you have to fight in order to get your product out there.
But it is A THING you have to do in a whole list of things.

For me, it keeps worth it

Product Hunt is 100% vanity. yeah every now and again someone will put a product on there and it will generate a good bit of revenue, but those are few and far between.

I'm saying this from the perspective of someone who has been using product hunt since it launched over 10 years ago. I used to visit multiple times EVERY DAY, for YEARS. I then dropped to roughly daily, then a few times a week and I haven't visited the site regularly now since maybe early covid times.

I've launched 16 "products" on there. My best performing product in real life did nothing on PH and one of my worst performing (in real life) finished top 3.

Consider product hunt just one of many places to list your app. It's not special.

Fantastic product and idea disclosure platform.
Thank you so much.

It just gets you some exposure, most of the people there are probably also just wanting exposure for their own products. I got over 100 upvotes a while ago and was on the first page, but 0 paying customers. However, it still worth launching on PH, just don't depend too much on it.

I think so, when you launch your product on PH, it will only bring some user to your product on launch day. After that, nobody will remember you.

I'm a very active member of PH. According to me, people use it to just launch their own.

I frequently visit Product Hunt and find a lot of value in looking through the variety of SaaS applications that are released every day.

My guess is that you hard find real customers from PH, same as here, unless you build something to solve problem for these two communities specifically. Otherwise there is a just brush your traffics dashboard a little.

I'm a pretty consistent producthunt user. If you're big into SaaS, it's super cool to see the various products launching each day. It's also a cool way to keep up with trends!

I've thought the same to myself, but most indie hackers that I listen to on podcasts or follow on twitter all talk positively about launching on PH. To some it's helped land clients, to some others it's just feedback.

Also I have a feeling that PH doesn't have such a "toxic" community as other platforms like hackernews. I feel like the PH and indiehackers community are quite similar.