If you care fairness, I have 1 extra suggestion that you might be interested in.
It was proven by several data-science research that when users have to votes (or give ratings) and if they are able to see the previous result, then the first few votes have an extremely important effect.
For instance here is one stury, very well written article by a famous teacher Robert West, "of sheep and beer" https://dlab.epfl.ch/2017-08-30-of-sheep-and-beer/ which describes this effect on beer-rating sites.
One way to overcome this effect is to hide the votes until enough votes were collected (eg more than 50). Another way is to hide votes until you have voted yourself.
You can see a form of this effect on HN itself, in particular in Show HN topics.
First few comments basically set the tone of the discussion and its dynamic. If they are shallow, negative or dismissive, the discussion gets stuck and takes a while to recover even if the submission has a lot of actual merit.
Similar with stackoverflow. A question with an answer is already uninteresting to other contributora, but if the answer is superficial or of bad quality on top of that, it lowers the chances of a good second answer dramatically.
This is from personal experience, not from any study, so take it with a ton of salt.
This is not a study but a reality for me. At one point on HN I wanted to farm for karma points. That period lasted for a few weeks, I wasn't too intense about it, just a fun question I had.
My tactic? Find something that has something like 15 upvotes and you suspect to be rising quick in upvotes. Create the first comment and your best to make an as thoughtful comment as possible, even if you don't know anything about the topic.
Result: I was always within the top 3 getting between 10 to 50 upvotes.
One idea I have (just brainstorming) force users to make a vote first of 10 random products and only after they see the results.
It could probably use some UX tweaking since forcing someone to vote isn't quite nice, but at least it takes care of this effect that was described.
AFAIK points aren't worth anything and don't unlock anything after the first few, probably to help block spam/bots.
It's exceedingly rare that I even click a profile here, and even then it's usually to see what a person works on not how many points they've accumulated.
In fact, there are many cases where the most knowledgeable person on a subject comments, I click to see who they are, and realize they've only ever commented a few times. I imagine they either mostly lurk, or have an idle account they just use when friends drag them into the conversation.
Another related aspect: it’s likely that tech hype sphere will not actually make much of a difference unless you’re selling to those people directly. My app Payload got featured in fastcompany, and I thought that was amazing. It drove traffic to the website and I was just waiting for the users… that didn’t come. And then a few days later back to normal.
On the other hand, the less prestigious tech blogs for regular people (think PC magazines) were much better at driving both real users and also traffic.
Anyway, the point is that your customers might not be on product hunt checking out the coolest newest hypiest products. In fact, it’s very unlikely they are. Just a reminder to not take these games so seriously.
Isn't producthunt (and similar) aimed at VCs fishing for unicorns? The idea being that they'll know to then market your product where it belongs so they can grow it and make their billion. If that's not it, then vcfish.com is $12/year and available
That sounds right. Now, I haven’t used producthunt but I believe they market themselves differently, with a heavy focus on ”creator community” and I believe they also call the VCs ”hunters”, suggesting perhaps that people are there looking for products to use and purchase, rather than an early investor club. LinkedIn, but instead of laborers and employees, it’s early founders and VCs? Doesn’t sound as sexy, and definitely not very indie hacker, tinkerer, explorer vibe. I don’t know if that’s the case, but it nevertheless feels like a mismatch between messaging and reality.
I really wish Ryan Hoover would take back the integrity of Product Hunt. It's such an amazing product with such currently painful execution, assumingly in the name of site traffic traded for ad dollars.
I truly think that the conversion rate for advertisers on PH would go UP if the quality of the site (moderated posts, comments, bot traffic) did the same.
What if your launch queue will be filling at a much faster rate aka backpressure issue? E.g what if this went viral and you get 1000 new projects per day, any new launch is scheduled after three months then?
>2 votes per user, per day.
Any idea how to prevent someone from creating 10 fake accounts and making it 20 votes per day? I'm sure any entrepreneur will see this opportunity right away if a little cheating means more exposure.
Looks like a good alternative to product hunt, the UI is looking fresh and I like it, however I'm genuinely interested about your thoughts on the problems this model can have at scale.
1) If the queue grows significantly, the first-come, first-serve system will still ensure fairness. Makers can plan their launches strategically within a 30-day scheduling window, and I’ll monitor growth closely to adapt if needed.
2) At the moment, I’m testing a few theories to address this and ensure fair play on the platform. I can’t share specifics just yet since these are still in the experimental phase, but I’m keeping this top of mind as the platform evolves.
This is awesome! Congrats on the metalaunch ;-) I found the site hard to navigate visually as everything was equally prominent (in fact, yesterday's launches pop more than the current ones right now), so I took a stab at a different layout.
Thank you so much for the feedback and taking the time to create a new layout idea. I truly appreciate it. The goal has always been to make the site intuitive and focused on giving launches their moment to shine. So I will take a closer look at your suggestions to see how can I make it more visually clear.
Nice product overall. Not sure anybody pointed out this yet, but you should consider changing spaces for dashes on your slugs, they look better than the coded space (%20) on pages like: https://itslaunched.com/profile/Kazane%20Shimizu
I see a new product-hunt alternative launched every couple months here. Maybe I’m cynical, but I don’t think we’re going to displace product hunt with things like new voting dynamics. They already have the network effects, so I think you’d need to make a relatively large change to stand a real chance.
Edit: Here’s a proposal for a bigger change. do some free advertising for the submitted ideas. Run simple Google/youtube/facebook ads for them, just directing people to their page on your platform. Hopefully this doesn’t burn too much cash, since you’re actually advertising for their page on your platform, so it’s good for you in the end. Perhaps submissions have a small fee in the long-term, to monetize the platform.
