Post to people who will value your idea and give you valuable feedback.
Just trying to get "traffic" is a wasteful and distracting vanity metric. The feedback you get from such traffic will take you further away from building something that really connects with the right audience.
(In the case of the list itself, it is worth posting it to those sites, as the audience at those sites is the target audience for the list itself. Which makes it hard to point out why the list is misguided.)
If you are building a consumer app your base unit is attention. You need to post to these sites in order to even find that “right audience” - so long as you’re not just trying to get people to sign-up for a non-existing product, this is the way.
Yes it’s fun to give people the “just give it to 5 people who really like it, and make sure you keep in touch” advice - but the truth is that for most good devs, their product dies because of exactly this mentality.
You need to learn to push your product as a creator, otherwise you will just straight fail, even if it’s a good product.
This is simply the easiest path to getting initial users to seed the feedback mechanisms that drive feature development.
Do not take the above advice - post your product to every high traffic place you can get your hands on. The users you don’t care about won’t stay, the ones that you do care about will give you information through the channels you hopefully have set up beforehand (i.e. Intercom, Segment, email, phone, Logrocket, Sentry, Datadog).
It’s up to you to then parse out which users are responsive, and if they come from some specific subreddit, you target that. If they come from a specific city, target that. You won’t ever get the data to make the decision of what niche group to target unless you post it to some high traffic source, or you are somehow extremely intimate with one of those groups already, which is often not the case.
So long as you don't confuse users of those sites with potential customers, and you post on these sites understanding that those people will never buy your product even if thousands of them look at what you've made and say they love it, it can still be useful. People often point out accessibility and usability problems, and more general issues like spelling mistakes.
Even if the feedback from people themselves isn't helpful, installing something like Sentry or Rollbar before you post to one of these sites can give you a ton of "real world" data about whether your app actually works.
While I completely agree, for some teams a successful Product Hunt launch can many positive follow on effects, and as unfortunate as it is the PH system works on upvotes at its core. There's nothing better than engaging with the communities that your future users are a part of, but this list is not for product development and UX, purely for helping make a splash on launch day.
Here is a list that I made for my own Product Hunt launch in December for www.sizle.io after going through a lot of the old lists that exist online and finding the most up to date ones. There is probably a much better way to format this but hopefully it helps! If anyone has any suggestions to improve the list that would be great :)
Thanks for posting this. I'm getting close to needing this for a new offering I'm building and have collected a few in my own notes. This is much more comprehensive than what I would have gotten on my own.
A few months ago i painstakingly submitted a product of mine to many places listed here. It was 100% ignored while many sites asked me to pay a price so they can post about my site. The general modus operandi is to claim "we get lots of submissions. We can move you up the queue list if you pay $$$."
I agree these sites need the revenue. Just don't claim to be torch bearers for the startup community. Be upfront like ProductHunt which says pay us to get promoted. No harm in that.
However, duplicate submissions are starting to become shadowbanned (if the intent is to manipulate SERP), while having your site link on spammy sites is simply a downrank in relevant metrics.
The other corollary is that these sites will likely not have substantial enough metrics -- owing to the amount of outlinks they have to all sorts of low-ranked content -- and so posting your site on them for purely SEO purposes is misguided.
^ This. These links/directories are best used as a 'set and forget for a while' tool so help drive organic traffic over time, definitely not a silver bullet.
The opportunity cost would be better targeted and more thoughtful posts in verticals, "startup" is kinda a demographic but it's not always a great target market.
Isn’t the goal of lists like these to make it so you can easily submit to all or a subset of them when you launch a product? Automating that process to save time does not make it spamming.
Automating it basically ensures that you don't adjust your submission for tha audience or consider if it is appropriate for the site. That makes it spamming. You can be working manually and spamming too, but automation "helps".
That’s not true. You could require a list of say 50 parameters, and then it determines what needs to be sent to each site and in which format, adjusting for each site.
Yes. Yes it is.
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(Or maybe it’s not. Or something in between.)
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Ok wait... isn’t Indeed for jobs and MLS for real estate and other aggregators “spamming” also?
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Ideally there would just be metadata about a project and one button you press to deploy and each side would be responsible for curating what they listen to.
Post to people who will value your idea and give you valuable feedback.
Just trying to get "traffic" is a wasteful and distracting vanity metric. The feedback you get from such traffic will take you further away from building something that really connects with the right audience.
(In the case of the list itself, it is worth posting it to those sites, as the audience at those sites is the target audience for the list itself. Which makes it hard to point out why the list is misguided.)