Anyone else here think PH is kind of bullshit?

Yep, agree.

Product Hunt = fantasy football. It's fun and feels like something to do but imagine if you actually thought you were the one running the ball or getting tackled.

Actual marketing (aka understanding your audience, earning their trust, learning to sell) = football. Actual athletes practice, and do the work. Real players get paid.

I don't know about "bullshit", but I would say it's of very limited / questionable importance. It's not an important, or necessarily valuable milestone of any kind.

The market is the market -- and only the market decides what's successful. PH is not the market. It's a very tiny niche of people who are in most cases, not your target market or end consumer. Which raises the question: Why do they matter?

(They don't, really).

Hi Eric,

I can share my experience with my product I recently launched on PH: https://stayin.app/

It was voted product of the day and it brought us 20k visitors within first month and huge exposure. Because of PH around 15 online news covered our product all over the world and I got invited and introduced to some really cool people.

We have done very little DMs and very little promotion on the PH itself. What we have done though - is posted it in the right time and made sure we nail the presentation (thumbnail, description etc.).

So, I would say PH is awesome for free marketing and basically get your idea out there. Imagine how much money I would have to pay for bringing 20k people to my website.

Hope this helped! :)

ProductHunt feels almost like some sort of gossip group. There are some cool things on there but almost all of it is a popularity contest.

PH is a community, therefore it's going to have its own culture, which will be somewhat inward facing, and its members will end up in orbit around their own set of shared aesthetic preferences. It's the same with any culture. On PH the preference is making for the sake of making. On IH we prioritize building profitable businesses. We're not identical, therefore there's some friction between us, but I personally think that's just fine and makes the Internet a more interesting place.

For IHers, the most valuable part of PH is its utility as a one-shot marketing channel. Where many of us go wrong is in mistaking a PH launch as an entire marketing strategy. I don't know where that comes from. Some combination of not knowing how to get in front of one's customers in a repeatable way, not wanting to do the work to learn how, and survivorship bias making the outlier PH success stories look like a common outcome.

Of course PH has its own hoops that people jump through, but that's true of every marketing channel. You just have to do the cost-benefit analysis to see if it's worth it for you. And I question whether doing that whole song and dance is really necessary.

Many of the submissions that do well on PH have already put a ton of work into learning about their market, crafting a solid product, building a following, etc. For example, IH has been #1 on PH twice, and I did very little consciously to make that happen. I don't think any amount of waking up at midnight and DMing people for upvotes on Twitter can compete with those who have existing audiences upvoting their submissions.

Your best bet for using PH as a marketing channel is to have already figured out your marketing.

I don’t fully agree, but I see where you’re coming from.

The idea that the launch on PH is somehow detrimental to the overall launch success and is its vital part is yeah, bullshit. Makers (including me) give PH much more importance than it deserves.

But other than that, PH is just a marketing channel. So is HN, so is Reddit, so is any other platform you can post your product on (including IH). You can use it to your advantage, and then you kinda have to play by their rules, since it's you who needs them, not otherwise. Or you can skip on it if you think it's not worth it.

I had a pretty successful launch on PH. I didn't post at 12:05 AM but rather at 9 AM, but I got picked for the next day. I didn't explicitly ask for upvotes — quite the opposite, when a friend of mine posted about my launch on FB and asked his followers to upvote, I told him to remove that last part. I got some really engaged users from PH, got sales, and ended up #3 product of the day, which is solid bragging rights for the next time I'm going to pitch my app to media.

The thing I dislike about PH is that it favors superficial products, most of which will not stand the test of market and time. It celebrates makership for the sake of makership (think of all those remix and meme products), just like Dribbble celebrates eye-candy design porn that has little to do with solving real problems. I guess you can say, PH is "maker porn", and yeah, any porn is bullshit. But just like you can use Dribbble to your advantage to show off your portfolio and get leads, PH is also a place to do exactly that — to show off. It’s a game of making an impression, you can play it or not.

I haven't actually posted anything on Product Hunt — and to be honest I doubt I ever will (at least as a primary marketing source). The site suffers from content overload, with low-quality applications being upvoted. Usually what companies do in this situation is just add a recommendation system instead of actually "weeding through" the small dev-focused "I learned web dev" projects that will be unsupported two weeks after release.

I have similar feelings, but was uneasy about voicing them out loud to be frank. I had a one product featured for no particular reason, it's not even a productn -- just bunch of links with a good domain under it.

But I tried twice to launch two projects that are more serious, with preparations and serious campaigns. I will not post anything on PH anymore -- I could have used all this time to actually acquire new customers through other means, not to annoy current customer with 'we're live on Product Hunt' and hope that some 'overnight magic' will happen.

It seems just a virtue signaling for other makers. Just to stroke your own ego -- without much of marketing benefit.

And I do love @thomasm1964 analogy ;-)

Product Hunt is great for getting some quick feedback and early users, but don't let it make or break you.

Yup, I did product hunt once and never went back. I'm not successful in marketing by any means but I knew that kind of marketing wouldn't be worth my time.

I found this post when I googled "Product Hunt is bullshit" out of frustration.
I live in the UK, there is just no way I can get people to wake up early in the morning to upvote my product.

ProductHunt is a very high traffic website. We got a lot of customers on our launch from there, but it's true that you will also have a lot of people who simply want to try your service or are just curious. It's basically a place for startups and not all visitors are established entrepreneurs / businesses but it's still a great place to validate / launch an idea.

100%.

As someone who has discovered a host of products on PH and still relies on it to learn about new products, I'd say it is worth the effort as it can get you some good feedback from experienced folks. I often end up giving detailed feedback on products I find interesting. But again, it's a sheer waste of time to go through all those articles that show you how to do a perfect PH launch and what not and then spend days planning and executing the launch. I have been through the process once and after garnering the maximum number of votes, the product didn't even make it to the top 5 (still don't understand the reason). So yes, it is a popularity contest and somehow favours some people/products over others. Besides some quick feedback, PH doesn't add any concrete value to your marketing effort for sure. So I'd say don't think too much and without much expectations, just launch your product (it surely helps to be hunted by an active community member so you can try that too).

PH should be a place where potential early adopters hang out, looking for cool new products to try out, and maybe become actual users. Seems like it's only a handful of people like those. Plus, as it has gotten more popular, and almost a standard way to promote a product, it's probably filled with marketers more than ever.

There is a small chance that you might get huge exposure. As you say, it may only be a spike that will flatten out in a week and yield no real benefit nor profit, but there are products out there that have truly benefited from a successful PH launch.

I kinda agree though, direct might be much better use of time. Will still do PH launches anyway...

ProductHunt is a very very noisy community. In one week, the top app could be an email marketing or podcasting tool, and the same week the top app could be a cat poster generator.

Nothing replaces a good old fashioned niche and marketing directly into that niche through forums/affinity groups.

Product Hunt can be useful if you're marketing to other entre/wantrepreneurs because there's a huge overlap there. That's where something like using their "ship" service would come into play, but is extremely steep in price, so you have to make sure the PH community would be your target customer.

-- Jimmy