Could somebody explain the appeal of browsing Product Hunt? It seems just like a subreddit where people post nothing but ads for their businesses, and I've always been a bit baffled by it. Sure if I had a SaaS to sell I'd post it there, but why is there an audience for a long list of product ads?
If something becomes important and useful you’ll hear it somewhere else too. Just like you don’t have to be a completionist on the HN New page…just wait until it bubbles up to the main page.
Maybe the bigger question is whether something like Product Hunt even needs to exist in the ecosystem. I think it had its place circa 2012–2014, but does it have any "real" users anymore? Or is it all founders and growth hackers trying to juice their launch, and an army of dummy accounts from people who sell votes?
Circular economy. I have seen that creator space is a circular system, they network, they support each other, so sites like these build their own bubble. Only a small percentage of launches break out and are used by users who are not in the creator space. Rest are just their followers(working in businesses) or creators themselves who adopt to most of the products launched there.
I know there have been big launches on PH but those are outliers because they also have put efforts into digital marketing and PH was just one of platforms for them. Majority are indiehackers, who are happy with a small MRR which is very much possible within this club of creators.
This. Why do I even need ProductHunt these days? There’s already so many products already in the market that does any possible use case you can think of. There’s hardly anything new or innovative in there anymore. If there’s something truly innovative (or chatgpt), I would probably have heard of it from ppl already
Great question. Right now, it's first come, first served, and makers can schedule their launches up to 30 days in advance. I don't plan to introduce any paid options to skip the line, it's important to me that it stays fair for everyone.
If it ever gets to a point where demand grows too much, I would explore ways to keep things manageable while still giving every product it's moment to shine. Thanks for brining this up!
This is nice! It looks like the pipeline is filling up! I signed up to launch NimbleAI [1] on your site.
One small issue with the launch date calendar. When I clicked a date in the calendar the popup with the actual launch date was always one day later. I wanted to launch on Tuesday, Jan 28, but when I picked that date it scheduled the launch for Wed, Jan 29.
BTW... what was the product you launched on PH that got buried??
Also... how funny would it be to launch ItsLaunched on PH and have it bubble to the top of PH! You should coordinate a launch on PH with all the users signed up for your new tool to get lots of votes. THAT would be awesome!
Cheers for adding up NimbleAI, I'm excited to see it launch.
I’ve had someone else mention the calendar issue too, but I haven’t been able to replicate it on my end, so I’m struggling to pinpoint the exact cause. If it’s not too much trouble, could you send me a screen recording or some details about the steps you took? That would really help me figure this out. (Send me a DM on twitter @lakshikagayal)
As for PH, I’ve launched not only one but several products there in the past, but since I don’t have a big community following me, they all ended up getting buried pretty quickly.
And launching this on PH and make it the #1? now that would be poetic, maybe we’ll make it happen someday :D
I would love to see your product on the platform when you are ready to launch!
And thanks for catching the encoding issue. I will get that sorted out to make sure everything displays properly. Let me know if there's anything else you spot or any feedback you have. Thanks again for checking it out.
I really like the direction you’re taking. Product Hunt can feel like it’s run more for the benefit of the maintainers than for the community. It’s their service, so fair enough, but it also means users sometimes lose out. And let’s face it—there’s definitely some gaming of the system going on.
Your approach seems promising. Have you considered taking it even further, maybe by making the platform more decentralized or democratized, kind of like a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization)? That might align the incentives more directly with the indie maker community and help keep everything transparent.
In any case, I’m glad to see new ideas that give smaller products and teams a fair shot.
Thank you so much for the kind words and encouragement. Product Hunt is a great platform I. Many ways, BUT there is always room for new approaches that put the spotlight back on the community itself.
I love the idea of exploring ways to make the platform more decentralized too. However for now, I'm more focused on keeping things simple and fair while improving based on feedback like yours. Thanks again for sharing your thoughts.
"This isn't a popularity contest... so anyway, here's how voting works" is a bit silly, and right there on the front page is "yesterday's winners" which is more than a bit disingenuous.
What if I vote for nothing because all of the products are bad? Why do I care about a user leaderboard for with streaks and their voting history? No noise?
People are so concerned with having an actual downvote button but not-so-concerned with how gameable upvote only systems are.
One of my favorite newsletters just gives links with one-line description. Done. What if this site just listed 10 products a day. No voting, no "judgment" by anyone except the person curating the links.
What if 100 products come out in a week. How do you choose?
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. You raise some valid points. I'm working to strike a balance between giving visibility to products and avoiding the "popularity contest" vibe, and I'm definitely open to refining how that works.
As for the leaderboard and voting history, I understand your concern. The idea behind it is to encourage meaningful participations, but I get how it could feel like extra noise.
Also right now, it's first come, first served, with makers able to schedule their launch up to 30 days ahead. This keep things fair and transparent, ensuring everyone gets an equal opportunity without having to compete for visibility.
If the platform grows, I might explore other ways to keep things manageable whether that's a curated selection, specific categories, or something else BUT for now, the goal is to maintain a simple and fair system that gives everyone a shot.
What is with this idea of having engaged user metric for such sites? Why are engaged members rewarded and recognized when the products should be the one that should get the focus and attention.
Can someone please tell me what I fail to understand? I fail to see why such apps focus on the creator than the creation itself?
