Is Product Hunt dying?

By Fabian Maume · September 27, 2024

Ok, that might be an overdramatic title but Product Hunt is currently facing some serious issues. Mainly, their rule to feature products are quite opaque and arbitrary. It is harder to be featured on the home page: Featured launch count on Product Hunt

This September on average 16 launches are featured per day
In September 2023 the average was 47

The issue is ever clearer when looking at the share of featured launches (vs all launches):

Last year between 60% and 98% of launches were featured.
The share dropped to 25% from the 25th of January.
In September 2024 only 10% of launches are featured

You currently have only 10% chance of being featured on the Product Hunt home page.

This led to a lot of bad press mainly from small startups and Indie hackers: Product hunt doesn’t feature launch Source : Dan Kulkov’s Twitter post Product hunt isn’t indie hacker friendly Source : Ivan Homala’s Twitter post Product hunt didn’t feature leadspicker Source : Tomas Blatak’s Linkedin post

So is Product Hunt dying? Is it still a relevant channel for startups? Those are some of the questions I will try answering in this article. I will actually structure this article around 3 key questions:

Is Product Hunt passed its pick? For this I will go through the last 2 years of Product Hunt updates and see how they impacted the organic traffic.

What are the current issues with Product Hunt? I currently see 2 core issues with Product Hunt:

Rules about featuring products are not clear which creates unnecessary uncertainty.
Only a few products are being featured which is killing Product Hunt’s viral loop. For those 2 issues, I will be listing potential solutions that the Product Hunt team could implement.

What should you do as a founder? Should you still consider launching on Product Hunt? How should you adapt your launch plan?

Is Product Hunt passed its pick?

The short answer is yes.

If you look at ahref estimates of organic traffic, Product Hunt was at its pick in July 2023: Product hunt organic traffic

Small caveat: This is only organic traffic. Product Hunt might still be getting a lot of traffic from referrals or social media. Unfortunately, I do not have access to Product Hunt web analytics, so I need to rely on organic traffic as a proxy of the overall traffic. If I get access to more data, I will be happy to update this article.

So why has Product Hunt’s organic traffic decreased since July 2023? Let’s go back in time and check the recent update on the platform:

1 of June 2022: release of the Product Hub
23rd of March 2023: randomization of the leaderboard for the first hours of the day
21st of March 2024: introduction of Shoutouts
January 2024: drop in feature product

If you aren’t interested in Product Hunt’s history feel free to jump to the current issues faced by Product Hunt.

Release of the Product Hub

On the 1st of June 2022, Product Hunt released the Product Hub. This was in my opinion one of their best update.

The product hub allows building a follower base across multiple launchers. This makes relaunch much easier. This solved one of the key issues with product hunt: what do do after a product hunt launch?

The product hub made re-launch much easier. This was a great move to boost maker retention, as it encouraged them to relaunch after 6 months.

This update had a positive impact on product hunt traffic but not straight away: Product hunt organic traffic June 2022 The uplift really started 6 months after the update:

Randomisation of the leaderboard

Another great update happened in March 2023. Product Hunt started randomizing the leaderboard for the first hour of the day.

This brought many benefits:

Less stressful first hours of launch
Make Product Hunt more fair for small startups and indie hackers
Avoid group normalization bias (first product getting more upvotes)

Product Hunt’s blog post about the release is actually quite interesting to read.

This update led to an uplift in organic traffic: Product hunt organic traffic March 2023

In my opinion that was the best time to launch on Product Hunt.

Instruction of Shoutouts

In March 2024 Product Hunt introduced the shoutout. For each launch, you could mention up to 3 tools that help you build the product.

It came with shoutout leaderboard which can be a great source of information for people interested in building a startup.

It is a feature that is still being worked on. They release product landscape in September 2024 which leverages the shoutout data.

This feature didn’t seem to impact the organic traffic: Product hunt organic traffic March 2024

In my opinion, shoutouts can be a good source of information but they tend to overrepresent large player and infrastructure tools (like APIs or payment gateway). If you look at the current leaderboard, the top 3 tools supported by large teams: Product hunt’s shoutout leadboard

The Shoutout is not where you could find some niche tool to solve a specific problem. Taplio was one of my best product hunt discoveries, and I doubt it will ever appear in shoutout’s leaderboard.

