gm legends. It’s Sunday.

This week: our quarterly report on what’s getting built, launched, and discovered on Product Hunt; four new writing tools; three launches with actual ducks; and why you might be playing it too safe with your landing pages. 

We’re safe to read, legend. Dig into this newsletter.

P.S. Launching soon? We’d love to hear about it → editorial@producthunt.co 🫶

We’ve just published our first Product Hunt quarterly report, and it’s packed with data about which products are finding an audience, where new audiences are popping up, and where opportunities might be developing.

Want to know which categories get the most upvotes? How about the types of products that are attracting new builders? Or maybe you’re looking for some under-the-radar categories you could launch in?

It’s all there.

 

Hugh Howey, the author of the immensely popular Silo series, was tired of all the distractions—not just from the outside world, but from his own word processor. So, like any normal bestselling author, he built his own. Neo, which hit #5 on Saturday’s leaderboard, is minimalist, runs locally, and converts your draft into manuscript format for you. All you have to do is write.

Since writing is one of the hardest skills to master (or was, until Claude and ChatGPT just did it all for us), we looked at some other recent writing assistant launches:

• For managing references: EssayKraft promises a “distraction-free writing experience designed specifically for academic work.” It handles citations so you don’t get bogged down in formatting and reference checks.

• For professional writers: Epilogue is a free platform for planning, writing, and managing drafts of books, stories, and poems.

• For interactive stories: Forgeon is a tool for authors to create stories that aren’t read-only. It allows them to add RPG mechanics, illustrations, music, and other interactive elements to their works, then publish.

 

by SpinProduct

My landing page names six different kinds of customer. Six cards, each with its own headline and its own reason this is for you. The thing behind them does exactly one job, and it does it identically no matter which of the six you happen to be.

I wrote the six on purpose. The logic was that a stranger scrolling wants to see themselves on the page, and one generic line does that for nobody. Recognition is cheap to add and it feels like it ought to help.

I've started to think the six cards are doing the opposite. A page that speaks to six people can read like it was written for none of them, and the more specific each card gets, the more obvious it is that nothing underneath changes when you pick one.

Three moves I've looked at and not made:

• Cut to one audience. Cleanest read, sharpest page — but I'd be turning away people who might be the best fit, and I don't have the data to know which one to keep.

• Keep six and branch the product. Honest, and expensive. Weeks of work to build six paths that are mostly the same path.

• Keep six and stop implying they're different. Say plainly that it's one tool and here are six things people do with it. Least impressive version, probably the most accurate one.

What I can't measure is which of the six the people who do arrive actually are. Nothing in the flow asks, and I'm not putting a question in front of someone who hasn't seen the thing work yet.

So: when your page names more audiences than your product distinguishes between, is that positioning, or is it a way of not deciding?

 

This week, AI Company Hugging Face was bought by Nvidia for nearly $13 billion. Its first order of business was to do something just for ducks: It released Microduck, a 25-cm bipedal robot you can train.

Believe it or not, several “duck” projects launched this week on Product Hunt. Here they are, plus one that eats those alive:

• Plask: “I made my Apple Watch's depth sensor do something deeply unserious. Apple ships a serious dive instrument in the Ultra and Series 10+ - and most owners never use it once. Plask points it at the bathtub: pixel-art rubber ducks swim on your wrist, and because the depth data is real, they dive when you do.” - Danni Efraim

• The Million Sad Ducks: “I made a world with a million sad ducks in it and you can make one permanently happy for a dollar. It comes with a Certificate of Duck Happiness that is, I think, the best part — a full A4 landscape document with seals, laurels, three fictional signatories and a Department of Avian Emotional Welfare. Yes, it's the Million Dollar Homepage with ducks.” - Bogdan Nechifor

• SnakeRank: “Last week I watched a pay-to-rank leaderboard do $200k in seven days, then watched 300 clones of it show up. Every one of them was the same thing: a list, sorted by price. That felt like a waste of a good idea. A board where money pushes you up and down is already a game — it just wasn't being drawn like one. So SnakeRank draws it as one. The board is a Nokia-style Snake that plays itself. #1 is the head. Every startup below it is a segment of the body. When someone outbids you, you get pushed back down the snake, and you can watch it happen.” - Aryan Agrawal