I get your point. The focus should definitely be on the product itself. The reason platform reward engaged users is often to build a supportive community around those products. Active users help promote, review and discuss products, which can give them the attention they deserve.
But I agree- it's important to make sure the product is always the main focus. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Its a growth hack, I understand that. But when creating something better than PH, it would be good to see something different than PH, the more focus on product than the makers themselves.
Most product launches from seasoned makers get a fair amount of attention anyway, isn't your mission to put focus on product no matter the maker? Not let the product get buried down because a well known maker has launched something else thats getting most of the attention?
It is good to create direct, fair and healthy competition for the Product Hunt (I am all for diversity). Competition is always good for business.
As far as successful launching on Product Hunt and getting feature isn't just for everyone. You have to do marketing, building hype around your product, moderate product idea (it's a minimum to get featured), good copywriting and whatnot.
I'm also going to sign up because of its features.
Thank you for the kind words and support! You're absolutely right. Launching successfully anywhere requires a mix of everything. My goal with this platform is to level the playing field a bit more for indie makers and small teams who might not have the resources for a big marketing push.
Also excited to have you on board, and I hope the features make your experience worthwhile. Would love to hear your thoughts once you’ve explored the platform.
Hey! I am launching my product on your site! Overall I think its really well made, 2 small things:
1) In categories it says (1) even for things that don't have a single launch listed when clicked maybe cuz there is an upcoming launch for the category, but none yet? IDK why, but just to let you know
2) Confirming the launch date (alert) said it was for one day before the one I selected, then on the confirmation page though it had the correct date.
I am happy to help! I know how helpful it is for people to point out the small stuff since I have launched things before too, but going to your site its obvious your a great developer and have made a good quality website :). GL!
Submitted my product for tomorrow, excited to see how it goes!
Some feedback:
- Could probably benefit from adding white-space: pre-line; in a couple of places, e.g. comments to support line breaks
- The encoding issue mentioned elsewhere too, stuff showing up as like '
- Launched today should maybe be a bit more prominent, but maybe it also looks better once there are more products that just one.
That's awesome! I'm really excited to see it on the platform tomorrow!
And thanks for the feedback;
1) I will add line breaks for comments
2) I'm aware of the encoding issue and will fix it soon
3) I agree that launched today section could stand out more. I will tweak that as we get more launches
Really appreciate your input, and good luck with the launch tomorrow!
The one thing to solve for imo is the initial attraction needs to be incentivized for being the early set in of users/contributors to arrive. On that note, make it possible for me as a product recommender to recommend someone else’s product if I want to, and that can be a separate bucket for recommendations.
Then what you have now is essentially digg and Reddit but for startups. It submission will be slow on day one, but hopefully ppl stick around if you capture their imagination and plant a seed for them to come back for.
A second tab by other recommendations by the user will always be buzzing as people will naturally want to hack their chances into being promoted to the LIST on the first tab and/or by being promoted, or feeling good about it, or helping a friend etc and the recommending submitter gets points that can be used for launching their own product and with greater placement or give them one vote for every 10 votes their reco gets on the other tab.
Anyway, I’m riffing but I’m also taking a break from working on a stratplan for my startup and winding down on the couch.
Love the simplicity. PH sold out.
P.s. instead of votes, give people satoshis’ and use as an opp to on-ramp more people onto crypto.
I like the name of it except for the missed opportunity to use the active voice instead of the passive. “It launched” is just as grammatically correct as “It has launched” in spite of how the passive voice gives an air of “regality” or whatever, it’s more laborious out of the mouth.
“It launched” is concise, direct, to the point and active.
Thank you for the thoughtful feedback! When I chose 'ItsLaunched', I was aiming for something that feels celebratory, like an announcement: "It's here, and it's ready"
I am curious why 10 launches by day ? Is a launch registering a product for sale ?
If yes, why not restrict to 1 launch a day, or 1 launch a week. It's not like anyone is that productive that they create 10 products in a day.
Surely this trades being in the spotlight for a few minutes now for being in the spotlight in a year's time when it's your turn in the 10-products-per-day queue?
That's a fair concern! However, the idea is to create a balanced system where every product gets its moment to shine without being overshadowed by dozens of others launching on the same day. The first-come, first-serve queue ensures fairness, and since launches can be scheduled up to 30 days ahead, creators can plan their timing strategically. The goal is quality exposure over a rushed spotlight.
- Sign up with Twitter? Please consider sign up with Apple, Github and maybe Google.
- You should def hide votes until someone has voted or used all their votes for the day to reduce bias.
Thanks so much for the congratulations. Coming up some more sign in methods, I just had setup Twitter as it was the easiest to setup at that time.
About your suggestion, hiding votes until users cast their own is a really smart way. I will look at the possibility of implementing something like that.
Thank you for the kind words and for reporting the bug. I agree that providing a simpler, cleaner alternative is essential, and I'm working hard to make it just that. Regarding the bug, I'm already looking into fixing it to ensure it doesn't happen again.
I totally understand where you're coming from. The idea behind commenting before submitting a product is to encourage meaningful engagement and help foster a supportive community.
However this is something I will definitely reconsider as I continue to improve the platform.
In fact they're terrible products, too, even if you don't aspire to run one as a business.
People don't realize this, so they keep building more launch platforms to replace the previous launch platforms, thinking that a different design will "work." But it won't work. Because the idea is flawed from the get-go.
Launch platforms are inherently competitive. There is no way for "everyone" to get to number one. As you scale and get more and more people adding their products to your platform, your homepage and your visitors' browsers' viewports stay the same size. So the ratio of launches:visible_launches grows and grows, and therefore the percentage that get any attention shrinks over time.
