Does Shoutouts influence your tool selection process?
The shoutouts on Product Hunt allow makers to list the tools that they used to make their launch possible, and the Top Product tags make use of this information, together with reviews. At some point I caught myself using this as a way to choose a database or hosting provider, and I am not sure that this is a good thing.
The positive aspect is obvious: a tool that is frequently mentioned by working makers has probably been through a lot of deadlines. Knowing what builders are listing Supabase or Vercel gives me more insight than reading the feature list ever could.
At the same time, a shoutout means the moment of the builder, not of mine. The person that found a tool useful for a weekend project might never have to deal with it going through fifty thousand rows or migration. Praise comes mostly at the time of launch.
A tiny bit of advice: include an extra line for each shoutout with information about how long that person has been using that tool and at what scale. Six months, small SaaS, no regrets would be enough already. Do you usually check the shoutouts before using some tool, and what could make them more helpful for you?
Replies
I look at them, but the signal I trust more is the opposite one: which tool someone moved away from, and when. A shoutout is written on launch day, a migration is written after months of real use. I switched my transactional mail provider once already, and that switch says more about both services than any launch day praise could. So my wish for shoutouts would be a "replaced" line next to "used": used X, replaced Y after six months. That one line would carry the scale and the time you are asking for, without anyone having to write a review.