Honestly launched this past Monday and we ended up Top 4 with 350+ upvotes and 40+ comments. It doesn t feel real, because:
1. The support we received from hundreds of strangers across the internet was incredible, and we are beyond grateful for it.
2. We didn t plan this launch. At all.
We ve been so deep in building the product that we kept pushing our launch back again and again and again. All of a sudden, on Monday we woke up to dozens of Congrats on the launch! messages. In our pre-coffee, foggy brained states we were really confused as to why. But then it hit us: we forgot to change our launch date.
To make matters worse, we didn t have any of the essentials: No hunter, no maker comment, no demo video (added in midday). There was just a placeholder of v0 materials we already iterated upon internally countless times. Our logo was even outdated, and the link to our product and website was nowhere to be found in the comments. Not one upvote or comment came from anyone we knew within the first hours of launching.
Because our day wasn t crazy enough, the website broke, so most businesses couldn t fill out our interest form properly, and our consumer facing Chrome extension encountered a huge bug where users couldn t use our product after installing it.
A situation like this usually means guaranteed failure, yet to our surprise, we climbed to a Top 5 position on the leaderboard and were swarmed with PH notifications all day. Even outside of Product Hunt we were being battered with notifications.
We re extremely thankful for the outcome, especially considering the circumstances. This is not a scenario that happens often, but it proved something vital to us:
Even with a shell of a launch, we re making something people want.
We always believed finding real, trustworthy reviews online mattered. But this experience made it clear it s not just important, it s necessary. As AI-generated content continues to blur the line between real and fake, the need for verified, authentic opinions is clear. That s the mission we re pursuing with Honestly.
yea the 5 star system is basically useless at this point. pulling from reddit and youtube makes way more sense, thats where ppl actually say what they think. do you guys do any filtering for fake or paid reviews on those platforms too?
Honestly
@gzoo We do! We're currently removing anything that's fake or sponsored using our own process; however, from the feedback we got here it seems like we should properly tag them and let our users pick whether they wanna filter them out or not.
Honestly
@abhishek_sanoria We're realized the most noise comes form 1. AI slop, 2. Sponsored content that's not tagged as such and 3. just plain misleading content. We've build or own internal tools to deal with these and it's only going to get better! If there's other things you'd consider noise on these platforms please let me know at lets@usehonestly.com :)
As a first-time Product Hunt user, I’m approaching this as a novice with limited experience evaluating SaaS platforms quickly.
From my perspective, the landing page felt unclear in terms of what exactly is being offered. At first glance, it appears to be a social media monitoring tool -> sounds great!
However, I also noticed there’s a Chrome extension and it left me wondering: who is the primary audience here? Is this built for users like me (e.g., brands or marketers) to monitor my brand, or is it intended for general consumers?
This raised a broader question about the product’s positioning. Is this a dual-sided platform that depends on consumer adoption to deliver value to brands? Or is it simply an extension of the same technology into a different use case?
I understand the offering to brands, and it's a great offering. Congrats.
Honestly
@tryexcept Hey Jay! Appreciate the comment and totally agree (we're also first time product hunt launchers!). We have two separate offerings. One for consumers and one for brands. In retrospect, the website is heavily catered to our brand offering. We got a lot of feedback echoing this and we're already in the process of building a separate landing page for the consumer product, so that they won't get mixed up!
To your question about the positioning, we offer the chrome extension for free for consumers and we have a much more in depth version for brands to use! Social listening is one aspect, competitor analytics is another, content creation ideas, etc.. We can basically tailor the product to your needs using our data.
One example is a brand wanting to know when someone complains about a jersey they bought eBay, so that they can reply and offer their jersey marketplace as a solution.
Another is finding creators who have affiliate links for X product that go to amazon so they can contact them for their affiliate network. The possibilities go on!
Thanks again for the kind words and if you ever wanna chat you can reach us at lets@usehonestly.com!
Honestly
Hey Product Hunt 👋, I’m Paolo, CEO & Co-founder of Honestly.
THE PROBLEM
Online shopping is broken. Not because there aren’t enough reviews, but because you can’t trust them.
Why today’s review system needs fixing:
❌ Fake & incentivized reviews: Over 30% of all online reviews are fake and ads are everywhere. This will only get worse as AI gets more unrecognizable.
❌ Time wasted finding real opinions: The takes that matter live in social media, so to get there, the average shopper spends 30 minutes buried in tabs just to find something useful.
After experiencing this frustration over and over ourselves, we decided to fix it.
WHAT HONESTLY DOES
Honestly brings real, verified opinions directly onto product pages where they belong.
Instead of relying on a suspicious 5-stars, we surface what real people are already saying elsewhere.
✅ Instant real reviews: Pulls genuine opinions from Reddit, TikTok, and YouTube real time.
✅ Automatically verified: No bots, no AI summaries, no paid ads. Just authentic human voices.
✅ No more tab suffocation: Now that everything is in one place, no need for jumping between Google, Reddit, YouTube, and other social platforms.
✅ Clear buying signals – See what people actually love & hate before you spend your money.
WHO IS THIS FOR?
If you shop online and want to make better decisions without wasting time or getting tricked by fake reviews, Honestly was made for you.
Can't install on Brave.
Honestly
@iamdhaven Thanks for pointing that out! We just pushed an update and it should be fixed ;) Let me know if it works!
Great idea! But now I have a problem - I won’t be able to choose a product at all because I always focus only on the negative reviews, haha. Seriously, though, this is a super useful app for me. The main thing, in my opinion, is to add protection against deliberate campaigns to damage a brand’s reputation through fake negative reviews.
Honestly
@allurepixel Absolutely! This is actually such a big issue. We've been speaking to brands and figuring out how our data and analysis can help them too.
Jupid
This is literally automating my own shopping workflow — I always add 'reddit' to every product search because Amazon reviews are 80% fake at this point. Smart move keeping it non-AI. How do you handle products with no Reddit/YouTube mentions? And is there any deduplication for reviews from the same user across platforms?
Honestly
@ilya_lee Exactly! Fun fact, Kalvin and I ran into this problem while testing another startup idea (it was an AI voice agent to help you shop) and the first thing we noticed with every user test was someone copying the product name then going to reddit, youtube or TikTok.
Right now for the products with no reviews our research is quite limited. One of the ways we can try to fix this is by pulling reviews for the actual brand. What do you think about this? How would you go about doing review research for a product without any reddit/youtube content?