i launched on producthunt and all i got was spam
So that ProductHunt launch happened. Here's how it went.
Quick recap: i built VidEditor.ai for The Monkey Patching Podcast. I needed to turn long episodes into short clips. It worked. I figured i'd put it on ProductHunt.
This was a cold launch. No LinkedIn posts. Didn't ask friends or family to upvote. No slack group stuff. I just put it out there.
the inbox thing
During the launch day my inbox exploded. First a few emails. Then dozens. For a minute i thought people actually cared. They didn't really care though.
90% of those emails were people selling upvotes. And it's cheap. Like really cheap. Somewhere between a coffee and a lunch to game the rankings. Kind of wild.
The other 10% were people offering to help me raise funding. I'm sure a finder's fee has nothing to do with it.
traffic
I expected something but got basically nothing. A few clicks, no one signed up.
is producthunt even a thing anymore
I got curious so i scraped four years of launch data from hunted.space and made a chart.
Every dot is one day. Blue line is 30-day average.
That peak in early 2023 is the ChatGPT moment. Everyone launching AI wrappers. About 55 launches per day.
Then it drops. By late 2024 it's around 15 per day. That's 70% down from peak.
Not saying PH is dead. But it's not 2023 anymore.
what actually worked
Reddit ads.
I know. Reddit. Where your ad gets roasted. But you can target specific subreddits. Podcast tool? r/podcasting. Video thing? r/VideoEditing. People there are actually looking for solutions.
All my paying customers came through Reddit. Not ProductHunt.
It won't work for everything. B2B enterprise stuff maybe needs LinkedIn. But for dev tools or creator tools with a niche community on reddit - at least it did for me.
anyway
ProductHunt is a milestone. Nothing more, nothing less. Don't expect traffic from it. If there is, cool. But don't build your launch strategy around it.
You get a badge. You can say you launched there. Your mom might be impressed. Mine wasn't.
There is no magic formula. Getting in front of potential customers just takes work. Find where your people hang out and go there. For me it was reddit.
And the ease of building apps these days probably doesn't make any of that easier. Maybe something to dig into in another post.
"The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it." — Terry Pratchett