When one builds a Product Hunt (PH) alternative, one needs to remember that PH succeeded because of Ryan Hoover. Just as with any new Startup App/Website of that time, it was not fancy, interesting or likable at all. Ryan’s shouts, marketing, and his everything everywhere all at once presence made PH. When I think of PH, I remember his avatar (profile picture); that 'P' reminds me more of Pinterest than PH.
PH is a successful directory-listing-ish website, there is always a limit to its success. Ryan, being a super smart founder, realizes that and moves out at the perfect time at its super-high hype cycle.
All PH-esque clones can focus on specific niches and become good lifestyle businesses. Like other business ideas, shred apart Craigslist and build PH of them.
What problem does PH solve/what problem would this solve?
Honestly PH always felt to me like a time waster. “Oh look at this idea. Neat. Next.”
Now, a website where I can type in the problem I am having and it suggests solutions (with a mix of self hosted vs commercial products depending on my settings) would be super useful. For example: “I want to organize a library full of old photos that don’t have metadata” or “I want a cheap online backup solution with support for Linux servers” or “I want to automate sending personalized-feeling birthday cards to people I know professionally”.
I would like a startups-which-are-not-shallow-llm-wrappers.com. Basically don't allow any product that you go to and shows you a chatbox 'type to create X'. It will be eaten tomorrow by openai, anthropic etc, so there is no product there; yet all is infested with these on sites like PH.
Glad to see someone working on an alternative!
Personal note - I used to be a pretty frequent user of ProductHunt. Some folks I worked with jokingly called me the SaaS King. If you had a problem, I knew of 3 tools to potentially solve it.
The biggest reason why I stopped using ProductHunt was because people opted to submit and upvote low quality "list of X" aggregation services and minor updates, not real products. Hopefully you've thought about how to refine the curation.
Also, agreed with the feedback from muhammadusman about having a product page. Right now, it's just a list of links with synopsis - not enough to intrigue me to explore further.
Product hunt clones should all launch on each other
ProductHunt has been gamed to the extent that it's no longer in any way real - it's just who can spam the most.
What will stop your site from the same fate?
How is the name supposed to be pronounced? It looks like the two English words hunt and lie which doesn't sound very nice.
I tried to post my side project (https://awesome.facts.dev/) but nothing happened when I clicked 'Submit'.
I see that a POST to https://huntlie.com/api/products returns Server Error 500 {error: "Failed to create record."}
I hope it helps!
Not gonna lie. It kinda feels like the site was generated by AI with minimal modifications. Hence, it made me wonder how long it will last.
There are so many product hunt alternatives that it's hard to keep track. There are literally services to go around and list you on all of the alternatives. I believe it's about 60+.
The problem with ProductHunt is that it's basically the glory days are behind it. If you want to have a successful ProductHunt launch the key is simple, wait until you're established and then send an email to all your customers to upvote you.
People focus so much on having a good ProductHunt launch like it'll make a difference. They go around begging everyone they know and spamming everyone they don't know asking for an upvote. They'll spend weeks focusing on this product hunt launch and overall get less traffic than they would from posting on here with Show HN and less traffic than they would get from posting on the right subreddits.
Product Hunt and similar launch sites are just focusing don't he false hope that new founders have that the launch matters.
The initial PH was more like the SHOW HN, turned into a website, filled with people who are geuninly buidlding things and showing things.
Then marketers came, and the whole thing became a place where people just game, where people that I were preparing for weeks for PH launch, sending reminders for people to vote and try to get to the top. It became a place where people wanted to sell you something rather than people who share what they build.
Looking at this website, I feel like it's already a place where it's more about selling, and not a PH alternative. Black Friday deals, promoted items, it may not be a place of gamification, but still it's more about selling.
I would love to se a place where there is old PH. But I guess it will forever be Show HN
Hi, I liked the idea. There are some issues, maybe these are in your todo list, but I want to tell you based on my usage.
