Product Hunt CEO defends decision to hand-pick only 10 products to be on the Product Hunt Homepage for the whole day, effectively reducing visibility for non-featured products on the site by >90%.
Rajiv Ayyangar, the CEO, claims that "no one wants to sift through 200 products per day" ... "it would be impossible for a good product to rise on its own merits", but users say this has effectively made it impossible for good products that aren't one of the ten selected by his team, to rise on their own merits - and undermines the whole system of voting.
The criteria for 'featured' selection remains vague, and the community is letting Product Hunt's CEO know how it feels on Twitter. His response to those who his team did not select to be featured, Ayyangar suggests: "Build better products."
What do you think of a solution where it's headless (i.e bring your own charts / components) but with a no-code builder that gives you the benefits of an off-the-shelf tool to manage and update easily? (that's what we're building at embeddable.com)
Building free tools alone is not a viable LT strategy, you need to market any tool (even the free ones) to get traction and usage. If you rely on SEO, you need to clearly demonstrate to Google that this is the best page for a search query (or set of) -- this is't very obvious to google if the value is not textual so this needs to be worked on to complement it (then you need backlinks too... the marathon begins).
I would question whether the 'ad-free' element of the strategy is potentially only a very small and ultimately insignificant weight in the perceived value of your tool vs others and might not be as impactful as you'd think -- if you deliver enough value for people not to care about having to ignore ads (which ppl are very, very good at these days) then they will confidently ignore the ads and find the value (e.g. academic referencing tools, wetransfer, {filetype}-to-{filetype} convertors)
Embeddable, a headless SaaS tool for building fully-custom analytics with full code control, wins 2024 Data Breakthrough Award as Embedded Analytics tool of the year 2024.
Rajiv Ayyangar, the CEO, claims that "no one wants to sift through 200 products per day" ... "it would be impossible for a good product to rise on its own merits", but users say this has effectively made it impossible for good products that aren't one of the ten selected by his team, to rise on their own merits - and undermines the whole system of voting.
The criteria for 'featured' selection remains vague, and the community is letting Product Hunt's CEO know how it feels on Twitter. His response to those who his team did not select to be featured, Ayyangar suggests: "Build better products."