I love Product Hunt, but the new redesign is confusing. And based on the feedback I heard from other community members, many people don't get the new concept with 'products/hubs', 'launch pages', 'follows', etc.
A few weeks ago, we launched Narrative BI for Google Ads
https://www.producthunt.com/post.... While the launch was warmly accepted by the community (#8-day rank), we had serious challenges caused by a recent Product Hunt redesign. Moreover, we couldn't take advantage of the new functionality due to some design issues, which I outline below.
1) We were forced to create a new product even though we already had two launches of the same product.
Our product Narrative BI lets you quickly connect your marketing data sources and get automated insights and alerts out of your data. We put a lot of effort into every integration and launch every integration separately
It would be logical to have a single product, "Narrative BI" and create a separate launch for each integration. But we can't.
Based on our previous launches, PH created a 'Narrative BI for GA' product with 2 launches: UA and GA4. But 'Narrative BI for GA' is an integration (launch:
https://www.producthunt.com/prod...), not a product!
The only option for us now is to create a new 'product' for each subsequent integration.
So, we launched a new 'product': "Narrative BI for Google Ads", and our current structure looks like this:
π Product1: Narrative BI for GA
βπ - Launch1: Narrative BI for GA
βπ - Launch2: Narrative BI for GA4
π Product2: Narrative BI for Google Ads
βπ - Launch1: Narrative BI for Google Ads
But it should be:
π Product1: Narrative BI
βπ - Launch1: Narrative BI for GA
βπ - Launch2: Narrative BI for GA4
βπ - Launch3: Narrative BI for Google Ads
βπ - Launch4: our next integration
βπ - Launch5: ...
2) Another problem is that people don't understand the difference between 'follow' and 'upvote'
I don't understand it too. Since we have to create a separate product for each launch, there is no point in product followers.
Because of this confusion, we had ~80 more followers than upvotes on the launch day. All from people who were genuinely interested in our launch but didn't know the difference between an upvote and follow.
The easiest solution would be to allow makers to manage the structure of the products and launches. In our case, it would be logical to create a separate Product Hub and move all launches there.
I think Product Hunt is still one of the best places to launch your startup and get initial traction, but I heard similar feedback from other makers, so I hope the PH team will hear this feedback. Let me know if this resonates with your experience!