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 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.

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.

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...

Promoting your own products doesn't really make it far though does it?

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.

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! ;)

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

How would you handle the situation that if this is successful, you’ll get massively more than 10 candidates each day?

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

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

I think the only product that you could really launch on Product Hunt is a Product Hunt clone.

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.

Looks great! Hope to see more submissions to HN from this site! Congrats on the launch!

What if you're an author and the products you launch are short stories. Can I participate?

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

Great idea and execution. Agree with all the points you've made about Product Hunt.

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.

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.

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

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?

Congrats! I love the idea!