You can try to remedy this by making it less competitive to launch, e.g. by cycling through submissions so no one is at the top all the time, or giving products second-chance days, or adding more launch lists so there's more real estate of products to upvote, or whatever. But this just leads to a second and more impactful problem…
…which is that you won't get any traffic. A launch platform is a marketplace, and the only value the supply side has for posting to a launch platform is to get users and/or feedback. Those users and feedback come from traffic, i.e. the demand side of your marketplace. And traffic comes from people referring their friends/audiences to the launch platform to upvote their product. In other words, it's the competition that drives traffic. That's it. Nothing else brings traffic. People en masse don't tend to make a habit of frequenting launch platforms, nor do launch platforms show up for popular search keywords, nor do they get shared on social media (except when first launched), nor do they receive traffic in any other way other than people promoting their launches.
So when you kill competition, you kill the only source of traffic you're ever going to have, and your launch platform ceases to be valuable. You killed the demand side of your marketplace, which made it useless to the supply side.
Limiting your platform to 10 launches per day seems like a clever way to circumvent this, but even if that "succeeds", the result will be that you have many more than 10 people per day who want to launch. And you will either have to expand to accommodate them (and thus encounter all of the above problems), or you'll have to implement some sort of rules or system for who gets to launch and who doesn't. Which is just you picking the winners/losers, and doesn't avoid the entire problem you sought to solve, which is preventing people from losing. All the people who don't get to launch will be on HN in a month writing about how they're making a new launch platform that works for everyone.
So what's the solution?
It's to understand and accept that marketing is competitive. And launching is just marketing. So launching is competitive.
Attention is zero sum. Not everyone can win. The vast majority of all products built will die in obscurity, and it's not because of a flaw in the design of launch platforms, social networks, search engines, etc. It's an inescapable fact of reality. It might as well be a law of physics. It's better to just embrace it.
Thank you so much. I'm really glad you like it, I'm also excited to see some submissions from the platform on HN. Thanks again for your support, and best of luck with everything.
I honestly wonder about that kind of place. To me, consumers don't go on these platforms, only other makers. So it seems like it's just a place where you can get your idea stolen.
I'm not seeing what makes this more fair or product hunt unfair. Can you talk about that piece?
If I'm reading between the lines, it kind of seems like you think product hunt is unfair because savvy startups activate their users for votes. Wouldn't the same thing happen here?
Thank you. The key difference I see is in how visibility is handled. On PH, the system tends to favor products that already have strong user base or team that can mobilize a lot of votes quickly, which can sometimes overshadow smaller, independent makers who don't have the same resources.
Here, the goal is to limit the number of launches per day and the number of votes per user. The under radar feature also gives products a second chance if they don't get enough attention on their launch day, ensuring that timing is not the only factor in success.
I do believe that some level of community support will always play a role, but I hope this system makes it easier for products to get a fair shot even without massive voting power behind them.
Thanks for raising this point, it's something I'm constantly thinking about as the platform grows.
Thank you! Right now, the focus is entirely on building a fair and vibrant community around the platform. Monetization isn’t a priority at this stage. That said, if the platform grows and requires funding to sustain, I would explore options.
If you care fairness, I have 1 extra suggestion that you might be interested in.
It was proven by several data-science research that when users have to votes (or give ratings) and if they are able to see the previous result, then the first few votes have an extremely important effect.
For instance here is one stury, very well written article by a famous teacher Robert West, "of sheep and beer" https://dlab.epfl.ch/2017-08-30-of-sheep-and-beer/ which describes this effect on beer-rating sites.
One way to overcome this effect is to hide the votes until enough votes were collected (eg more than 50). Another way is to hide votes until you have voted yourself.
You can see a form of this effect on HN itself, in particular in Show HN topics.
First few comments basically set the tone of the discussion and its dynamic. If they are shallow, negative or dismissive, the discussion gets stuck and takes a while to recover even if the submission has a lot of actual merit.
On the other hand it can recover. I am not going back to reading sequential pages on a forum. Good enough until something better comes along.
Similar with stackoverflow. A question with an answer is already uninteresting to other contributora, but if the answer is superficial or of bad quality on top of that, it lowers the chances of a good second answer dramatically.
This is from personal experience, not from any study, so take it with a ton of salt.
This is not a study but a reality for me. At one point on HN I wanted to farm for karma points. That period lasted for a few weeks, I wasn't too intense about it, just a fun question I had.
My tactic? Find something that has something like 15 upvotes and you suspect to be rising quick in upvotes. Create the first comment and your best to make an as thoughtful comment as possible, even if you don't know anything about the topic.
Result: I was always within the top 3 getting between 10 to 50 upvotes.
One idea I have (just brainstorming) force users to make a vote first of 10 random products and only after they see the results.
It could probably use some UX tweaking since forcing someone to vote isn't quite nice, but at least it takes care of this effect that was described.
Serious question: what motivation was there?
AFAIK points aren't worth anything and don't unlock anything after the first few, probably to help block spam/bots.
It's exceedingly rare that I even click a profile here, and even then it's usually to see what a person works on not how many points they've accumulated.
In fact, there are many cases where the most knowledgeable person on a subject comments, I click to see who they are, and realize they've only ever commented a few times. I imagine they either mostly lurk, or have an idle account they just use when friends drag them into the conversation.
I feel like that was gaming the system in the spirit of https://xkcd.com/810/
Thank you for the suggestion. I have implemented something like this but still experimenting with different factors.
