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No, no no. 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. T

by LeonB 7y ago

No, no no. 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.)

jeremysizle 7y ago
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.
onion2k 7y ago
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.
winrid 7y ago
Sure, but getting others to write about your project is a huge milestone.
armatav 7y ago
This is 100% false information. 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.

by LeonB 7y ago

jeremysizle 7y ago

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.

onion2k 7y ago

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.

winrid 7y ago

Sure, but getting others to write about your project is a huge milestone.

armatav 7y ago

This is 100% false information. 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.