How do you use Product Hunt to make people aware of your product? (Less-known approach)

One number to add: 8 followers to 73 in just over two weeks, with no launch and mostly without naming what I build. All of it came from commenting on other people's launches with something specific, usually a hole I found while poking at the product. A few of those makers changed their roadmap off a comment, then followed the profile.

So the awareness landed on me rather than on a product. It still pays. Whoever clicks through finds what I am building at the top of the profile. The comment history turns out to be a landing page nobody designs on purpose.

Jernej's ordering point is the one worth keeping. Comment on other people's launches for weeks before you post your own, a thread from a nobody account reads like a diary.

The one on your list that compounds is 5. The rest are broadcasts. Useful, but they reset every time. What almost nobody does with 5 is go back. Answering someone's problem once is a transaction. Turning up in their thread a second time a week later, remembering what they were stuck on, is when they learn your name. I would push on the badge though. A badge is proof for people who already found you. It closes, it does not open. Which of these actually brought you a user you can name?

One mechanic worth adding, because it changes which item on your list actually compounds.

Buried in the notification settings: commenting in the forums makes you follow the product and the author of that thread. Not the other way round. So the notifiable audience accrues to whoever wrote the thread, not to the person leaving the good comment.

Which splits your list in two. Commenting on other people's discussions is how you get known, and it's genuinely the better first move. Starting your own is what builds a list you can actually notify later.

The honest caveat, and I'm mid-launch today so I've just watched this happen: starting threads only works once people already know who you are. Mine sat there with barely a view for days. The order seems to matter more than either tactic on its own, which is roughly the sequence you described anyway, just with a different reason underneath it.

Everything here is about getting attention to the page. I would add the unglamorous other half: check that the page can actually receive it.

I have a launch scheduled, and instead of adding another channel this week I walked my own funnel as if I were a stranger. I found four leaks I would otherwise have driven traffic straight into:

1. The launch pointed at my homepage instead of the product page, so every visitor had to go hunting for the thing they clicked for.
2. The hero said one price. The buy button 400px below it said a different one. Both had been live for weeks.
3. My structured data still advertised a product that could no longer be bought, so Google and AI assistants were quoting a dead offer.
4. The site defaulted to my own language, while the launch audience reads English.

None of that is a marketing problem, and none of it appears on any launch checklist. It just quietly halves whatever the channel delivers, and then you blame the channel.

So the step I would add to your list, right before launch day: walk your own funnel as a stranger. Click your own launch link, land where they land, and try to give yourself money. It takes twenty minutes and it was the highest-return thing I did all week.

Three people in this thread now report the same shape, own threads near zero and comments doing real numbers, and all of us put it down to audience. I think that is only half of it. The other half is invisible unless you go looking for it.

I submitted two threads on the same day. Different forums, opposite content profiles. One had no links in it at all, one was an invitational post with three. Both came back rejected with the same generic pointer to the forum guidelines and no specific reason given. The second rejection landed about a minute after I submitted, which is fast enough that no human read it.

The part that matters for your numbers is this. A rejected thread still resolves at its URL and renders completely normally. It looks published. It simply never enters the feed, so it sits at one or two views forever. If you did not think to check your notifications you would conclude the writing was ignored, when it was actually filtered before anyone got the chance to ignore it.

So before concluding that threads do not land because you lack a following, check notifications for a rejection notice. These are two different problems with different fixes. One is solved by building an audience. The other is not solved by writing better, and I spent two rewrites learning that.

Nika, your threads consistently go live and you carry the verified badge, so I suspect that is closer to the real variable than follower count. Did thread approval change for you once you were verified, or were they going live before that?

One constraint on the ongoing channel idea that nobody seems to write down: on a young account, threads and comments are not equally available to you.

I submitted two threads on the same day. One in p/general with zero links and no product mentioned, one in p/self-promotion with links. Different forums, opposite content profiles, both rejected with the same generic pointer to the guidelines and no specific reason. The second rejection came back inside about a minute, which is a filter, not a person reading it. My comments on other people's threads have never had a problem.

So I stopped rewriting the copy, because the copy was not the variable. The gate is account trust on thread creation, and comments are how you build the history it measures.

Worth knowing because the usual advice is to post threads consistently, and if you do that from a new account you can burn a week of rewrites learning that your posts were never going to enter the feed. Also worth knowing that a rejected thread still loads fine at its URL. The only place the rejection shows up is your notifications, so a live link is not proof it worked.

@busmark_w_nika I'm around more than I was, and it's the launch that did it, though not in the way I expected. Two people picked the product apart in that thread properly, and this week I shipped what they said. Now I keep going back to see what someone has spotted next.

Which is Neeraj's point above, really. The ranking went stale in about a day. The two strangers who read it closely enough to find what was wrong are still worth something a week later, and they'll be there for the next one.

Manish, your instinct is right but I'd sharpen one word in it, because I spent two weeks learning this the slow way.

It isn't consistency. I commented every day for a fortnight and my follower count went from 1 to 1. Not slow growth, none. Then launch day moved it 1 to 26 in about four hours.

The variable isn't how often you show up, it's whose audience you're standing in when you do. A comment in someone else's thread that's already moving gets 12 to 35 views. A thread I write myself gets 1 or 2. Two other people in this community ran that comparison separately and got the same shape, which is enough for me to stop calling it a fluke.

So keep doing exactly what you described, just don't spread it evenly. Find the threads with actual traffic and say something worth reading there, rather than posting daily into rooms with nobody in them. Consistency is what it looks like from the outside. Borrowed attention is what's actually doing the work.

Two upvotes on day two means very little either way, for what it's worth. Mine ended at 12.

Nika, on the weekend timing idea: not yet, and I have talked myself out of it for now.

The response time is what puts me off. Both rejections came back inside about a minute, so whatever is running is automated and always on. A review queue would show timing effects. A filter that fires in sixty seconds should not care whether it is a Tuesday or a Sunday. Weekend posting would really be a test of how many humans are reviewing, and I do not think any humans are.

The other reason is cost. Every attempt that comes back rejected is another rejection sitting on a young account, and I have no way of knowing whether those accumulate. So the test costs me something and the answer is worth less than the risk.

One thing has changed since we spoke though. My verification page now carries a green tick at the top, with work email, GitHub and LinkedIn all confirmed. The public profile still shows no badge next to my name. So either the badge lags that, or confirming the inputs is not the same thing as the account being verified. Yours shows the badge, which is why I keep circling back to it.

If the badge does turn up I will post a thread that same week and report back whether it went live. That separates it from your Kitty points idea properly, because my points will not have moved much in the meantime.