Another related aspect: it’s likely that tech hype sphere will not actually make much of a difference unless you’re selling to those people directly. My app Payload got featured in fastcompany, and I thought that was amazing. It drove traffic to the website and I was just waiting for the users… that didn’t come. And then a few days later back to normal.
On the other hand, the less prestigious tech blogs for regular people (think PC magazines) were much better at driving both real users and also traffic.
Anyway, the point is that your customers might not be on product hunt checking out the coolest newest hypiest products. In fact, it’s very unlikely they are. Just a reminder to not take these games so seriously.
Isn't producthunt (and similar) aimed at VCs fishing for unicorns? The idea being that they'll know to then market your product where it belongs so they can grow it and make their billion. If that's not it, then vcfish.com is $12/year and available
That sounds right. Now, I haven’t used producthunt but I believe they market themselves differently, with a heavy focus on ”creator community” and I believe they also call the VCs ”hunters”, suggesting perhaps that people are there looking for products to use and purchase, rather than an early investor club. LinkedIn, but instead of laborers and employees, it’s early founders and VCs? Doesn’t sound as sexy, and definitely not very indie hacker, tinkerer, explorer vibe. I don’t know if that’s the case, but it nevertheless feels like a mismatch between messaging and reality.
I really wish Ryan Hoover would take back the integrity of Product Hunt. It's such an amazing product with such currently painful execution, assumingly in the name of site traffic traded for ad dollars.
I truly think that the conversion rate for advertisers on PH would go UP if the quality of the site (moderated posts, comments, bot traffic) did the same.
I'm consistently baffled by the rarity of a product owner improving their bottom line by simply improving their users' experience.
I think the calculation is made on the sum of user experience.
Any activity can be made worse if they find a way to increase users by other means.
It's not quick enough. People want juicy returns quickly. Consequences be damned.
I left the site even before Ryan left, but yeah, he was the best person to steward it at forward. It’s been junk for a very long time.
Whatever happened to him that he gave up such a valuable resource for the community? I don't think it can be saved at this point though.
AngelList bought ProductHunt.
Oh he's gone? That explains a lot.
Looking cool! I have two questions though:
>10 launches per day, max.
What if your launch queue will be filling at a much faster rate aka backpressure issue? E.g what if this went viral and you get 1000 new projects per day, any new launch is scheduled after three months then?
>2 votes per user, per day.
Any idea how to prevent someone from creating 10 fake accounts and making it 20 votes per day? I'm sure any entrepreneur will see this opportunity right away if a little cheating means more exposure.
Looks like a good alternative to product hunt, the UI is looking fresh and I like it, however I'm genuinely interested about your thoughts on the problems this model can have at scale.
1) If the queue grows significantly, the first-come, first-serve system will still ensure fairness. Makers can plan their launches strategically within a 30-day scheduling window, and I’ll monitor growth closely to adapt if needed.
2) At the moment, I’m testing a few theories to address this and ensure fair play on the platform. I can’t share specifics just yet since these are still in the experimental phase, but I’m keeping this top of mind as the platform evolves.
Appreciate your interest and feedback, thank you!
This is awesome! Congrats on the metalaunch ;-) I found the site hard to navigate visually as everything was equally prominent (in fact, yesterday's launches pop more than the current ones right now), so I took a stab at a different layout.
Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/4qoY7o2.png
Code here: https://gist.github.com/airstrike/923a7049d5cde7405e60e99e22...
Thank you so much for the feedback and taking the time to create a new layout idea. I truly appreciate it. The goal has always been to make the site intuitive and focused on giving launches their moment to shine. So I will take a closer look at your suggestions to see how can I make it more visually clear.
Nice product overall. Not sure anybody pointed out this yet, but you should consider changing spaces for dashes on your slugs, they look better than the coded space (%20) on pages like: https://itslaunched.com/profile/Kazane%20Shimizu
Thank you for pointing this out. Will be fixed as soon as possible.
I see a new product-hunt alternative launched every couple months here. Maybe I’m cynical, but I don’t think we’re going to displace product hunt with things like new voting dynamics. They already have the network effects, so I think you’d need to make a relatively large change to stand a real chance.
Edit: Here’s a proposal for a bigger change. do some free advertising for the submitted ideas. Run simple Google/youtube/facebook ads for them, just directing people to their page on your platform. Hopefully this doesn’t burn too much cash, since you’re actually advertising for their page on your platform, so it’s good for you in the end. Perhaps submissions have a small fee in the long-term, to monetize the platform.
Let’s go full meta and build a product hunt… but for product hunt alternatives!
https://www.producthunt.com/products/product-hunt/alternativ...
Could somebody explain the appeal of browsing Product Hunt? It seems just like a subreddit where people post nothing but ads for their businesses, and I've always been a bit baffled by it. Sure if I had a SaaS to sell I'd post it there, but why is there an audience for a long list of product ads?
They are not just product ads, they are ads for NEW products.
So, the audience gets to stay on top of all the cutting edge products and services.
If something becomes important and useful you’ll hear it somewhere else too. Just like you don’t have to be a completionist on the HN New page…just wait until it bubbles up to the main page.
Maybe the bigger question is whether something like Product Hunt even needs to exist in the ecosystem. I think it had its place circa 2012–2014, but does it have any "real" users anymore? Or is it all founders and growth hackers trying to juice their launch, and an army of dummy accounts from people who sell votes?
Circular economy. I have seen that creator space is a circular system, they network, they support each other, so sites like these build their own bubble. Only a small percentage of launches break out and are used by users who are not in the creator space. Rest are just their followers(working in businesses) or creators themselves who adopt to most of the products launched there.