1. there is no difference before and after login. (maybe login is unsuccessful) 2. I cannot edit/delete my submitted project. 3. No search for projects. 4. No Dark mode :)
There was a slightly similar product some days ago:
I don't want to be a debbie downer, but I'm seeing this sort of post often now on HN. If not bimonthly.
Congrats on launching! I just submitted https://www.freeats.com
I liked the submission flow, it was nice and simple. The only issue is that at the end of the process I got a page that looked like it was broken, so had to manually navigate to the main page.
Looks like the site is broken? The login feature doesn't work, and trying to post a product gives a 500 error.
{message: 'Request failed with status code 500', name: 'AxiosError', code: 'ERR_BAD_RESPONSE', config: {…}, request: XMLHttpRequest, …}
I tried to add a product (https://platformchecker.com), and initially, the process wasn't clear. The icon isn't marked as mandatory (it is) and the discount code is (it is not).
I received a 500 error when attempting to submit a product.
I also attempted to log in (with Google) and it doesn't seem to have taken. I still see the "Login" button at the top of the page.
I kind of regret giving you my data via Sign in with Google now.
When everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. Re: the black visit buttons. Save black for the top 3 featured, and make the rest a milder color. It's cognitively fatiguing to have a giant list of primary buttons.
I've added a product (SWIRL) it shows 0% off. :) How can I change that?
What we really need is one of these service directories that excludes commercial results. I don't care about what I can buy, I care about what I can do for free.
Congrats!
I tried submitting https://fdeploy.com but the product icon wouldn’t upload. Which file formats are supported?
I hope to see a catalogue for open source tools, so when I’m trying to accomplish something I can find a tool that can do that.
A well organized pegboard for OSS
Added an icon, and still it says:
> Product icon is required
This could use an RSS feed (Blogtrottr reported there isn't one). Looking forward to seeing how it develops!
500 error when attempting to add a product.
> "Failed to load the submitted data due to invalid formatting."
Switching between newest and featured brings me to the top of the late each time
That’s pretty annoying
Should just stay where the surfer is
I can't add a product, it asks me to add an icon despite the fact that I already uploaded one.
Tried to add a product but nothing happens when I submit.
Domain isn't the easiest to remember IMO.
Looks interesting!
Could I get a short pitch on what makes your alternative better/different?
Why?
0% off, use coupon "undefined"
:)
Great, just posted my product there PandaExtract
PH-Sites, are that the new ToDo-List-Examples?
Terrible name.
Hunt doesn’t mean anything. Huntly is bad. Huntlie is terrible. Forget about product hunt. Invent a new brand.
Let people submit for free but you choose when they get published. If they want to pick a date charge for that.
Login doesn’t work…
How to correct a post?
:-)
Is this a pisstake??
Just tried posting my site (which I was gonna launch on HN today anyway).
https://strawberry.army ("Hover Youtube Thumbnails for Instant Summaries")
...but got a 500 error. No other clues in the console.
Good luck with this!
hunt lies rebrand!
Are you going to launch it on PH?
Joking aside, I really think you need a unique angle and a solid distribution strategy: there are 1,000 PH clones but they don't stick because they're the same as PH, just with less users/traction/eyeballs.
Unrelated, but I am thinking about how do I get alpha users for an app I am building, and decided to check Product Hunt if they offer any sort of feature to help with that, and I ended up on this page https://www.producthunt.com/questions
Looks like someone is trying to pull a Forbes...
And I guess related to you, please don't do that :)
Don't use the term "hunt" in the name, to me it just screams "dupe" instead of something unique. Go the route of improving what PH has and adding things that are missing.
Some ideas: - Users should be able to update their post to some extent.
- There's no "product page" in your app, build something where I can see people commenting, reacting, and maybe even sharing their own screenshots of it because that's something PH does pretty well but can be improved.
- "LAUNCHES WORTH YOUR SCROLL" sounds kinda cringe, change to something like "Find the next best thing" or make it random on load and have a few less in your face versions of it. Reddit has "homepage of the internet" which seems appropriate. You can have "have you launched yet?", "find the next best thing", "what's trending today"...etc
I have more ideas, feel free to message me or drop a way to contact you if you'd like more feedback :)