I appreciate that you've put months of effort into this project, and your site looks slick. I'm going to share some candid feedback. Not trying to be mean, but I am trying to help you think through your service's value prop and business model.
What you've actually created here is an advertising platform that helps indie hackers and startups get in front of... other bootstrappers. This is a limited audience, in size, in scope, and in available spend.
If you want to build a community, you may be better off with a Discord server and spreading through word of mouth - or something more personalized and closed like Inbox Startup if you want to monetize it. If you want to sit in the middle of the indie hacker community and collect fees on featured slots, you've got find a way to sell access to an audience that's worth $9. You're competing with product sites which are free and ad networks that give you very fine grained targeting of a wide range of audiences.
People go to sites like PH to be surprised and delighted by interesting new products. Even if the upvote system is borked, users have some faith in the wisdom of the crowd and the PH brand. Why would I, as a user, want to see a list of "everyone who had $9 to give to Filip today" over a list of "products other indie hackers thought were cool?"
Finally, a very diligent user might look at 20 products a day on a site like PH or this one. Let's say you sell out your top 20 feature slots every day. That caps you at $66K gross revenue per year... unless you raise your prices.
Thank you so much for taking the time to write this detailed feedback! I actually agree with everything you've outlined here.
My longterm goal with SaaSCurate isn't to rely on the $9 featured slots as the main monetization or draw for users. Instead, I am working to build a community where founders actively support each other through their growth journey.
When someone publishes a product on the platform, other community members receive an email notification so that they can check out the product, leave endorsements and connect. I've also got a Discord server linked in the platform as a space for founders to engage directly.
The $9 featured slots are more of a stepping stone to help fund and shape the broader vision I have for SaaSCurate. I want to help founders grow their products not just by publishing, but with other features that go beyond just product visibility.
Thank you again for your detailed feedback, I truly appreciate it and I am glad to see that we're aligned in the thought process.
When you list a product, you can choose whether to feature it or list it for free.
Featuring it costs $9 or 500 karma points (which are earned by contributing). There are also other benefits to featuring:
- Get spotlighted in a newsletter sent to all community members
- Featured embeddable badge
- Dofollow backlink for SEO
I was just looking for an alternative to Product Hunt, so thanks for the great info!
I signed up right away. If I have any feedback after using it, I'll be sure to leave a comment.
Is there supposed to be an icon next to the "Featured Products" and Leaderboard headings? Just pointing out that it seems to be a missing font/icon box for me.
Is the new grift to start a product-hunt style website and charge $$$ to be featured / listed? I've encountered a few of these types of websites already and they seem to be growing in numbers.
Seems like it! I've started building SaaSCurate since June 2024, but since then quite a few platforms like this have emerged. My vision for SaaSCurate is more than to just list a product – I want to build a strong community that helps founders acquire new customers through partnerships and earned media. SaaSCurate is still in MVP phase.
Any karma/voting system is going to have issues with bots eventually. By having the system in the first place, you crowdsource, and eventualy that crowd is going to be bots because there is always someone that can derive benefit from manipulating markets, and other related things.
Additionally, competition is important. Adversarial individual decision-making is required for economic calculation to take place. Cooperation is the anti-thesis of this, and it generally fails in ways Mises describes back in the 1930s. You can read more about it in his collected works on Socialism. It applies broadly.
The main issues you'll be immediately faced with once your reach a self-starting saturation, is controlling the noise floor. If its not useful, people won't use it.
Many of these problems don't have any good solutions. GPT makes it cost-effective to destructively manipulate aspects in ways you can't predict as well.
In my general opinion, you cannot develop or preserve community when you have bad actors taking advantage of community. This is most notably seen recently with the many LLM developers crawling any public sites available. Performing what amounts to DDOS attacks.
There can be no goodwill when the status quo is bot driven, and those bots are all about taking or imposing cost through interference.
Its a cursed problem series. Open platforms fail to the flood, Closed platforms fail to lack of engagement, and Semi-Open platforms eat up all your time for little return.
I appreciate that you've put months of effort into this project, and your site looks slick. I'm going to share some candid feedback. Not trying to be mean, but I am trying to help you think through your service's value prop and business model.
What you've actually created here is an advertising platform that helps indie hackers and startups get in front of... other bootstrappers. This is a limited audience, in size, in scope, and in available spend.