I know there have been big launches on PH but those are outliers because they also have put efforts into digital marketing and PH was just one of platforms for them. Majority are indiehackers, who are happy with a small MRR which is very much possible within this club of creators.
This. Why do I even need ProductHunt these days? There’s already so many products already in the market that does any possible use case you can think of. There’s hardly anything new or innovative in there anymore. If there’s something truly innovative (or chatgpt), I would probably have heard of it from ppl already
How would you handle the situation that if this is successful, you’ll get massively more than 10 candidates each day?
Great question. Right now, it's first come, first served, and makers can schedule their launches up to 30 days in advance. I don't plan to introduce any paid options to skip the line, it's important to me that it stays fair for everyone.
If it ever gets to a point where demand grows too much, I would explore ways to keep things manageable while still giving every product it's moment to shine. Thanks for brining this up!
This is nice! It looks like the pipeline is filling up! I signed up to launch NimbleAI [1] on your site.
One small issue with the launch date calendar. When I clicked a date in the calendar the popup with the actual launch date was always one day later. I wanted to launch on Tuesday, Jan 28, but when I picked that date it scheduled the launch for Wed, Jan 29.
BTW... what was the product you launched on PH that got buried??
Also... how funny would it be to launch ItsLaunched on PH and have it bubble to the top of PH! You should coordinate a launch on PH with all the users signed up for your new tool to get lots of votes. THAT would be awesome!
[1] https://www.nimbleai.co
Cheers for adding up NimbleAI, I'm excited to see it launch.
I’ve had someone else mention the calendar issue too, but I haven’t been able to replicate it on my end, so I’m struggling to pinpoint the exact cause. If it’s not too much trouble, could you send me a screen recording or some details about the steps you took? That would really help me figure this out. (Send me a DM on twitter @lakshikagayal)
As for PH, I’ve launched not only one but several products there in the past, but since I don’t have a big community following me, they all ended up getting buried pretty quickly.
And launching this on PH and make it the #1? now that would be poetic, maybe we’ll make it happen someday :D
My guess is that maybe the calendar issue is timezone related?!? That is where I'd start. I am in US central time.
Nice work! It looks pretty good, I just might use it soon!
FYI, you seem to have an encoding issue. There is a bunch of `'` in your pages. [0]
[0]: https://itslaunched.com/product/sponsorapp
I would love to see your product on the platform when you are ready to launch!
And thanks for catching the encoding issue. I will get that sorted out to make sure everything displays properly. Let me know if there's anything else you spot or any feedback you have. Thanks again for checking it out.
I really like the direction you’re taking. Product Hunt can feel like it’s run more for the benefit of the maintainers than for the community. It’s their service, so fair enough, but it also means users sometimes lose out. And let’s face it—there’s definitely some gaming of the system going on.
Your approach seems promising. Have you considered taking it even further, maybe by making the platform more decentralized or democratized, kind of like a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization)? That might align the incentives more directly with the indie maker community and help keep everything transparent. In any case, I’m glad to see new ideas that give smaller products and teams a fair shot.
Keep at it!
D
Thank you so much for the kind words and encouragement. Product Hunt is a great platform I. Many ways, BUT there is always room for new approaches that put the spotlight back on the community itself.
I love the idea of exploring ways to make the platform more decentralized too. However for now, I'm more focused on keeping things simple and fair while improving based on feedback like yours. Thanks again for sharing your thoughts.
It's all a fine balancing act, sure, but ...
"This isn't a popularity contest... so anyway, here's how voting works" is a bit silly, and right there on the front page is "yesterday's winners" which is more than a bit disingenuous.
What if I vote for nothing because all of the products are bad? Why do I care about a user leaderboard for with streaks and their voting history? No noise?
People are so concerned with having an actual downvote button but not-so-concerned with how gameable upvote only systems are.
One of my favorite newsletters just gives links with one-line description. Done. What if this site just listed 10 products a day. No voting, no "judgment" by anyone except the person curating the links.
What if 100 products come out in a week. How do you choose?
etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.
Just another channel to saturate
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. You raise some valid points. I'm working to strike a balance between giving visibility to products and avoiding the "popularity contest" vibe, and I'm definitely open to refining how that works.
As for the leaderboard and voting history, I understand your concern. The idea behind it is to encourage meaningful participations, but I get how it could feel like extra noise.
Also right now, it's first come, first served, with makers able to schedule their launch up to 30 days ahead. This keep things fair and transparent, ensuring everyone gets an equal opportunity without having to compete for visibility.
If the platform grows, I might explore other ways to keep things manageable whether that's a curated selection, specific categories, or something else BUT for now, the goal is to maintain a simple and fair system that gives everyone a shot.
What is with this idea of having engaged user metric for such sites? Why are engaged members rewarded and recognized when the products should be the one that should get the focus and attention.
Can someone please tell me what I fail to understand? I fail to see why such apps focus on the creator than the creation itself?
I get your point. The focus should definitely be on the product itself. The reason platform reward engaged users is often to build a supportive community around those products. Active users help promote, review and discuss products, which can give them the attention they deserve.
But I agree- it's important to make sure the product is always the main focus. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Its a growth hack, I understand that. But when creating something better than PH, it would be good to see something different than PH, the more focus on product than the makers themselves.
Most product launches from seasoned makers get a fair amount of attention anyway, isn't your mission to put focus on product no matter the maker? Not let the product get buried down because a well known maker has launched something else thats getting most of the attention?
