Product Hunt alternatives: where else a launch can go

Most lists of Product Hunt alternatives are sorted by size, which is the least useful order possible. What decides whether a launch works is who reads the place, so that is how this one is sorted. Disclosure: outclimbed is one of the options here and it is ours.

Why founders look past Product Hunt

Usually one of three reasons. The product is not aimed at the people who browse Product Hunt, which skews heavily toward makers, developers and designers. Or the founder has no following to mobilise on launch day, and a launch with no starting push tends to sink quietly. Or they already launched, it went flat, and they want somewhere else to go.

None of those are criticisms of the platform. They are fit problems, and the whole point of looking at Product Hunt alternatives is to find a better fit rather than a bigger crowd.

Sort by audience, not by traffic

A thousand visitors who build software and two hundred who run e-commerce shops are not comparable numbers if you sell an e-commerce plugin. The first group will look and leave.

Maker and developer communities

• Hacker News, Show HN - free, brutal, and the highest-quality technical feedback available anywhere. Works for developer tools and genuinely novel things. Does not work for anything that reads as marketing.
• Indie Hackers - free. Responds to the story behind the product more than the product. A launch post that includes real numbers does much better than a feature list.
• Reddit - free, and the strictest. Every subreddit has its own rules about self-promotion and most will remove a launch post from an account with no history. Participate first or do not bother.

Early-adopter platforms

These exist to put pre-launch and just-launched products in front of people who like being first. BetaList is the best known. The trade is typically a queue you can pay to skip, so the free lane costs weeks rather than money.

They suit a product that is not finished. If you have a waiting list rather than a checkout, this is the right shelf.

Category directories

The long tail, and the most durable of the Product Hunt alternatives. A launch is one day; a directory listing sits there. Directory traffic is smaller and steadier, and it arrives from search months later rather than in a spike.

The trap is volume. Services will submit you to two hundred directories, and two hundred identical listings appearing in one week is a pattern rather than a launch. Ten that match your category will do more. What a startup directory listing costs covers the money side.

What each type asks of you

Choosing between Product Hunt alternatives

Once the audience filter has removed the obvious mismatches, three questions separate what is left. They are worth asking in this order.

Does it need an audience on the day? Voting platforms do. If you cannot bring thirty people to the page in the first two hours, a ranked feed will bury you regardless of the product. Directories and search-driven surfaces do not care what happens on day one, which is why they suit a first product better.

Does it reward the product or the story? Some places respond to what you built and some to why. Indie Hackers rewards a story with numbers in it. Show HN rewards something technically interesting and is openly hostile to narrative. Submitting the same post to both is how people conclude that launching does not work.

How long does the listing live? A launch is one day and then it is archive. A directory listing sits there and is found months later. Most founders pick from among Product Hunt alternatives as though they were all the first kind, and then wonder why nothing compounds.

Stagger the launches

The common mistake is doing everything on one Tuesday. You get a single spike, no way to attribute anything, and the same copy appearing in ten places at once, which several communities read as spam.

One platform a week, with a different tracking parameter on the URL each time, turns launch week into data you can actually use. The second week is also much easier, because you have something to say about how the first went.

What to prepare before submitting anywhere

Every one of these platforms asks for some subset of the same things, and having them ready turns a submission from an hour into ten minutes.

• A one-line description under about 60 characters that makes sense with no context.
• A longer one around 150 characters, written for a reader who has never heard of you.
• A square logo at 512 pixels or more, on a solid background rather than transparency.
• One screenshot showing the product doing its job, not a marketing page.
• A URL with a tracking parameter, different for each platform.

Vary the descriptions between platforms rather than pasting one everywhere. It is more work and it is the difference between a set of submissions and a bulk campaign, both to the moderators reading them and to anyone who encounters two of them.

What a launch day cannot do for you

It cannot create demand that is not there. A launch puts a product in front of people who are already browsing; if none of them wanted it, a bigger platform would only have told you that faster.

It also cannot substitute for distribution. The products that do well on launch day almost always arrived with an audience. That is worth knowing before you treat a flat launch as a verdict on the product.

Mistakes people make with Product Hunt alternatives

Four, in rough order of how much they cost.

Treating the list as a queue to get through. The value is in matching a product to an audience, not in completing a checklist. Ten submissions chosen badly do less than three chosen well, and they take longer.

Reusing the launch post verbatim. Each of these communities has a register. A post that reads as a press release on Show HN will be flattened; the same content rewritten as a technical note is welcome. Product Hunt alternatives are not interchangeable surfaces for one piece of copy.

Judging by upvotes. The number that matters is people who arrived and did something. A quiet post that sent eleven people who all signed up beat a popular one that sent four hundred who bounced.

Stopping after the launch platforms. The launch surfaces are the loud half. The directories are the half that is still sending visitors in month six, and they are the part founders skip because nothing happens on the day.

Where this site fits, and where it does not

outclimbed is a paid directory rather than a launch platform, and the difference matters. A place starts at $10 and does not expire on the day, which suits a product that wants to be findable rather than one that wants a spike. Position is public and priced, and it can also be earned by sending people, which is the part aimed at founders with no budget to outspend anybody.

It is a poor fit if you want launch-day attention, community feedback, or a front page of upvotes. None of those are what it does. The rules lay out the mechanism and about lists plainly what a paid place does not buy.

How many to try

Three or four properly, not a dozen badly. Each of these Product Hunt alternatives is a different audience with a different register, and adapting a post to one takes an hour that pasting it takes five minutes to waste.

Spread them over a month, one a week, and put a different tracking parameter on each. At the end you will know which audience responded, which is the only output of this exercise that is still useful next time.

Questions people ask

Which Product Hunt alternative is the biggest? Hacker News, by a distance. That does not make it the right one for your product.

Should I relaunch on Product Hunt later? Usually yes, once you have something new to show and an audience to bring. A second launch with nothing new rarely performs differently.

Do I need a following to launch? On voting platforms, effectively yes. On directories and search-driven surfaces, no, which is why those suit a first product better.