ProductHunt vs. HackerNews

Justin Hunter
6 replies
This is obviously a bit of a meta topic seeing as how we're on ProductHunt now, but I'm curious if others have had the same experience as I saw with SimpleID [https://www.simpleid.xyz]. We launched on PH three weeks ago and we *still* get decent traffic every day from that launch. However, we've now tried to launch on HackerNews twice with very little traffic coming on launch day and zero traffic after launch day. I had one product get a ton of traction on HackerNews last year, but that seemed very much like a fluke. So all this really to say, I feel like there is no strategy to posting on either site that truly works, but ProductHunt just has a better community and better discovery. Thoughts?

Replies

Tony Chen
I like how PH's website is structured around products and people. It makes it easy to search for products that launch a while ago and see the progress. Whereas HN is structured around the news. The Show HN's are great, but they're mixed in with news articles of the day. Because of that, I rarely read HN articles over a day old.
Prabhaav
@chatjsio also show hn feels like a lottery most of the time, which is disheartening given the effort that goes in to launching.
Max Spitsyn
I'm rather theorizing, so take that with a grain of salt, but to me HN is about problem solving as a process, and PH is about product ideas as a result. Yet to test this theory though.
flo merian
> HN is about problem-solving as a process, and PH is about product ideas as a result. @max_spitsyn love this definition
Justin Hunter
@max_spitsyn Interesting. I like that theory a lot, though.