@victoria_wu https://www.producthunt.com/p/trickle-3

2. Yes, we have plans to make them consistent!

@rajiv_ayyangar Wow! Thank you so much! That would be great! Looking forward it!

@matthew_gordon discoverability of products has changed over the last 10 years. I think it's mainly about the launch, backlinks and badges.

@taniabell Isn't it supposed to be 'The place to find your new favorite product' not the place to get a high DR-backlink (at least until the Google algorithm gets updated)? or an increasingly meaningless badge?

I think Product Hunt can solve this but it takes a combination of very careful Hacker News style modding and community outreach.

@matthew_gordon Hey, I haven’t been on Product Hunt for that long, so it’s really interesting to hear that it used to be easier for unknown but genuinely good products to become Product of the Day.

I launched about two weeks ago with no community and only a handful of followers from being active in the forum and commenting on other launches. Ended up at #6, which I honestly didn’t expect. But looking at the top spots, they were all taken by companies that had either launched multiple times before or already had a strong community backing them, which made it really hard to compete.

I get why people now feel like PH is more about leveraging existing audiences than discovering hidden gems, but I’m curious, if you could change something about how launches work today, what would it be?

@hussein_r Congrats on your launch! That's great. I think better curation and moderation and building a makers community on site would be a good start. Maybe be a bit more opinionated about what makes it to the frontpage. More hackathons and festivals.

@matthew_gordon Thanks! I totally agree, better curation and a stronger on-site maker community would definitely help. Right now, a lot of visibility comes from external reach rather than discovery within PH itself.

I love the idea of hackathons and festivals to bring makers together and surface more original projects. Maybe even themed launch days where indie makers get more of a spotlight?

Do you think more active moderation (like PH being more selective about what gets featured) would make things feel more gatekept?

@rajiv_ayyangar what do you mean by 'go big'?

@nico_jeannen we feature products that we believe our community should know about. Put another way, when I see a launch on Product Hunt, I want to feel that I'm, somehow, better for knowing about it. Sometimes the reason we featured something isn't always apparent from the launch description itself - for example, when there's an unusual level of craft, or something distinct in the approach. That said, if you look closely, each product that we feature has a reason.

Do we get it right 100%? No - but we (mainly @gabe ) do our best. We've made an effort to describe our guidelines, but I'm not sure I can make it clearer than that: https://help.producthunt.com/en/articles/9883485-product-hunt-featuring-guidelines

One thing I'll say: expect our bar to rise, not lower. There are more talented makers than ever before, and AI is enabling even more people to make software. The bar for compelling apps is rising, and our standards need to rise with it.

If you're making software, take this as a challenge to make something distinctive, that solves an unsolved problem, or solves a problem in a new way.

@busmark_w_nika It's been tough to balance improving what's here with building the next phase of PH. I see the potential to build something that - I know this seems audacious - makes the current product hunt appear almost like a footnote (helping everyone figure out what product to use), but also as a long-time Product Hunter, I have lots I want to improve about the leaderboard and experience of launching.

@busmark_w_nika What's been amazing is to have a team of people - some new, some Product Hunt veterans, who are thought-partners in creating that future, while being grounded in our strengths.

@chrismessina 
1. Make product forums awesome
2. Make the leaderboard even more vibrant and high-signal
3. New revenue model: Start making money in a way that's more aligned with connecting makers and customers. To be clear, I like our ad model - our advertisers are awesome (they're some of the biggest success stories on Product Hunt, like Notion, Deepgram, Intercom...) but I think there's a compelling direction to explore that's more like affiliate revenue.

@abod_rehman there are many directions it could go, but right now it's quite simple: I love talking about and thinking about cool products, and I've met many good friends through jamming on products - I want to create the best place on the internet for that.

@marc__milberg 2) build something people want and describe it / showcase it in a clear, compelling way. I like to think of “promise-market fit” as a piece of “product market fit” - you need to make a clear and novel promise to users, that your product then needs to fulfill. Product Hunt is, at its core, a test of promise-market fit. Do people want this?

1) YC was critical for us. Above all we learned what speed looks like - it’s not about writing more code or building more features. It’s about how quickly you identify, and answer the most important questions in a startup.

A key moment for us was when @gustaf pushed us to launch on Product Hunt well before we felt ready. “You need to find out whether people want this more than you need to know whether you can build it.”

There were numerous other lessons we learned from YC, and many lifelong friends. But overall I think my takeaway was: speed. Also: launch sooner!

@alexiscollado probably something in collaboration. I love working on tools for builders (part of why I love product hunt). I also really love working on things that bring people together. Plus it's super fun to build something that makes your team faster as you improve it!

@corgicabal 1. I use AI search more and more. Maybe 2/3 AI 1/3 google.

2. I haven't noticed these changes because I'm there less.
3. UGC is going to become most of what's interesting on the internet! When I do use Google, I've found myself going to reddit (and now product hunt forums) more and more!

@zeeb0t what was your latest launch and the copy-cat? Hard to give context without specifics.

@rajiv_ayyangar I’ve attempted to launch my product three times on ProductHunt, each time with new features. My product uses AI to power web scraping.

Launch history:

1. August 13, 2024 – https://www.producthunt.com/products/instantapi-ai#instantapi-ai

2. November 22, 2024 – A free version of the above

3. January 28, 2025 – A no-code version as a Chrome extension (https://www.producthunt.com/products/instantapi-ai#ai-web-scraper)

If you look at the content of my launches, you’ll see I automated data extraction for web scraping, then put in significant effort to make it accessible for non-coders. Yet none of these were ever featured.

I noticed there were a few products using AI for scraping at the time—some before, some after. I initially assumed PH might be tired of the topic. Then I saw a YC-backed team (Firecrawl) launch a similar approach. Their product got 2nd of the day on January 20th, 2025. They adopted key ideas I’d published months earlier, and I’d been working on this concept since early 2024. That makes me think PH isn’t actually uninterested in AI web scraping—there might be another reason mine hasn’t been featured.

Here is their launch: https://www.producthunt.com/products/extract-by-firecrawl#extract-by-firecrawl

I admit my first two launches weren’t perfect, which is why I put so much effort into the no-code extension. When Firecrawl’s approach (very similar to my own) was featured, I hoped my new version would finally get attention. Still, it was ignored, even after I reached out to ProductHunt support for feedback and followed best practices and guides.

So I’m left wondering: why did a later, YC-backed product get featured for an idea I’d released on PH months prior, while none of my launches—original, free, and no-code—ever got featured?

@rajiv_ayyangar I can't see your reply, even though my notifications say you left one. In your reply, you said and I quote:

Maybe a question to ask for the future: What's broken about the existing solutions - including Firecrawl?

This is incredibly tone-deaf. I pointed out to you, quite clearly and with receipts, that my concept was not only ignored by PH not once, but 3 times, but some months later, may have inspired a YC-backed company to adopt the approach, and THEN your team decided to support it.

Would it have anything to do with the financial backing, Mr Ayyanger?

Finally, I'd just like to point out - that me replying to you here has actually generated traffic to my site from PH users, more-so than my silenced PH launches itself. So, to claim the product offering was not clear enough is clearly misaligned with your userbase.

And that seems it, really. IMO PH is no longer aligned with a bootstrapped-maker community. Rather than defend these actions and gaslight me into suggestion I should check what's broken about Firecrawl when it was I who pioneered this approach, maybe you should check what's broken about ProductHunt.