If you want to build a community, you may be better off with a Discord server and spreading through word of mouth - or something more personalized and closed like Inbox Startup if you want to monetize it. If you want to sit in the middle of the indie hacker community and collect fees on featured slots, you've got find a way to sell access to an audience that's worth $9. You're competing with product sites which are free and ad networks that give you very fine grained targeting of a wide range of audiences.
People go to sites like PH to be surprised and delighted by interesting new products. Even if the upvote system is borked, users have some faith in the wisdom of the crowd and the PH brand. Why would I, as a user, want to see a list of "everyone who had $9 to give to Filip today" over a list of "products other indie hackers thought were cool?"
Finally, a very diligent user might look at 20 products a day on a site like PH or this one. Let's say you sell out your top 20 feature slots every day. That caps you at $66K gross revenue per year... unless you raise your prices.
Thank you so much for taking the time to write this detailed feedback! I actually agree with everything you've outlined here.
My longterm goal with SaaSCurate isn't to rely on the $9 featured slots as the main monetization or draw for users. Instead, I am working to build a community where founders actively support each other through their growth journey.
When someone publishes a product on the platform, other community members receive an email notification so that they can check out the product, leave endorsements and connect. I've also got a Discord server linked in the platform as a space for founders to engage directly.
The $9 featured slots are more of a stepping stone to help fund and shape the broader vision I have for SaaSCurate. I want to help founders grow their products not just by publishing, but with other features that go beyond just product visibility.
Thank you again for your detailed feedback, I truly appreciate it and I am glad to see that we're aligned in the thought process.
If there are no upvotes, what dictates something being "Featured" on the homepage, the items of which are said to be the "Greatest"?
When you list a product, you can choose whether to feature it or list it for free.
Featuring it costs $9 or 500 karma points (which are earned by contributing). There are also other benefits to featuring: - Get spotlighted in a newsletter sent to all community members - Featured embeddable badge - Dofollow backlink for SEO
I was just looking for an alternative to Product Hunt, so thanks for the great info! I signed up right away. If I have any feedback after using it, I'll be sure to leave a comment.
Thanks! Hope you derive value! Would love to hear any feedback.
I built SaaSCurate. AMA.
Is there supposed to be an icon next to the "Featured Products" and Leaderboard headings? Just pointing out that it seems to be a missing font/icon box for me.
Yes, there are supposed to be star and trophy emojis. I am wondering why they're not showing up for you. Does the icon for Listed Products show?
Yes it was only those two missing but it might have been specific to Linux (desktop). When on my phone it renders properly.
I see! Good to know that there are rendering issues with emojis on Unix. Thanks for letting me know!
Is the new grift to start a product-hunt style website and charge $$$ to be featured / listed? I've encountered a few of these types of websites already and they seem to be growing in numbers.
Seems like it! I've started building SaaSCurate since June 2024, but since then quite a few platforms like this have emerged. My vision for SaaSCurate is more than to just list a product – I want to build a strong community that helps founders acquire new customers through partnerships and earned media. SaaSCurate is still in MVP phase.
I like your honesty! Best of luck in your launch!
Thanks!
Any karma/voting system is going to have issues with bots eventually. By having the system in the first place, you crowdsource, and eventualy that crowd is going to be bots because there is always someone that can derive benefit from manipulating markets, and other related things.
Additionally, competition is important. Adversarial individual decision-making is required for economic calculation to take place. Cooperation is the anti-thesis of this, and it generally fails in ways Mises describes back in the 1930s. You can read more about it in his collected works on Socialism. It applies broadly.
The main issues you'll be immediately faced with once your reach a self-starting saturation, is controlling the noise floor. If its not useful, people won't use it.
Many of these problems don't have any good solutions. GPT makes it cost-effective to destructively manipulate aspects in ways you can't predict as well.
In my general opinion, you cannot develop or preserve community when you have bad actors taking advantage of community. This is most notably seen recently with the many LLM developers crawling any public sites available. Performing what amounts to DDOS attacks.
There can be no goodwill when the status quo is bot driven, and those bots are all about taking or imposing cost through interference.
Its a cursed problem series. Open platforms fail to the flood, Closed platforms fail to lack of engagement, and Semi-Open platforms eat up all your time for little return.
That's true. I’ve set up social login to help keep bots out, but I know it’s not a perfect solution.