🔥 Get more points by launching on Alpha Day
We’re trying something new on Thursday: Alpha Day.
The idea is simple. If this is the first time you’re launching your product anywhere, you can tag it alpha and get a boost to your points (and land on a special leaderboard).
This is for the genuinely fresh stuff. The products that are just getting out into the world. The ones that still need feedback, still have rough edges, and are way more interesting because of it.
We’re also putting more weight on comments. So if you try an Alpha product and leave a thoughtful comment, it matters more. And if you’re a maker, jumping in and commenting on other Alpha launches can help you too.
Basically: launch something new, try other new things, leave real feedback, and make each other’s day.
If that sounds like your kind of chaos, get your launch in by tomorrow midnight PST.
Replies
The Alpha Day feature is not working for me. Why is my product not showing up or being recommended to others?
OpenOwl
When is the next event of this type?
@aaronoleary will you run this every Thursday now or was this a one-time test?
Lets add to the barrage of questions also this: Is this going to become a standard for thurdays or just a one off? Asking since my first launch is up next week and I got something very special for a product.
Hello Aria
Alpha Day is a great concept — giving indie builders a dedicated spotlight makes a real difference when big-tech launches otherwise dominate the leaderboard.
We launched Hello Aria on April 10th (AI assistant for WhatsApp/Telegram, ~3k users). The launch energy on PH was incredible and the community feedback directly shaped the first week of post-launch iteration. Special days like this would have been even better for us — it is exactly the type of audience who would get what we are building.
For anyone on the fence about launching on Alpha Day: do it. The signal-to-noise ratio here is much higher than a standard launch day.
Alpha Day is honestly a great idea. Early launches usually get ignored because people expect polished products, but the best feedback comes when things are still rough and evolving. Weighting thoughtful comments more also makes the community feel less like pure promotion and more like actual collaboration.
I’d love to see more experimental tools launch this way, especially in spaces moving fast like image ai api products where real user feedback matters more than perfection on day one.
The part I like most is the comment weighting. Every "launch day" I've seen on PH ends up being an upvote race where the comments section is either empty or full of "congrats on the launch!" one-liners that add nothing. Shifting points toward actual discussion is a different kind of signal entirely.
Also the separate leaderboard is a smart call. Watching a first-time builder compete on the same board as a product backed by a team of 50 with a pre-built audience never felt right. This gives early stuff a shot at visibility without having to go head to head with that.
the line id underline here is putting more weight on comments, becuase that also sets the failure mode. weighting comments makes people write more of them, and volume pressure is exactly what produces the generic congrats an alpha launch cannot use. what separates usable feedback from noise, from what ive watched this week, is whether the comment names a decision rather than a preference. i would add x is a wish. your zoom follows the cursor and breaks when the result renders somewhere else is something the maker can act on tomorrow. one small mechanic that would do more than the weighting: ask every alpha maker to post one open question alongside the launch. the launches i commented on today where the maker asked something specific, one of them wrote not the someday meeting, the one on monday, got real answers. the ones that only described the product got congratulations. the question does the sorting for you and it costs the maker one sentence.