I think the only product that you could really launch on Product Hunt is a Product Hunt clone.
It is good to create direct, fair and healthy competition for the Product Hunt (I am all for diversity). Competition is always good for business.
As far as successful launching on Product Hunt and getting feature isn't just for everyone. You have to do marketing, building hype around your product, moderate product idea (it's a minimum to get featured), good copywriting and whatnot.
I'm also going to sign up because of its features.
Thank you for the kind words and support! You're absolutely right. Launching successfully anywhere requires a mix of everything. My goal with this platform is to level the playing field a bit more for indie makers and small teams who might not have the resources for a big marketing push.
Also excited to have you on board, and I hope the features make your experience worthwhile. Would love to hear your thoughts once you’ve explored the platform.
Hey! I am launching my product on your site! Overall I think its really well made, 2 small things:
1) In categories it says (1) even for things that don't have a single launch listed when clicked maybe cuz there is an upcoming launch for the category, but none yet? IDK why, but just to let you know 2) Confirming the launch date (alert) said it was for one day before the one I selected, then on the confirmation page though it had the correct date.
I hope your site takes off! GL! ;)
Hey, that's awesome. Thank you for launching on the site and kind words.
1) The category issue is probably because it's counting upcoming launches as well. I will take a look at it and fix that right up.
2) Thanks for catching that date issue. I will dig into it and get it sorted out ASAP to avoid any mix ups.
It means a lot that you took the time to share these with me. Wishing you a great launch, and thanks again for the support.
I am happy to help! I know how helpful it is for people to point out the small stuff since I have launched things before too, but going to your site its obvious your a great developer and have made a good quality website :). GL!
Nice, congratz on the launch!
Submitted my product for tomorrow, excited to see how it goes!
Some feedback: - Could probably benefit from adding white-space: pre-line; in a couple of places, e.g. comments to support line breaks - The encoding issue mentioned elsewhere too, stuff showing up as like ' - Launched today should maybe be a bit more prominent, but maybe it also looks better once there are more products that just one.
That's awesome! I'm really excited to see it on the platform tomorrow!
And thanks for the feedback; 1) I will add line breaks for comments 2) I'm aware of the encoding issue and will fix it soon 3) I agree that launched today section could stand out more. I will tweak that as we get more launches
Really appreciate your input, and good luck with the launch tomorrow!
I like that you show the website stats. For an indie maker, we care about reach a lot. The transparency is important I think.
Transparency is a core part of what I'm aiming for. Glad you appreciate it!
Feature request: Just a way to bookmark or save products so I can go back and reference them at a later date.
Love it! I think you’ve got something here.
The one thing to solve for imo is the initial attraction needs to be incentivized for being the early set in of users/contributors to arrive. On that note, make it possible for me as a product recommender to recommend someone else’s product if I want to, and that can be a separate bucket for recommendations.
Then what you have now is essentially digg and Reddit but for startups. It submission will be slow on day one, but hopefully ppl stick around if you capture their imagination and plant a seed for them to come back for.
A second tab by other recommendations by the user will always be buzzing as people will naturally want to hack their chances into being promoted to the LIST on the first tab and/or by being promoted, or feeling good about it, or helping a friend etc and the recommending submitter gets points that can be used for launching their own product and with greater placement or give them one vote for every 10 votes their reco gets on the other tab.
Anyway, I’m riffing but I’m also taking a break from working on a stratplan for my startup and winding down on the couch.
Love the simplicity. PH sold out.
P.s. instead of votes, give people satoshis’ and use as an opp to on-ramp more people onto crypto.
I like the name of it except for the missed opportunity to use the active voice instead of the passive. “It launched” is just as grammatically correct as “It has launched” in spite of how the passive voice gives an air of “regality” or whatever, it’s more laborious out of the mouth.
“It launched” is concise, direct, to the point and active.
Thank you for the thoughtful feedback! When I chose 'ItsLaunched', I was aiming for something that feels celebratory, like an announcement: "It's here, and it's ready"
Okay that explains a lot. I misread the contraction! "It is launched" is what you must mean then?
Funny how words work. Well then, who cares about what I think now. Thanks for the correction.
Does a launch have to be software only? Can I announce, say, the launch of an e-book? Or a newsletter entry?
I am curious why 10 launches by day ? Is a launch registering a product for sale ? If yes, why not restrict to 1 launch a day, or 1 launch a week. It's not like anyone is that productive that they create 10 products in a day.
It's 10 maximum on the site a day, I think.
Surely this trades being in the spotlight for a few minutes now for being in the spotlight in a year's time when it's your turn in the 10-products-per-day queue?
That's a fair concern! However, the idea is to create a balanced system where every product gets its moment to shine without being overshadowed by dozens of others launching on the same day. The first-come, first-serve queue ensures fairness, and since launches can be scheduled up to 30 days ahead, creators can plan their timing strategically. The goal is quality exposure over a rushed spotlight.
Makes sense! I guess you can see how it goes and adjust. I hope it goes well.
Awesome, congratulations!
A few notes:
- Sign up with Twitter? Please consider sign up with Apple, Github and maybe Google. - You should def hide votes until someone has voted or used all their votes for the day to reduce bias.
Thanks so much for the congratulations. Coming up some more sign in methods, I just had setup Twitter as it was the easiest to setup at that time.
About your suggestion, hiding votes until users cast their own is a really smart way. I will look at the possibility of implementing something like that.