Lower number of featured product

Last but not least in January 2024, Product Hunt decided to lower the number of featured products.

I didn’t find the official announcement on the topic. but the data clearly shows a sharp decline in the share of products featured on the home page. What is more concerning is that the reasons to feature products are not clear at all.

From my personal experience, it seems that relaunch has a lower chance of being featured. That undermines the product hub update and can lead to retention issues for the maker side of the platform.

Why would you stay active on Product Hunt as a maker, if there is really little chance option for relaunch?

What are product hunt current issues?

So the main current issue with Product Hunt is the low share of featured launches. That led to a bunch of other issues:

It limits the exposure of most launches and therefore the incentive for founders to launch on Product Hunt.
This is killing Product Hunt’s viral loop as many founders will stop promotion activities if their launch is not featured
As the reasons to be featured aren’t transparent it is adding a lot of uncertainty about the potential of a product launch.

Low engagement for non-feature launch

If your launch is not featured, you will be getting really little exposure. Let me use a concrete example: Leadspicker.

In June 2023 Leadspicher launched a side product : AI-Powered VC sheet. This product was featured and got 300 upvotes which led it to be the 7th product of the day. Not an impressive result ute enough for Leadspicker to gain 91 paying customers.

In September 2024 Leadspicker launched its flagship product. This launch wasn’t featured but was the most upvoted launch for most of the day and finished the day with 612 upvotes. So overall a far better performance on Product Hunt. Guess how many paying customers Leadspicker got from the launch? Only one!

This shows, that you will be getting really little exposure from the product hunt if your launch is not featured.

Furthermore, if your launch is not featured you cannot:

Gain a product of the day badge
Be featured in Product Hunt’s newsletter

This gives you no incentive to keep on promoting your launch if you aren’t featured in the first 2 first hours of the day. This leads me to the next issue: the end of the viral loop.

Killing the viral loop

Product hunt builds its success on one core viral loop: You need to bring people to product hunt in order to get upvotes and exposure for your launch. That makes Product Hunt a more interesting platform to launch, making more founder launch on the platform and promote their launch.

This viral loop is broken when most of the launches aren’t featured. Why would you try to bring people to your product hunt launch page if it doesn’t give you exposure? It will be more productive for you to promote directly your own website.

This led some prominent Hunter like Olena Bomko to recommend stop promoting your launch mid-day (if you are not featured): stop promotion mid-launch

Source Olena Bomko’s Linkedin comment

BTW: Olena Bomko was nominated among the community members of the year in 2023 so she is an interesting person to follow on LinkedIn and Product Hunt.

High uncertainty with launch

Last but not least issue with the recent low share of featured products: it isn’t predictable. Even if you do everything by the book your launch might not be featured.

Product hunt was always an uncertain channel as you could not predict what your competition would be. That is why anyone promising you they can make you the product of the day is a red flag.

But with less than 20% of launches featured, Product Hunt is becoming an unreliable channel. That means that any startup relying on I.C.E. (Impact, confidence, effort) to prioritize growth activities will deprioritize Product hunt.

At the end of the day, it means that fewer people will be launching on product hunt, letting the platform slowly die out.

So with its current course, Product Hunt is most likely to lose momentum as it is becoming less and less attractive to makers. However, there is still hope. There are a few things that the product hunt team could do to stop its demise.

How can product hunt solve those issues?

Feature more products: That would be the easy fix, as most issue comes from the low share of featured products. This is however a trade-off. Featuring too many products can lead to quality issues, which would also lower the quality of the platform.

Randomise and feature mid-day: This would be my favorite solution. Product Hunt already randomizes the ranking of products in the first hours of the launch. Why not feature all products at the start of the day and filter the leaderboard only mid-day? This would make Product hunt attractive again for small startups and indie hackers. Furthermore, it will restore the viral loop at least until mid-day.

