Lately, my DMs have been full of this question. While I can t say exactly what changed after Product Hunt s Aug 25 update (since the featured criteria seem a bit mysterious now), here are a few patterns I ve noticed:
Version updates: New versions or re-launches (like Product v2.0) often don t get featured anymore.
No freemium or free trial : Launches without a free plan or trial seem to be struggling to get featured.
Hunter Featured : Having a well-known hunter doesn t guarantee a feature. In fact, recently, the two seem almost mutually exclusive.
Look & feel: Launches that use the same template design or layout as others often get skipped.
Curious to hear your thoughts - have you noticed similar trends?
I am now on my 3. release on ProductHunt and right after the release I get a ton of people trying to connect on LinkedIn with the promise to boost my launch. By now I can spot the pattern a mile away: vague guarantees, exclusive pods, and a price tag that mysteriously appears in the second message. On launch day, when you re running on caffeine and hope, that shortcut looks shiny. But in my experience, it warps the signal you actually need: real reactions from people who might use what you built. What s helped more than any boost : Treating launch day like support day answering every question fast. Shipping a tight demo video and a clear what s new thread. Reaching out to existing users the week before with a simple note: Here s what changed. Anything confusing? Sharing in communities where I already show up the other 364 days. I m not anti-promotion; I m anti-fog. If something truly accelerates learning without faking momentum, I m all ears. There s probably nuance I haven t seen yet, and I m curious how other makers filter the noise. If you ve navigated this dance kept it clean, kept it effective how did you do it? What actually moved the needle for you on launch day (or the week after)?
Anthropic is rolling out weekly rate limits for Claude Code on Pro and Max plans starting August 28. They're saying it'll only affect ~5% of subscribers, the ones running Claude Code continuously in the background, plus a handful violating ToS by sharing or reselling accounts.
PLG was the backbone of some of the fastest-growing companies in history.
Slack grew by making team invites frictionless. Dropbox gave you free storage for every referral. Zoom let you host 40-minute meetings without a credit card. Those models worked because reducing friction was enough.
It is ~7 days with a new format (changing Discussions Forums) The biggest changes I noticed in my behaviour and reflecting towards UX, and UI: On the Forums page, we can see besides the title also the part of the description (it is like a hook to participate in one of them) Conversations are better moderated. Less bots, more genuine feedback. Tagging users via the handle. You can contribute apart from General, Introduce yourself, and Self-promotion to the Product forum instead of choosing these 3 topics, you can start typing the name of the product. Things, I haven't figured out yet:
Hey everyone! I ve seen some people mention using Reddit groups to help launching their products, but I m a bit new to the platform. From what I ve noticed, many groups don t allow self-promotion or talking about your own business. I m curious, which subreddits do you participate in, and what s your strategy for engaging and launching your products there?
I d love to hear about your experiences and any tips for successfully navigating Reddit for product launches!
In the last few days, I have seen many AI tools for creating audio-visual, and even people in my feed shared short movies created by AI (Hollywood will probably cut costs quite a bit in the next few years).
What is your experience with AI video generators, and which ones do you find the best? (In terms of which AI tools have given you the best video results.)