Great ! PH has become "too big" and full of spam, it needs alternative :)
Bug report : When you post a comment, if you refresh the page it's sending it again and you have duplicates
Thank you for the kind words and for reporting the bug. I agree that providing a simpler, cleaner alternative is essential, and I'm working hard to make it just that. Regarding the bug, I'm already looking into fixing it to ensure it doesn't happen again.
I don't like that I have to comment before I can post my own product. None of the items on the page look like something I'd want to try or comment on.
I totally understand where you're coming from. The idea behind commenting before submitting a product is to encourage meaningful engagement and help foster a supportive community.
However this is something I will definitely reconsider as I continue to improve the platform.
Maybe everyone else is thinking the same thing about your product.
Maybe
Launch platforms are terrible businesses.
In fact they're terrible products, too, even if you don't aspire to run one as a business.
People don't realize this, so they keep building more launch platforms to replace the previous launch platforms, thinking that a different design will "work." But it won't work. Because the idea is flawed from the get-go.
Launch platforms are inherently competitive. There is no way for "everyone" to get to number one. As you scale and get more and more people adding their products to your platform, your homepage and your visitors' browsers' viewports stay the same size. So the ratio of launches:visible_launches grows and grows, and therefore the percentage that get any attention shrinks over time.
You can try to remedy this by making it less competitive to launch, e.g. by cycling through submissions so no one is at the top all the time, or giving products second-chance days, or adding more launch lists so there's more real estate of products to upvote, or whatever. But this just leads to a second and more impactful problem…
…which is that you won't get any traffic. A launch platform is a marketplace, and the only value the supply side has for posting to a launch platform is to get users and/or feedback. Those users and feedback come from traffic, i.e. the demand side of your marketplace. And traffic comes from people referring their friends/audiences to the launch platform to upvote their product. In other words, it's the competition that drives traffic. That's it. Nothing else brings traffic. People en masse don't tend to make a habit of frequenting launch platforms, nor do launch platforms show up for popular search keywords, nor do they get shared on social media (except when first launched), nor do they receive traffic in any other way other than people promoting their launches.
So when you kill competition, you kill the only source of traffic you're ever going to have, and your launch platform ceases to be valuable. You killed the demand side of your marketplace, which made it useless to the supply side.
Limiting your platform to 10 launches per day seems like a clever way to circumvent this, but even if that "succeeds", the result will be that you have many more than 10 people per day who want to launch. And you will either have to expand to accommodate them (and thus encounter all of the above problems), or you'll have to implement some sort of rules or system for who gets to launch and who doesn't. Which is just you picking the winners/losers, and doesn't avoid the entire problem you sought to solve, which is preventing people from losing. All the people who don't get to launch will be on HN in a month writing about how they're making a new launch platform that works for everyone.
So what's the solution?
It's to understand and accept that marketing is competitive. And launching is just marketing. So launching is competitive.
Attention is zero sum. Not everyone can win. The vast majority of all products built will die in obscurity, and it's not because of a flaw in the design of launch platforms, social networks, search engines, etc. It's an inescapable fact of reality. It might as well be a law of physics. It's better to just embrace it.
Looks nice, but you need to add more categories, also what's you plan to prevent bots? PH is full of bots.
Love the idea! Would be amazing if the ranking algorithm would be public. As in you know exactly what needs to be done to rank higher
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
I disagree, this smells like SEO "hacking."
No.
Site looks fresh. At now there are free slots to publish projects, so I added my as well.
Good look!
Thank you! Glad to have your project onboard. Wishing you the best with your launch!
I submit my site into this directory too, love it.
Can't wait for your launch
What if you're an author and the products you launch are short stories. Can I participate?
Looks great! Hope to see more submissions to HN from this site! Congrats on the launch!
Thank you so much. I'm really glad you like it, I'm also excited to see some submissions from the platform on HN. Thanks again for your support, and best of luck with everything.
Great idea and execution. Agree with all the points you've made about Product Hunt.
Thanks a lot. I'm glad you agree with the points. It's all about giving indie makers a fair shot, and I appreciate your support.
Promoting your own products doesn't really make it far though does it?
*fair
I honestly wonder about that kind of place. To me, consumers don't go on these platforms, only other makers. So it seems like it's just a place where you can get your idea stolen.
Edit: or best case scenario, bought
Makers are also consumers. When producthunt first started a lot of the apps listed there were targeted to makers.
Gotta admit, I kinda love this. Thanks man.
Glad you like it, thank you
Thanks for sharing and congrats on the launch!
I'm not seeing what makes this more fair or product hunt unfair. Can you talk about that piece?
If I'm reading between the lines, it kind of seems like you think product hunt is unfair because savvy startups activate their users for votes. Wouldn't the same thing happen here?
Thank you. The key difference I see is in how visibility is handled. On PH, the system tends to favor products that already have strong user base or team that can mobilize a lot of votes quickly, which can sometimes overshadow smaller, independent makers who don't have the same resources.
Here, the goal is to limit the number of launches per day and the number of votes per user. The under radar feature also gives products a second chance if they don't get enough attention on their launch day, ensuring that timing is not the only factor in success.
I do believe that some level of community support will always play a role, but I hope this system makes it easier for products to get a fair shot even without massive voting power behind them.
Thanks for raising this point, it's something I'm constantly thinking about as the platform grows.
Love it. Are you thinking about monetizing it?
Thank you! Right now, the focus is entirely on building a fair and vibrant community around the platform. Monetization isn’t a priority at this stage. That said, if the platform grows and requires funding to sustain, I would explore options.
Congrats! I love the idea!
Thank you so much!
Well done!
Looks cool.