How I would approach creating discussions on Product Hunt (also a guide for newbies here)
Besides making sure your discussion follows the community guidelines, you can approach Product Hunt discussions more strategically and use them to increase your visibility for your personal brand and your product.
A lot of people struggle with their discussions being rejected.
This usually happens to accounts that don’t have much interaction history yet.
If I wanted to become more active in Product Hunt discussions, I would try the following:
If you have a new account, start by engaging with existing discussions. Leave useful comments, not some generic LLM copy-paste response. Sometimes comments can get even more engagement than the original post. A great example is @byalexai , who consistently shares comments and practical advice.
After some time, verify your profile in the settings. It’s an opportunity to get the green verification badge. Strengthen trustworthiness.
When creating your own discussion, try dedicating it to a specific subforum. For example, if you’re discussing another product (let’s say a LinkedIn tool), place it under the LinkedIn subforum.
Avoid hard promotion in your posts. Discussions work better when they provide value rather than feeling like an advertisement.
If one of your discussions starts gaining traction, focus your attention there. Reply to new comments and keep the conversation going – active discussions are more likely to go to the top and stay visible. A good example is this one I posted 3 days ago about my launched Chrome extension for LinkedIn.
If you run out of ideas, get inspired by highly rated discussions from the past. You can filter and analyse what topics have been the most popular so far.
That’s the basic approach I would personally follow.
Do you have your own hacks or strategies for using Product Hunt discussions? :)
Replies
@busmark_w_nika One thing I'd add from experience: comments aren't fully exempt either. I've had comments held by the filter with no notification at all. They looked live to me while logged in, but the count didn't move and no one else could see them, and one cleared on its own later. So it's worth checking a comment in a logged-out tab after posting rather than assuming it went through. There are also Reddit posts about comments being permanently invisible to others.