Announcing product categories

Over the last 10 years (🤯), Product Hunt has grown from a newsletter into a large and complex directory of products. Many moons ago, we introduced topics as a way to organize our growing catalog. Unfortunately, over time, they’ve gotten less useful. There are some interesting and useful topics, but there’s also many of varying specificity and clarity like “baseball”, “physics”, “DJ Khaled”, and “Work in Progress”.

While many people in our community are interested in what’s new (aka, the homepage), there’s an equally large use-case for finding a cool product to solve a particular use-case, whether that’s a new link-in-bio tool, AI avatar generator, or investing app. Because topics don’t have a clear ruleset or taxonomy, they aren’t a great way to explore Product Hunt or find products that solve specific problems.

Today, we’re adding categories to the mix.

Categories are a new taxonomy for Product Hunt that is focused on what your product does. Superhuman is an email client. Zoom is video conferencing software. Later is a link-in-bio and social media management tool.

Categories are what your product is or what problem it solves. (AKA, not AI)

Topics might include general industries, specific features, technologies, or keywords (like AI).

At the moment, categories are meant to supplement topics. Topics will still exist, although you can think of them more as ‘additional flavor’ than a primary taxonomy.

Like any new feature, there are kinks to work out. We’ll be adding additional categories, and changing the taxonomy around a bit as we learn from you.

While we got started on categorizing existing products internally, there are plenty we haven’t got to yet, and there are plenty of products that have launched over the years that simply defy any normal categorization structure (that’s ok).

You can edit the category of your products by editing your product pages (read more about this in our help article). Not everything will fit perfectly in one of our initial categories – let us know if you think there’s a bucket of products that we’re missing.

Please send us any feedback, categories we’re missing, or suggestions around taxonomy.