Offer pre-launch check: If the Product Hunt team wishes to keep the curation 100% manual they can offer the option to request pre-launch curation. That could go well with the recent update of pre-launch dashboard. Let the maker know if the launch will feature a few hours after it is scheduled. This would remove the uncertainty and make Product Hunt much more attractive as a growth channel.

What should you do as a founder?

If Product Hunt doesn’t change its policy should you still be considering launching?

There are typically 3 benefits from a Product Hunt launch:

Get a do-follow link and boost your SEO
Get some exposure and traffic on your website
Get feedback about your product

If your product isn’t featured you will get low exposure and low web traffic. You will also get little feedback as feedback is a function of exposure: if nobody sees your launch page, nobody will comment on it.

The do-follow link is guaranteed, so Product Hunt is still relevant to kick-start your SEO effort. However, as exposure is not guaranteed you need to be really lean in your launch preparation.

Go for no-frill launch

You will not know if your launch is featured until the D-day, so you should do as little preparation as possible.

However if on the day of the launch you are featured then it makes sense to go all in. As there are fewer featured products you have a lower competition to make it into the top 10 and be featured in the newsletter.

Interestingly the decrease in featured products didn’t lower the upvote count required to make it to make it to the top 10: Product hunt top 10 upvote count

But it considerably lowered the standard deviation (the spread of upvote count): Product hunt top 10 upvote standard deviation If you pass the product hunt manual curation you have a good chance to be featured in the newsletter. This is logical as you aren’t anymore competing to be the best product but rather not to be one of the 10 worst products (as only 20 products are featured).

So you need to:

Skip most promotion activity before the launch
Have promotion ready for D-day if you get featured

As prelaunch activity I recommend to:

Get your product ready: make sure the onboarding is working, have proper analytics on your home page, test and optimize your home page copy. This is a good investment as it will help you with all future marketing channels you test.
Focus on the launch assets (screenshot, tagline, product description, and demo video). Those assets can be reused on other channels in case your launch is not featured.
Outreach people who upvoted similar products on LinkedIn, as I explained in this tutorial. In case your product is not featured you can still ask those people for feedback about your product just send them to your home page directly instead of the product hunt page.

Avoid:

Sending people to your teaser page. Users who subscribe to your launch page will receive a notification about the launch only if the product is featured.
Launch a side product first. It is unlikely for side-products to be featured. It can also lower the chances of your main product being featured if the side-product is hosted on the same domain name.
Ask your team to be active on Product Hunt. That is nowadays an activity with really low ROI.

Plan for flexibility

On the launch day, you need to plan for flexibility.

I recommend:

In the first two hours of the launch

Make a post about your launch on your social media account (that is a low-cost marketing channel to use).
Share your launch on Facebook and LinkedIn groups dedicated to Product Hunt (those groups cannot really be used for anything else).

After 2 hours, check if your launch is featured. The easiest way to do so is to click on all launches on Product Hunt’s home page: is your launch featured? If the number of upvotes on your launch is visible, it means your launch is not featured.

If you are featured: go all in

Ask your LinkedIn contacts for support
Have someone on call to answer comments on your launch
Share your launch in Facebook group and community about your industry
Send an email blast to your users to tell them that you are live on Product Hunt

If you are not featured: go home:

Ask a question on the Product Hunt discussion section linking back to your launch. That can give you some exposure
Ask your LinkedIn contact for feedback sending it directly to your home page
Reuse your launch assets to schedule the launch on Fazier and Micro-Launch

I will be updating my Product Hunt Launch template to align with this plan.

Diversify your channel

But my most important advice will be to diversify your channels.

Product hunt was always only one channel out of many. Eithiriel DeMeré stated it well:

And a site like Product Hunt, or Indie Hackers, or wherever you decide to announce your products is just one part of a channel strategy. It’s just it’s just one channel within your channel strategy. And so it’s not your entire product launch strategy.

Product hunt should be only one channel within your channel strategy. That becomes ever more true with the difficulty of getting featured.

There isn’t yet any good alternative to Product Hunt but there are plenty of other marketing channels to consider for your B2B SaaS:

SEO is always a good channel to invest in.
Comparison websites like Capterra and G2 can give you great social proof.
Google PPC is an old and boring channel but it is a relatively low-risk one.

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