How Product Hunt works
Getting started with your launch starts with understanding the basics. If you’re a long-time Product Hunt user, you might find this bit too basic. Feel free to skip ahead to the next section on preparing for launch, but it’s also not a bad idea to make sure there’s nothing in here that surprises you. Let’s do this.
This article covers:
Who is Product Hunt for?Why should I launch on Product Hunt?What should I launch on Product Hunt?How products get noticedProduct Hunt is freeNo company accounts
Who is Product Hunt for?
Anyone can use Product Hunt! Our community is made up of early adopters, makers, tech people, entrepreneurs, investors, and those who just love trying new products. We’re here to help surface amazing new things that other people can use. Product Hunt is a place where you can introduce a product you’ve had a hand in creating, whether you…
fly solo or are part of a big team,
are a developer or a marketer,
work for a big tech company or for yourself…
And so on; everything and in between.
At Product Hunt, a maker is anyone who uses technology to solve their problems, and we encourage makers to share what they’ve built. If you just love to discover new products, Product Hunt is for you, too (yayy). Read our tips for using Product Hunt.
Why should I launch on Product Hunt?
Product Hunt has been supporting makers with a platform to share their products since 2013 (thanks, Ryan Hoover). One of the main reasons people launch their products here is distribution. The platform you’re looking at right now gives makers access to a huge, global community of tech people and early adopters. They make amazing first users who give poignant feedback. Many companies (like Loom, Lattice, Zoom, and Figma) have used the feedback they received on launch day to make their products better.
The most common reasons people launch on Product Hunt are to:
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Reach an audience of highly-engaged product lovers.
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Get feedback that improves products.
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Validate that the idea for a product is a good one/find product-market fit.
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Collect social proof in the form of reviews and testimonials.
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Find customers from people who land on Product Hunt searching for new products
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Find funding (venture capitalists and the tech press use Product Hunt to find buzz about the next big thing).
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Hire/find a co-founder or other top talent.
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Keep up with competitors who are also launching on the platform.
What should I launch on Product Hunt?
Product Hunt is a platform for amplifying new products that are interesting to our community. They can be anything from mobile apps to innovative showerheads. But if this was an “anything goes” environment, we’d end up with potatoes clogging up the homepage page instead of providing awesome products to our community. Here are our guidelines for determining whether or not a product is a good fit:
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The product is new. We love TikTok too…but if it’s already in the hands of most of our community, it's probably not a good fit.
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Or the product has substantive updates since its last launch. While TikTok 1.0 may not be it, a new app, major feature launch, or extension from makers at TikTok would be interesting to the community.
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The product is a product. Blog posts, lists, or plain text documents — as high-quality as some might be — dilute the homepage.
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The product is usable. Or it will be usable soon with a trustworthy timeline in place. Closed beta launches are usually not a good fit if it means our community can’t participate. For crowdfunded projects like those on Kickstarter, this means the project was funded and will be available soon.
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The maker is trustworthy. If the maker of the product was found to be spamming their audiences or paying for upvotes, the product will be removed. Spammers will also be permanently removed from the site.
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The product appears to be high-quality and interesting to our community. Also, if the product’s website is unclear or broken, and/or the maker left little information about how the product works, we may have to take precaution on launch day in case the product is unclear or unsafe to use.
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The product provides unique value. For info products (such as newsletters, eBooks, or reports), the content should contain information or expertise that is otherwise not readily available through a Google search or Twitter. The cadence of the content promised should be defined and demonstrate consistency. Content that can be completed in just a few hours is not often high-quality enough, or doesn’t have enough volume, to meet guidelines.
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The product is innovative and useful. Products of mass consumption (e.g. T-shirts, VPNs) should demonstrate uniqueness and exceptional usefulness through things like content, sales, press, or research.
Our guidelines reflect many years of evaluating product submissions and reviewing feedback from the community about what they’d like to see on the homepage. This is not a list of hard and fast rules — guidelines have adjusted as tech and interests of the community have evolved, and it’s very possible we’ll have to update them in the future. If they do, we’ll make sure to let you know.
Also note our terms and conditions specify that products or posts that are threatening, violent, abusive, directly/indirectly attacking individuals/groups, or containing spam will be removed. If you see anything that is concerning, please send us a message through the chat and let us know.
How products get noticed
Product Hunt is first and foremost a community. People come here to share, discover, and discuss the newest products, many of which are driven by tech.
Adding products
Products can be added to the platform by absolutely anybody with a free Product Hunt account. The person who submits the product is the "hunter" of that product. In most cases, products are self-hunted by their own creators or founders when they’re ready to launch or share their product with the community. Learn more about the role of the hunter here.
Homepage leaderboard
The Product Hunt homepage displays a list of submitted products, with featured products as the default (you can see all products by toggling to “All”). The homepage leaderboard changes throughout the day based on the number of upvotes, comments, time since submission, and other factors. We can't give the exact details of how our algorithm works because doing so would make it easier to be gamed. The most important takeaway here is that we want the homepage to remain an authentic place for makers to launch and discover products.