Ivan Semenov

Ivan Semenov

Causo: AI Co-Founder who handles sales
28 points

About

Former VC (7 years) turned builder. Ex-consultant. Once ran restaurants. Now I spend my time building, testing, and shipping products (and sometimes breaking them).

Badges

Tastemaker
Tastemaker
Gone streaking 10
Gone streaking 10
Gone streaking
Gone streaking
Gone streaking 5
Gone streaking 5

Maker History

Forums

Has Product Hunt become startups talking to themselves?

We launched Visibility by Causo last week to learn how Product Hunt actually works.
What we found was interesting and worth sharing.

Our results:

  • 21st place

  • 24 points

  • 53 followers

  • 13 comments

  • 13 waitlist sign-ups

  • ~60 real product uses

  • 360+ total launches that day

Not terrible, but it didn t feel like traction.

Learnings from our launch - is PH now more about a reputation leaderboard than real feedback?

Here s what we learned from launching our AI visibility checker on Product Hunt (it audits how well ChatGPT, Claude, and other LLMs understand your business).

  • Ranked #21

  • Gained 53 followers, 40 people upvoted

  • Decent waitlist signups for our upcoming full product (https://causo.ai/)

  • The real lesson: it s about who you can rally, not what you built.

New accounts don t count. You need people with active, aged accounts. We had about 40 people upvote, but only verified accounts mattered for ranking. Our friends and supporters who previously didn't have a PH account but legitimately wanted to support us didn't count.

Only top 14 products get real visibility. The mobile app literally only shows the top 14. Everyone else is invisible to most users. Organic discovery below that is basically nonexistent.

Just launched our free AI visibility checker - see what LLMs understand about your business

Hey Hunters,

Excited to launch or AI Visibility Checker on PH today!
Visibility used to mean SEO and backlinks. Now it means how AI systems understand your company. Our free tool runs a structured audit through OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and Perplexity to show:
-What each model knows about your startup
-Where gaps exist
-How to fix them
We spun it off as a free tool out of Causo - our upcoming AI co-founder for sales, purpose built for AI native founders. It runs on the same enrichment logic that we're incorporating into our product.
Give it a spin here - excited to hear your feedback! https://visibility.causo.ai/

View more