When we launched Flexprice, I thought Product Hunt success was about chasing upvotes.

I was wrong.

It s really about momentum, community, and showing up prepared.

Here are a few lessons we learned the hard way but I hope they save someone a few gray hairs before their launch day:

Some product categories are naturally fun to talk about (AI video, dev tools, design tools, consumer apps). People understand the product and get excited pretty quickly.

But then there are categories that are important, useful, and valuable, but historically kind of boring. Things like analytics, internal tools, compliance, finance, HR software, etc.

There are a hundred posts about how to succeed on Product Hunt.

This is about how to not fail.

Our latest Product Hunt launch was a disaster. Just as we had hoped.

I used to be a startup scout, and one of my sources of deal flow was actually the Product Hunt leaderboard. For fun, I m going to pick the top five products I find most interesting that launched in the last week from a scout POV. I ll try to veer away from the top products each day to keep things interesting.

@Check Supply (Send checks in the mail) --> Takes something that s been around for decades and feels like it s stuck in the Stone Age, and lowers the friction to accomplish the task at hand. Do young Gen Z ers even know how to write a check? I don't know, but I know many systems still rely on these. This makes sense.

@PickR (free e-sports prediction game) - Betting is in. I can bet on political events via @Polymarket. I can bet on sports. It s natural to assume betting on e-sports is going to be just as big (if not bigger). I see PickR building the stepping stones to unlock the next wave of betting, for better or for worse. (I don t even know if this is their intent, but this is where my brain went.)

I've started asking one thing before I give anyone advice about their product. Do you want me to help you think, or do you want me to tell you what I would do?

They are completely different conversations and most of the time people want one and receive the other.

Ask someone what they think of your product and you get a polite opinion with nothing underneath it.

Ask them what they did last time they used it and you get a story. A specific moment. The thing that broke, the thing they skipped, the thing that surprised them.

I think the biggest AI boom was in 2023-2024, but only now have I noticed improvements that have positively helped many businesses.

If I had to name three things that have had a very positive impact on business, they are:

• Improved image creation using GPT Chat

• Realistic videos through AI, where costs are reduced by hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars (production video agency vs. a few custom prompts)

• "vibe coding" tools that show me a visual and I can reverse query and learn why the code is written in such a way that I got a certain result.

I used to keep my chat apps open all day replying to every ping within five minutes because I thought it showed dedication.

All it really did was chop my day into tiny useless pieces where I couldn't focus on anything meaningful. The day I started batching my replies to just twice a day my anxiety dropped and I actually finished things on time. Nobody got mad and the world didn't end.

How do you manage your communication loops without letting constant notifications wreck your focus?

Version one. Version two. Version three. Version four.

Each one felt better than the last. Each one converted about the same.

I often get asked why someone's forum was rejected.

First of all, I need to clarify that I m not an internal member of the Product Hunt team, so I do not influence these decisions.